Language: English

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 23, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Eva Wissting, and Rita Horanyi

This week’s latest news from Australia, Taiwan, and Sweden!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Australia, Taiwan, and Sweden. In Australia, the NT Writers Festival has celebrated Aboriginal writing and language; in Taiwan, registration has opened for the 2021 Taipei International Book Fair and the winners of the Golden Tripod Awards were announced; and in Sweden, the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement was made, awarding American poet Louise Glück. Read on to find out more! 

Rita Horanyi, Newsletter Editor, reporting from Australia

In Australia, like much of the rest of the world, literary events have been cancelled or moved online due to lockdowns and travel restrictions. Thus, it was especially exciting to see that the Northern Territory (NT) Writers Festival—held this year in the country’s tropical Top End in Darwin—was able to pull off a predominantly live event after having to postpone the festival from May to October.

The NT Writers Festival showcases local talent, alongside interstate and international guests, with a particular focus on South East Asian voices. Unfortunately, COVID-19 meant it was challenging to include writers from South East Asia this year, but, with the assistance of digital technology, acclaimed Indonesian poet Norman Erikson Pasaribu was able to join the festival to discuss “Translating Indonesia” with past Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Indonesia and translator Tiffany Tsao (the session is available to watch online here).

One of the ways the NT Writers Festival differs from many literary events in the country is in its strong emphasis on Aboriginal writing and language. This year’s festival included a panel with Meigim Kriol Strongbala (a group based in Ngukurr working to strengthen the place of Kriol), who discussed the process of translating the popular children’s book Too Many Cheeky Dogs (the session was held in both Kriol and English). Another special appearance was by the Gay’wu (Dilly Bag) group of women from Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land. This group of women read from and discussed the writing of their Stella Prize longlisted book, Songspirals, which illuminates the role of women in the crying of Yolŋu songlines. Senior Yolŋu Elder Eunice Djerrkngu Yunupingu even keened milkarri (women’s songspirals) in front of festival audiences. In other sessions, a group of Arrernte poets from Mparntwe/Alice Springs read and discussed their new poetry collection, Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk, which interweaves poems in both English and Arrernte. READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

The Queer Lives of Arabic Literature

October 7, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

[T]he question of translating the “Arabic queer” . . . looms large . . . [H]owever, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders.

The role that fiction plays in both relating and shaping our reality is pivotal, and this power that lies in representation is oftentimes an essential source of strength for individuals who persist under oppression and negation. For writers of queer texts in the contemporary Arab world, the complex paradigm of politics, history, storytelling, and interiority has culminated in an explosive multiplicity of voices and experiences, coming together in revolutionary expression. In this essay, MK Harb, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Lebanon, focuses in on three novels which engage their queer characters and environments in surprising and enlightening narratives, denying easy categorization to tell the poetry of the personal.

Oftentimes, when discussing the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature, the idea of time travel arises in tandem. I say this only half sarcastically: it is not strange for a piece of criticism on a twenty-first-century Arabic novel to have an introduction valorizing the homoerotic poetry of Abu Nuwas, an Arabo-Persian poet from the ninth century. To put this in literary perspective, imagine an article on Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous beginning with an introduction discussing a queer text from the European Middle Ages. This bemusing conundrum is a product of orientalist academic training, often popularized by the faculties of Middle Eastern Studies departments across Western universities: a standard that singles out race in using the past to justify the present, imagining an uninterrupted continuum of the “Arab” experience irrelevant of space and time.

This obsession with the queer past of the Middle Eastern archive rarely comes from an investigation into the transgressive capabilities of past writings; rather, a strong exoticism governs this curiosity, and it often falls into the trappings of fetishizing the body and the experience of male love. Now, the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature is itself fraught; many countries across the Middle East and North Africa engage in heavy censorship of books, particularly ones with characters that defy the hegemony of national and patriarchal orders. The other dilemma is that of language—in the past years, many queer Arabic characters came to us through writings in English or French. Whether it is Saleem Haddad’s Guapa or Abdellah Taïa’s An Arab Melancholia, the question of translating the “Arabic queer” and its various experiences looms large. Regardless of such constraints, however, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders, which shed some much-needed light on the developments in queer livelihoods and philosophies. In this article, we will go on an elaborately queer journey through the works of Samar Yazbek in Cinnamon, Hoda Barakat in The Stone of Laughter, and Muhammad Abdel Nabi in In the Spider’s Room. What binds the protagonists of these novels together is not simply their queerness, but also their strong interiority and internal monologues, through which they shatter and construct social orders. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Radu Vancu

September 23, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Radu Vancu

It is [the poet’s] task . . . to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures.

Though Asymptote has made it a point to celebrate literary translation no matter the time of year, we’re still pretty thrilled that there’s a whole month dedicated to the cause. As we draw towards the end of National Translation Month, Asymptote is taking the opportunity to bring together essential components that complete the cycle of literature as it travels from one language to the next, with the intention of recognizing the meticulous, purposeful, and intimate labour invested into a text during this peregrination—from conception to publication. We have asked four valued members of the literary community, spanning the globe, to bring us their take on translation and its gifts. 

With this first feature, we are honoured to introduce an original text by Radu Vancu, a brilliant Romanian writer and translator (and past Asymptote contributor!) who traverses the international literary arena with a virtuoso expertise and a seemingly time-defiant profusion. In the following essay, he discusses his ongoing project to translate the works of Ezra Pound into Romanian, and thus brings to the forefront the great modernist’s defiance of limits. This poetry, which spans time, language, and cultures, is a testament to the sublime nature of translation, and its endless capacity for encapsulation.

Ezra Pound quickly understood that, in the case of poetry, regeneration is actually reinvention—or, more synthetically and apparently more paradoxically, inventing is actually reinventing. Poetry can live only through the graft of all that is alive throughout all ages, all cultures, all languages. Therefore, Pound came to understand that poetry does not mean only regenerated language, as he originally believed; it is instead a translingual, transnational, and even transcultural body, built (or “excerned,” to use his own word) by the addition of all the “living parts” still active in the geological layers of poetic language.

He says this in more contracted and memorable form in a 1930 Credo: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy.” J.J. Wilhelm also observes, in Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, that this proposition is in full consonance with a small text by Pound, Religio, from 1910—forming thus, in my opinion, an approximate backbone of Pound’s poetics, otherwise so branched and polymorphous.

The poet must coagulate in their work this migrant light which iridesces simultaneously the Eleusine texts, the Provençal ballads, the Italian sonnets, in addition to the ancient Chinese, Greek, and Latin poetry, and so on. It is their task, therefore, to not only regenerate the poetic language—this enormous burden is still too simple—but to build an enormous, resonating device which would reverberate with beauty from all times, all spaces, all cultures. This is why it is hard to capture in translation the beauty of an Ezra Pound poem: because some poems substantiate the ancient Greek beauty, harsh and dangerous (“seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light / And take your wounds from it gladly,” a poem says); some others take the form of Medieval villanelles, ballads, or shapes invented by Pound himself (the villonaud, for example), coalescing in another kind of beauty—seductive, chanting, feminine, sweet; some others reinvent a traditional Chinese aesthetic in the English language of the twentieth century; and so on. What is remarkable and astounding is that you, a twenty-first-century reader of English, can resonate with all these varying types of beauty. Pound’s genius is precisely that he succeeded in making new and alive the beauty of all great poetic languages, including the old or “dead” ones.

His achievement is that he can adapt his resonating apparatus to all the diachronic wavelengths of beauty. The construction of the poem—his physis—also varies according to the oscillation of this wavelength; when “making new” the ancient Greek epigrams, the poem has two or three lines, quite rarely more, and the Idealtypus of the beauty targeted is that of an intense and sarcastic, sometimes quasi-licentious lapidarity. In other instances, when he pretends to be translating from the ancient Chinese, the poems become long, winding, archaic in lexis, but the intricacies of the lines are in actuality an ekphrasis of the Chinese ideograms. In the Cantos, this mechanism builds an enormous vortex-poem, or, more preferably, a poem whose vortex is that of History itself—infinitely commingling fragments of poems, fragments of languages, fragments of historical, economic, biological, political information, and so on. And the beauty of these demented, illegible, and hypnotic Cantos is the very demented, illegible, and hypnotic beauty of our times. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 11, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Edwin Alanís-García, and Jovanka Kalaba

This week’s latest news from Palestine, Serbia, and the United States!

This week’s literary news comes from our writers in Palestine, Serbia, and the United States. In Palestine, the winners of the Najati Sidqi Competition have been announced; in Serbia, the annual KROKODIL festival has welcomed an array of authors, with a particular emphasis on regional female poets and prose writers; and in the United States, the University of Notre Dame’s reading series began with a reading by Paul Cunningham and Johannes Göransson, in addition to the launch of a new program focusing on “Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance.” Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Out of eighty-nine applications from different parts of Palestine and the diaspora, the three winners of the Najati Sidqi Competition for Short Story by Young Writers (2020) have been announced: “al-Barzakh” (The Isthmus) by Muhammad Atef Ghuneim from Nuseirat Camp in Gaza; “al-Toot al-Faased” (Rotten Berries) by Dunya Yusef Abdullah from Salfit, which is published in Arabic here; and “al-Khalaas ka Dam’a: Seeret Bukaa’ al-Sayyed Meem” (Salvation As a Tear: Crying Biography of Mr M.) by Majd Abu Amer from Gaza. According to the jury (which consisted of three renowned Palestinian writers: Safi Safi, Ziad Khadash, and Amani Junaidi), the prize “comes in recognition of the importance of the role of youth in cultural life and building a national society capable of preserving the history and memory of place and man,” as well as to honor the legacy of Najati Sidqi.

In a new venture between Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, Tibaq Publishing in Ramallah published Qalaaqel Jameel wa Hiyaam (Jamil and Hiyam’s Turbelences) by Hani Salloum from Nazareth. The play is about a romantic relationship, taking place between the two cities of Nazareth and Haifa, which sheds light on the social transformations that have affected Palestinian Arab communities in Israel. This is the second literary work by Salloum, after his novel al-Khuruuj min Halaqat al-Raaqisseen (Exiting the Dancers’ Circle) was published in 1997.

Five Palestinian authors have been selected for the new Arabic Stories by emerging writers, published bilingually in Arabic and English by adda. adda is an online magazine of new international writing, which supports and promotes stories and literary talent from the Middle East. Arabic Stories is part of the project Short Stories by KfW Stiftung in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut and Commonwealth Writers. The five selected stories are: Mai Kaloti’s “The Madman of Almond Hill,” translated by Basma Ghalayini; Majdal Hindi’s “Fly,” translated by Katharine Halls; Eman Sharabati’s “A Story from the South” —her first published story—also translated by Halls; Huda Armosh’s “Walking on Quicksand,” translated by Nariman Youssef; and Mira Sidawi’s “The Story of Nasr,” translated by Basma Ghalayini. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 4, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, David Boyd, MARGENTO, and MK Harb

This week's latest news from Lebanon, Japan, Romania, and Hong Kong!

Our writers bring you the latest literary news this week from Lebanon, where writers have been responding in the aftermath of the devastating port explosion. In Japan, literary journals have published essays centred upon literature and illness, responding to the ongoing pandemic. Romanian literature has been thriving in European literary initiatives and in Hong Kong, faced with a third wave of COVID-19, the city’s open mic nights and reading series have been taking place online. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

This week, as French President, Emmanuel Macron, began his Lebanon tour by meeting the iconic Lebanese diva, Fairuz, the literary world continued to grieve for Beirut in the aftermath of the explosion. Author Nasri Atallah, writing for GQ Magazine, recounts the cataclysmic impact of “Beirut’s Broken Heart.” Writer and translator Lina Mounzer and writer, Mirene Arsanios, exchanged a series of letters to each other for Lithub, talking about the anguish of distance and the pain of witnessing tragedy.Writer Reem Joudi also wrote an intimate essay exclusively for Asymptote, reflecting on her experience of the explosion and the uncertain future that Beirut now faces. Naji Bakhti, a young Lebanese writer, made his literary debut with Between Beirut and the Moon. Published on August 27 with Influx Press, the book is a sardonic coming of age story in post-civil-war Beirut (1975-1990). While Bakhti was chronicling the past, reading it now feels eerily relevant.

In translation news, writer and transgender activist, Veronica Esposito, interviewed Yasmine Seale about her upcoming translation of the Thousand and One Nights. Seale, whose English translation of Aladdin is beautiful in the most transgressive sense, will be the first woman to translate the Thousand and One Nights into English. In the interview, she discusses the colonial and class legacy of translating classics and the wild possibility of re-translating and re-imagining many Arabic classics. Lastly, here at Asymptote, we are excited about acclaimed Egyptian author, Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s new novel, Basateen Al-Basra from Dar El-Shourouk publishing house. Her previous novel, Beyond Paradise, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010. We eagerly await its translation from Arabic!

David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan

This month, Japan’s major literary journals continue to showcase writing that deals with illness. The September issue of Subaru features several essays on the intersection between literature and illness, including “Masuku no sekai wo ikiru” (Living in the World of the Masque), in which Ujitaka Ito connects Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman to the current pandemic. READ MORE…

Dancing on a Digital Pond: the International Poetry Familia

September 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches  |  by Edwin Alanís-García

Latinidad contains multitudes . . . an array of intersecting races, gender identities, languages, religions, and nations.

The age of social distancing has left even the introverted among us seeking community. For poets in particular, whose work continues to seek establishment and verity through the inherited traditions of oration and public gatherings, being deprived of the physical realms in which one can share and revel in poetry together has been especially lonesome. As we adapt, rally, and shift into virtual spaces, however, one encounters equal joy and substance in the connections fostered beyond the locality, as notions of community expand beyond physical closeness. One momentous event that took full advantage of this moment in time was LatinX: International Poetry Familia, which connected a brilliantly variant array of Latinx poets from the U.S. and the U.K. in a celebratory reading. With bodies of work that newly tread and interrogate the disparate facets of identity, these contemporary poets embody a politics of pride and revelation, lessons learned during the journey one takes to arrive at oneself. Asymptote’s own assistant editor, Edwin Alanís-García, reports from the event.

Lest locked up poetry aficionados forget, there was once a time when people gathered in public spaces to hear poets read or recite their work. For the uninitiated, such events help poets stay connected with their community and fellow writers, while helping grow a (hopefully book-buying) fanbase. At the risk of waxing poetic (no pun intended), these readings are the heart of an ancient vocation—a tradition going back to the epic poets, who sang about transnational sagas, and later the wandering troubadours, who brought their musical repertoires to the countryside. Even now, poets tour their countries like rockstars, sometimes to the same acclaim. Or so they did, until the pandemic hit.

For those ensconced in major literary hubs such as London or New York City, the shift to virtual readings was—and perhaps still is—a pale simulation of the real thing, a necessary adaptation meant to keep newly published books marketable. In the rest of the connected world, however, this shift has opened new doors for rural and otherwise isolated audiences. And within certain literary circles, it has created entirely new forums for artistic exchange.

One such event took place this past June. The transatlantic reading “LatinX: International Poetry Familia” was meant to celebrate the diverse roster of Latinx poets in the United States and the United Kingdom. Featured voices from the U.S. included Francisco Aragón, José Olivarez, Jasminne Mendez, Antonio López, Janel Pineda, Malcolm Friend, and co-hosts Carlos Andrés Gómez and Diannely Antigua. Among their U.K. counterparts were Leo Boix, Maia Elsner, Patrizia Longhitano, Kat Lockton, Marina Sanchez, and Juana Adcock. The nearly two-hour event was organized and co-hosted by scholar, artist, and activist Nathalie Teitler, co-founder (with Leo Boix) of Invisible Presence, a U.K. initiative dedicated to promoting the work of British Latinx writers; Teitler is also credited with founding the country’s first mentoring and translation programs for exiled writers.

The reading was in celebration of two recent anthologies of Latinx poetry: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, published by Chicago-based Haymarket Press, and Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers, published by London-based flipped eye publishing (sic). Each participant was invited to preface their reading with a one-minute excerpt from a Latinx song of their choice. Dancing (albeit socially distant and through a Zoom screen) was encouraged; as Teitler said in her opening remarks, it was the readers’ way of affirming that, “yes, sí, we’re still alive.” Her words can be interpreted as a statement about our collective resilience in the face of the pandemic, but also a poignant endorsement of poetry as a tool of resistance across Latinx communities—a testament to Latinx survival in the face of colonial and anti-Black violence. The entire event, in fact, was an extended moment of resistance. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 21, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from China, the United Kingdom, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Central America, and China. In China, the Shanghai Book Fair explodes with glitz and glamour in suspicious contrast with a supposed dedication to books and reading. In the United Kingdom, important translation mentorship and courses are adapting to online programmes to continue to discover and help emerging translators. And in Central America, Centroamérica Cuenta festival has created an exciting programme for its online events, whilst Guatemala’s Catafixia Editorial has announced new publications by three famed Guatemalan and Chilean poets. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

On August 12, the 2020 Shanghai Book Fair began its week-long occupation of the grandiose Shanghai Exhibition Center, bringing with it the usual munificence of new publications, symposiums, readings, and exhibitions. While large-scale, highly attended events may seem unwise at the moment, organizers ensured the public that plenty of precautions were being taken, with the keywords of “safety” and “brilliance” operating in tandem to cohere the theme of this year’s fair. Brilliant safety—or, alternatively, safe brilliance.

True to China’s dedication to establishing itself as a technological trailblazer and the foremost nation in holding dominion over the future—accentuated by the threat of COVID-19 against physical bookstores (and brick-and-mortar spaces in general)—this year’s fair adopted the modus operandi of utilizing the new to reform the old, as opposed to incorporating novel contents and technologies into the existing framework. What this means for the ancient medium of reading and writing soon became clear as the fair revealed a buffet of stratagems to morph the existing methods into multi-faceted, multi-sensory activities. Featuring isolated reading “pods,” cloud-based tours and libraries, virtual reality reading “experiences,” augmented reality reading “supplements,” “sound castles” which seemingly exist solely to provide to children books void of their need to be actually read, interactive reading featuring audio-visual installations, and robot “writing.” The embarrassment of instruments and innovations—which have become increasingly familiar to the arguably more tech-savvy Chinese population—appears to be entirely genuine in its motivation to increase readerships and engagement with literature, but also has the slightly queasy effect of concealing the book, and the function of reading itself, underneath a nebulous aggregate of superficial entertainments and twinkly charms. This is exemplified perhaps most sardonically by the AI library in the aforementioned sound castle, in which one may pick up a paper book and immediately be transported into an immersive, intuitive reading platform—what, one is likely to wonder, is the point of this book, when it performs a function identical to that of a switch or a button?

This obligation of technology to expedite and accentuate our experiences strikes me as one of its most suspect ends, in compliance with its subduing and totalizing tendencies; those among us who love reading acknowledge it as an active, pursuant undertaking, and engorging the transference of language with manufactured visions and kinetics undermines its innate and sublime power to invoke those senses and impressions by the individuating motor of human imagination. As enthusiasm for, and adoption of such technologies rise, a decline in creatively productive, sensually complex language will surely follow. Safe brilliance, indeed.
READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 7, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andrew Adair, Clémence Lucchini, and Eva Wissting

This week's literary news from the United States, Sweden, and Mexico!

This week our editors bring you the latest news from Sweden, where a new edition of Nobel Prize-winner Nelly Sachs’s Swedish translations has been published; Mexico, where cultural centre Casa Tomada has continued its remarkable response to the coronavirus situation with a series of author events; and from Boston in the United States, which has lined up exciting programming this summer. Read on to find out more! 

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

This summer, Swedish publishing company Faethon released a new collection with the poetry of German-Swedish Nelly Sachs. For the first time, all of the most prominent Swedish translations of her poetry are presented together in one book. The collection includes classical translations by poets such as Gunnar Ekelöf and Erik Lindegren, as well as new interpretations by Margaretha Holmqvist, who also was a friend of Sachs. The book also presents thorough commentaries by Daniel Pedersen, professor in comparative literature, and an afterword by poet and translator Eva Ström.

The Jewish poet and playwright Nelly Sachs was born in 1891 in Berlin and fled together with her mother to Sweden in 1940 where she lived until her death in 1970. Sachs had a long friendship with Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, who used her contacts with the Swedish royal family to enable Sachs and her mother to escape Nazi Germany. In Sweden, Sachs lived with her mother in Stockholm and it was at this time that she became a poet of note. She remained active as a writer and a translator for the most part of her life. In 1966, Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.”

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, Sarah Timmer Harvey, and Varun Nayar

From Misty poetry to texts both visual and conceptual, our latest issue is bright with offerings.

As testament both to our times and to Asymptote’s ongoing commitment to accentuating the richness and value of global literature, our Summer 2020 issue is replete with texts that vary in their gifts but are unified in their resonance. To help you navigate this selection, our section editors are here with their top picks.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and “Vignettes” Special Feature Editor:

Less diverse than a typical Asymptote lineup, I’m nevertheless proud of the five pieces I curated for the regular Fiction section: Each one wrestles with despair—even if it’s a different timber of dread than the one we’re currently in. In Italian author Christian Raimo’s “No More Cult of the Dead for Twentieth-Century Italy,” two men, haunted by dreams of dead bodies, set out to find and bury one. It’s an exhilarating tale of redemption set against the backdrop of a financial crisis—rendered in Brian Robert Moore’s tonally perfect translation. Don’t miss Czech novelist Daniela Hodrová’s Puppets (Living Pictures); cotranslators Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny took home a 2020 PEN Translates Award for their masterful work. In the hypnotic excerpt that we were lucky to present, the reader is whisked across time via a jump-rope. Featuring translations from the Arabic, Chinese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, and Telugu, our more diverse wildcard Special Feature shines a spotlight on the humble vignette. From conventional shorts to metafictional haikus, there’s truly something for everyone. My favorite is perhaps Marianna Geide’s People and Other Beings. Via translator (and past contributor) Fiona Bell, Geide conjures up bizarre creatures—insects shaped like bird droppings, predators shaped like human ears, uselessly decorative bugs, mushroom people—and examines each of her specimens with the precision of a jeweler.

From Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor:

“Dead Sea” by Yang Lian feels about as close as a piece of writing can get to its subject. Even more impressive is that he does this in two hundred and seventy words, and that the subject is a country gripped by a modern plague. It’s a vision of hell illustrated with “a dense tessellation of images, often hard for the translator to disentangle, which build and build to powerfully symphonic effect,” in the words of translator Brian Holton. Despite the obscurity, however, it’s oddly tangible and even familiar at times, probably because this same hell has become global.

dead fishies drift with the tide     with no high hopes of escaping underwater
there is no underwater in your world

From Sam Carter, Criticism Editor:

In a review of Dmitri Prigov‘s Soviet Texts, Dan Shurley makes the Russian conceptualist writer’s work come alive by grounding an analysis of his work in broader trends both inside and outside the former Soviet Union. Prigov was, as Shurley explains, “a shape-shifter and a master of appropriating the lofty rhetoric of Soviet authority in whatever form it took,” and Shurley carefully guides us through the many offerings and intricacies of the collection that was published by Ugly Duckling Presse and translated by Simon Schuchat with Ainsley Morse.

Another collection, this time of work from multiple writers, is discussed in Ysabelle Cheung‘s review of That We May Live, which contains seven stories of Chinese speculative fiction that delve into alternate realities not entirely separate from our own. Cheung walks us through examinations of particular concerns that, taken together, allow this anthology to “reference global philosophical quandaries and anxieties.” READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 10, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary developments from Taiwan, the US, and Japan!

The disparities of COVID-19’s grip over us is becoming gradually more apparent as certain countries celebrate recovery, while others continue to shelter in place. In Taiwan and Japan, processions are resuming after the interruption, with film festivals and award announcements taking over headlines, while in the US the situation remains somehow at once unpredictable and static. In Taiwan, reportage literature seeks to reset old injustices; in Japan, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize reveals its nominees; and in the US, a beloved literary event is put off for another year. Read our editors’ dispatches from the ground here!

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Taiwan

The 2020 United Daily News Literary Prize has been awarded to the Malaysia-born Sinophone novelist, Chang Kuei-hsing (張貴興), who has been living in Taiwan for the last four decades. The prestigious award went to the author’s latest novel, 野豬渡河 (Wild Boar Crosses the River) which depicts his hometown in Malaysia, Sarawak—a city occupied by the Japanese in the 1940s. Asymptote has previously featured Chang’s “Siren Song” (translated by Anna Gustafson) in our Winter 2016 issue.

The Taiwanese author notable for his reportage literature, Lan Bozhou (藍博洲), will soon have new book published by Taipei’s INK Publishing in July: 尋找二二八失蹤的宋斐如 (Searching for the Missing Song Feiru in the February 28 Incident ). Consistent with Lan’s previous focus on giving a voice to the victims of Taiwan’s White Terror (1947-1987), this new work again inquires into the difficult question of the whereabouts of Song Feiru, a Taiwanese intellectual and founder of a newspaper criticizing the government in the 1940s. The namesake of the book was kidnapped by the Kuomintang and went missing after the outbreak of the infamous February 28 Incident in 1947.

Although the global situation of COVID-19 has been rapidly evolving with uncertainty, Taiwan has luckily arrived at a relatively safe status, and many local activities are resuming this summer as a result. The island-wide screenings of Xin Qi’s (辛奇, 1924-2010) films from mid-July to late-November, and the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival (with the theme of the beloved Italian director, Federico Fellini) from late-July to mid-August, are among the events leading this trend of recovery in Taipei. Xin Qi was one of the few prolific and prominent Taiwanese-language film directors in the 1960s, whose five cross-genre cinematic works have been digitally restored by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, and will be screened around Taiwan’s theatres, both new and old, during the festival. As for the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival, it is a part of the global tribute to Fellini’s 100th birthday anniversary (“Fellini 100”), and will broadcast twenty-four of the director’s films, most of which are 4K versions, freshly restored.  READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 19, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Clémence Lucchini, and José García Escobar

This week’s latest news from Argentina, Central America, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Argentina, Central America, and the United States. In Argentina, Chris Andrews’s forthcoming translation of César Aira’s novel The Divorce was awarded a PEN Translates award; in Guatemala, a new posthumous collection by Kaqchikel Maya writer Luis de Lión was published; and in the United States, bookstores and libraries have been supporting the Black Lives Matter protests by publishing recommended reading lists. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

English PEN announced the winners of its PEN Translates award earlier this month, and among them was Chris Andrews’s translation of César Aira’s The Divorce, forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2021. The Argentine author and translator continues to have a powerful influence both at home and abroad. His short novel Artforum, published in March by New Directions, earned glowing praise in an April NPR review: “Aira is unencumbered. He does what he does, and what we receive is giddy, unquestionably self-indulgent, and yet absolutely perfect.” The review, it should be noted, doesn’t reference the translator, Katherine Silver. It’s almost unbelievable that Aira can work at such a remarkable pace—he publishes two or three short novels a year—and continue to get such good reviews. (His most recent release in Argentina, Fulgentius, was also lauded.) The good news is that his pace of writing ensures work for translators and new releases into English for years to come.

Perhaps soon there will be a service to have Aira’s new releases delivered to your door monthly. Buenos Aires is a hotbed for independent publishers, and book clubs have sprung up as a way to promote and discuss new offerings. In a market inundated with new books each month—at least until recently—the clubs also provide vetting and a way to make sense of the noise. Some require members to obtain the book themselves, but others do the task of curating and sending members their selections each month. Pez Banana works this way (the name, which means banana fish, is a homage to Salinger). Founded by two veterans of the Buenos Aires publishing industry, Florencia Ure and Santiago Llach, the service sends a new release novel and reading guide each month. Among other book club choices, Bukku also sends out a monthly selection, and the decision of which service to subscribe to may come down to what else is in the box: Bukku deliveries include the book, a bookmark, a playlist curated by the author, and a surprise book-related, locally designed gift. Sign me up.  READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 5, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jiaoyang Li, and Julia Sherwood

This week's latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, and China!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Poland, Sweden, and China. In Poland, Anna Zaranko’s translation of Kornel Filipowicz was awarded the 2020 Found in Translation Award; in Sweden, an anthology will soon be released of writings on coronavirus, featuring many international writers including Olga Tokarczuk; and in China, bookshops are responding to challenging times by moving to online engagement with their reading community. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

Since she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, Wisława Szymborska’s poetry has been appreciated around the world, while the work of her partner of twenty-three years, the master story teller Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990) remained largely unknown outside Poland. Fortunately, this has changed with The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2019 in a translation by Anna Zaranko. On March 31, Zaranko received the 2020 Found in Translation Award in recognition of her “quietly understated yet immensely evocative rendering of Filipowicz’s prose, which The Sunday Times’s David Mills described as ‘provocative, troubling, awkward, a proper classic.’”

On May 27, the winner of the eleventh Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, awarded by the City of Warsaw, was announced online (the fourteen-minute video of the ceremony has English subtitles). The prize went to Katarzyna Kobylarczyk for Strup. Hiszpania rozdrapuje rany (The Scab. Spain Scratches its Wounds, 2019 Wydawnictwo Czarne), a book about grappling with historical memory. The jury praised it as “a fascinating story that blends the nightmarish and the grotesque, in which reality reveals its metaphorical dimension. It is proof that one can create real literature relying solely on facts.” READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 29, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Andreea Scridon, Andrew Adair, and Josefina Massot

This week's latest news roundup from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico!

This week our writer’s bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico. In the UK, Oxford Translation Day welcomed past Asymptote contributor Sophie Hughes to talk about her Booker-shortlisted translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurrican Season. In Argentina, the rising cases of COVID-19 have prompted the Fundación Filba to organize virtual classes with well-known Latin American writers. In Mexico, booksellers are finding innovative solutions to reach readers as the stores remain closed. Read on to find out more! 

Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor, reporting from the United Kingdom

Every year, research center Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation hosts Oxford Translation Day, consisting of workshops, readings, and talks, as a prelude of sorts to the award of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize on the June 13, at its home base of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Given this year’s unusual global situation, Oxford Translation Day is taking place online over the span of several weeks. We are particularly looking forward to Asymptote contributor Sophie Hughes’s talk on her Booker-shortlisted translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo Editions), which we’ve featured here and here, on June 13. Another event that seems particularly intriguing is poet and translator A.E. Stallings’s discussion of two contemporary Greek female poets, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Kiki Dimoula, also on June 13. READ MORE…