Language: Faroese

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Matthew Landrum on Faroese Writer Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir

If you loved the spotlight on Faroese Literature in our latest issue, this episode is for you!

In today’s thrilling conversation with author and translator Matthew Landrum, Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak explores the compelling poetry of Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir and the renaissance of Faroese literature as spotlighted in Asymptote’s Spring issue. Nine Faroese authors from multiple generations are represented in our Special Feature organized in partnership with FarLit. The showcase, which readers can access here, affords a rare glimpse into literature from the Faroes. In addition to contextualizing Faroese literature and sharing how he came to translate Faroese literature, Matthew Landrum also reads in English a dramatic excerpt of Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir’s eerie and existential poem. Listen to the podcast now.

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2024

A deeper look into our latest edition!

With so many stellar pieces in the Spring 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

In a Bethlehem of the future, no one is left. Some undetermined ecological catastrophe, shown only through a black, viscous flood tiding over the narrow alleyways, had sent volcanic streams of smoke up through the minaret and the turreted roofs, obliterating the limestone, the arched windows, the indecipherable urban folds. This is where Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s 2019 film, In Vitro, takes place: a world where two of the last remaining survivors of the human race meet in an abandoned nuclear reactor. One of them is dying, and the other seems to be a designed individual, a living archive. In the dialogue that unites the disparate scenes—some archival, some distinctly futuristic, some shimmering with ghosts—the woman lying in the hospital bed says to her visitor: “Your memories are as real as mine.” The younger woman gets up and walks to the other side of the room. “I disagree,” she replies brusquely. “The pain these stories cause are twofold. . . because the loss I feel was never mine.”

Living within an increasingly crowded media landscape, combined with modern technology’s dissolution of physical distance, the significance of these lines from In Vitro do not escape most of us. The theorist Alison Landsberg called it “prosthetic memory”: a phenomenon in which recollections are lifted from a cultural landscape and implanted almost seamlessly within an individual consciousness, culminating in a psychic patchwork that does not distinguish between what has happened to us, and what was simply witnessed. Uban Cristina Ali Farah’s “Three Short Pieces”, in a delicate and tender translation by Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen, sees the Somalian-Italian author picking over such stitches in her own life, examining what has been lived and what has been given; what has been inherited and what has been picked up along the way. Some of the memories she discusses, as in a shared experience of migration, have slowly unwound inside her by way of language, and others, as in the first three years of her life, are echoed into the body through photographs, tastes, trails, stuttering fragments that she pieces together into a portrait of lineage, a half-there origin story. 

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Our Spring 2024 Edition Is Here!

Featuring Andrey Kurkov, Michela Murgia, Katie Holten, and a spotlight on literature from the Faroe Islands

When we fall asleep, where do we go? Why, of course, to a #midnightgarden‚ filled with exciting discoveries from 32 countries, including interviews with Andrey Kurkov and Diamela Eltit, fiction by Michela Murgia and Khrystia Vengryniukapocalyptic drama from Honduras, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Ludovico Ariosto—specifically, of his Orlando Furioso, the bestselling book of the sixteenth century—as well as a Special Feature on Literature from the Faroe Islands, sponsored by FarLit and headlined by Kim Simonsen and Rannvá Holm Mortensen. Ahead of the 60th Venice Biennale opening this weekend, we are proud to unveil our own international showcase—illustrated with elan by Korean guest artist Joon Yoon—still the most ambitious of any literary periodical.

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Among the highlights in this edition is visual artist Katie Holten—herself a veteran of the Venice Biennale—who returns to our pages to discuss her rustling, arresting Language of Trees, a response to ecological catastrophe. Michelle Chan Schmidt reviews a similar attempt to capture new language, crisis language, when extremes brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called for A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War. Interviewing young Somali refugees for a dictionary entry, “Partire” or leave, Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah discovers how disasters—in this case, civil war and genocide—“reveal the limit of language.” In Fiction, a “great flood” forms the backdrop of Khrystia Vengryniuk’s mordantly funny but ultimately heartbreaking story about two star-crossed lovers. By contrast, LGBTQ+ rights activist Michela Murgia’s relatively uneventful piece centers a soon-to-be empty nester and the solution to her ennui that she tucks away in her wardrobe: a life-sized cutout of BTS boyband member Park Jimin.

Just this past week, the Financial Times reported that “rising nationalism and falling funding is reshaping the Venice Biennale;” at Asymptote, we find ourselves running up against the same constraints that keep the art world from fully realizing its potential (as a matter of fact, just carrying on remains a challenge because we are incorporated outside of the US and Europe, where most of literary arts funding lies). If you have benefitted from our work these past thirteen years, consider helping us grow this #midnightgarden as a sustaining or masthead member. Together, we can keep it alive.

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“The Mistakes of the Healthy”: Lindy Falk van Rooyen on Translating Maria Gerhardt’s Transfer Window

I don’t see the book as a vision of the future so much as an alternative perspective of the present.

Maria Gerhardt died of breast cancer soon after writing Transfer Window, a dark and futuristic novel informed by her own experience with terminal illness. In today’s interview, Asymptotes Jacob Silkstone talks with Lindy Falk van Rooyen about the experience of translating Maria Gerhardt’s Transfer Window, chosen as this month’s Asymptote Book Club selection, from Danish into English. Read on to learn how Falk van Rooyen discovered Transfer Window and how she navigated the challenges of translating a semi-autobiographical novel that defies categorization.

Jacob Silkstone (JS): When did you first read Transfer Window, and what initially drew you to the book? How aware were you of Maria Gerhardt’s previous work?

Lindy Falk van Rooyen (LFvR): I wasn’t aware of Maria Gerhardt or her previous work until Transfervindue was published in March 2017. I remember quite vividly that I was sitting on the top level of a red London bus on my way to a translator’s dinner during the London Book Fair when a colleague working for The Danish Arts Council told me how much the book had moved him, and shortly after my return from London, I requested a copy of the original from the Danish publisher. I think what drew me in during the first reading was Maria Gerhardt’s unadulterated honesty.

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Four Poems by Tóroddur Poulsen

Translated by Randi Ward

Under Black Sails

 

questioning why the fog’s green

is my goodnight to the godless

and my good evening

to a hasty summer

of trains that don’t run on time

and rain that always wants to be first

with the freshest of the fresh

so the dance can bloom

on the great sloom’s deck

as it heads straight into a glare of cold

where the comatose lie

awaiting passage home to the dull life

the superficial love

because they don’t think

there’s anything else

when a person can’t be

like a garbage truck in paradise

that’s forgotten its way

to the incinerator

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