Language: French

More Indestructible Than the Past: On Pascal Quignard’s The Fount of Time

March 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Quignard invites us into thinking alongside him, into an active engagement between two consciousnesses, writer and reader.

The Fount of Time by Pascal Quignard, translated from the French by Chris Turner, Seagull Books, 2022

You might not know it, but you’ve likely been affected by the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor of psychology and specialist in visual perception. That is—if a static image has ever given you vertigo, if you’ve taken LSD at some point in your life, or if you happen to be a fan of experimental pop band Animal Collective, whose 2002 album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is outfitted in one of the scientist’s undulating patterns. Carefully constructed to delude the eye, Kitaoka’s psychedelic, shifty images induce an anomalous motion illusion, wherein selective shadings and geometries, coupled with repetition, tricks neurons into thinking that a picture is moving when it’s not. What results is an extremely convincing array of stillnesses that nevertheless quiver, spin, and oscillate. It’s only a tiny, easily recognisable fissure in the reliability of perception, but just as such illusions hint towards the limits of seeing, the indisputable evidence of our deceptive and limiting physicality sends us outward, pushing us towards all that exists in the unseen—that which finds its way to us through the intuited at, the briefly sensed, the deeply felt.

Pascal Quignard is restless with the unseen. His immense body of work—comprising of over sixty titles—plunges into the lush fabric of invisible things. From loss, to silence, to love, Quignard introduces the solid infrastructures that seem to contain these wild and eternal subjects, only to then elaborate upon their perceptible dimensions with the secret experience of echoes, phantoms, and the vivid reality of the imagined. From novels that wrestle with the psychological tortured voyeur (Villa Amalia) to ekphrastic writings on sexual imagery, the author is famed for his ability to excavate the torrid undercurrents of our daily existence—the metaphors, symbols, and myths that enrich and multiply human experience.

The latest work to make its way to English, The Fount of Time, is part of Quignard’s Last Kingdom (Dernier Royaume) series, which today comprises of eleven titles perhaps most notable for their resistance to classification. At once novelistic, aphoristic, philosophical, and poetic, the books flow through the author’s intelligence and preoccupations, traversing the topography of his mind in the rhythm of thinking—which is to say, formlessly. The Fount of Time joins three other Last Kingdom books in the Anglosphere, all in the fastidious and graceful language of Chris Turner, including: The Silent Crossing in 2013, Abysses in 2015, The Roving Shadows (which won the 2002 Goncourt) in 2019—with Dying of Thinking due out in early 2024. All of the titles hold to the same mutable nature, composed of chapters of widely varying lengths (some a dozen pages long, some containing only a sentence). Of the sections, there are ones that sound like the beginnings of stories, and ones that sound like endings; the contents verge from the studious and cerebral, to the simplicity of oral lyricism. Subjects include the colour red, the spring, classifications of matter, civil war, seclusion, The Huainanzi, animality, orgasms, fairies, ancient Rome, and happiness. The prose is passionate, distant, and indelible. Certain lines are almost even funny. It makes sense that Quignard has now dedicated himself to this series; it is essentially to state that after a lifetime spent pursuing a craft bound by definitions, delineations, and elucidations, he has forsaken clarity for the infinitely more true nature of life’s complexity. The cage door of literature’s maniacal self-diagnosis is flung open; the words have been freed. READ MORE…

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

March 8, 2023  |  in News  |  by The Blog Team

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.

Interviews

A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra

But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.

Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart

For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer

Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . .  I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.

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Asymptote at the Movies: Happening

March 6, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Georgina Fooks, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

But how does the visual operate in cinema, as opposed to literature?

Annie Ernaux’s memoir of her 1963 abortion, Happening, originally published in 2000, and Audrey Diwan’s 2021 movie adaptation of the same name are the subject of our latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies. Ernaux’s memoir tells the story of an abortion she sought before the procedure was legal in France, and the story of her reflecting on the experience decades later, well after France legalized abortion. Diwan’s movie came out in a very different world than the one Ernaux’s memoir reflects on and, indeed, the one in which Ernaux wrote her memoir. Both the book and the movie follow young Annie’s struggle to find the medical care she needs—Ernaux said that watching the film “plunged” her back into the experience she wrote about. Taking the two together underscores the urgency of her situation and raises questions about the difference between cinematic immediacy and memoiristic distance. In the following roundtable, Meghan Racklin, Xiao Yue Shan, and Georgina Fooks discuss the relationship between these two works, the translation of memoir into fiction, and experience of reading and watching the movement of time.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Halfway through the pages of Ernaux’s Happening, there’s a line that I saw as a kind of summation of her entire corpus’ ethos: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled.” It seems to me that a similar sentiment across nearly all of her texts—which are, after all, in their obsessive tunnelling and metaphysical depth, a refusal of any verdict that women’s lives are mundane, and their thoughts unserious.

And there is a particular impact to that Serious Verb—chronicled. In French, Ernaux opts for the less indomitable l’écrire, but I’d like to believe that Tanya Leslie, in her translation, understood that to write would have been too pliant for what Ernaux wanted to say: that such experiences needed to be inscribed into the archives of human history, that they needed to be preserved as well as they can for future excavation, and that such texts would fill the void in the scaffolding of time.

Happening, then, is a text about writing, but also the remembering that feeds the writing, and also the rupture that must be navigated when reality and recognition are trying to find one another on the page. If there was any image that came to mind while I read Happening, it was only of the older Ernaux holding a pen, gazing out the window, closing her eyes in conjuration of an image. Because Happening does not centralise the abortion that propels its narrative, but the intellectual clarity that is required to unveil “what can be found there,” I almost expected a cinematic replication of that once-removed perspective in Audrey Diwan’s adaptation: voiceover narration, analepsis/prolepsis, superimpositions . . .

The film, however, makes no use of such manipulations, and completely isolates itself within the parameters of the Event; it is a movie about abortion, and its illegality and ramifications in 1960s France. It is so dissonant from its source text—not in content but in intention—that it jarred me when Anamaria Varolomei, who plays Ernaux, is first addressed as Annie. It was impossible for me to connect her with the woman of the book—not only because the woman is older, but because the woman is remembering, not living through. The film is an intimate, occasionally chilling, and politically effective film about the alienation and humiliation of being accidentally pregnant in that era—and as such it is rooted in the immediate, in the physical, and in the cinematic present. Ernaux’s text read to me in direct opposition, weaving and defining that tenuous space of the eternal past. How did the two of you feel about this variation in treatment? Was it as disconcerting for you?

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Inside the Prison of Her Own Skin: On Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde

February 16, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Leduc is therefore bisexual, and La Bâtarde, a bisexual text.

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, translated from the French by Derek Coltman, Dalkey Archive Press, 2023

“. . . very often, women think that all they need do is to tell their unhappy childhood. And so they tell it, and it has no literary value whatsoever, neither in style, nor in the universality which it ought to contain. So there are many, many autobiographies which publishers reject . . . Very disappointing . . . to think that as long as they’re women telling their story it will be interesting. . . . [but] there are extraordinary cases, like that of Violette Leduc who, exceptionally, was wonderfully successful.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, La Revue Littéraire des Femmes (March 1986)

“Being a woman, not wanting to be one,” Violette Leduc writes about her mother, Berthe, in La Bâtarde [The Bastard]. Perhaps she is speaking about herself as well, the reader takes a guess, which later in the autobiography is—spoiler alert—confirmed. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, La Bâtarde was translated into the English by Derek Coltman (who has translated two of her other works) as La Bâtarde: An Autobiography, and released the following year by C Nicholls & Company in the United Kingdom and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States. Over the years, at least two new editions have been published, and this year, we are given a new edition to this bestselling French autobiography from Dalkey Archive Press.

“Being a woman and therefore condemned to the miseries of the feminine condition,” echoes Simone de Beauvoir in the foreword. Like Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Robert Brasillach, and Richard Wright, Leduc is considered a historical contemporary and political protege of Beauvoir (although ecofeminist-biographer Françoise d’Eaubonne disagrees, stating that Leduc never subscribed to Beauvoir’s philosophy or politics). It may have been, however, more than that; newly discovered letters—two hundred and ninety-seven of them—have revealed Beauvoir rejecting Leduc’s repeated romantic advances.

This autobiography is unapologetic—particularly so, as Laetitia Hanin deems, because while its predecessors within Francophone women’s literature, like the memoirs of George Sand and Marie d’Agoult, sacrificed to self-mythification, Leduc did not apologise for writing the story of her life. Beginning in northern France, the author reveals a childhood spent under WWI German occupation, where the government’s rationing of food is so insufficient people resorted to stealing cabbages from the back of carts. Two maternal figures among a neighbourhood of women raise her: her mother, Berthe, with whom she has an extremely agonising and suffocating relationship (“You were all I had, mother, and you wanted me to die with you”); and her grandmother, Fidéline, “an angel” who loved her “in passionate silence.” In her youth, as an “unrecognized daughter of a son of a good family,” she yearns for a paternal figure, but she will never know her father André, a man whose dominant quality is anonymity: “It is a strange moment when you gaze questioningly at an unknown figure in a picture and the picture, the unknown figure, is your nerves, your joints, your spinal column.” Further contemplating on her lineage, Leduc writes, “I reject my heredity.” This is particularly true with her maternal relationship, when in the later years Leduc would say: “Her absence was a relief; I was oppressed by her return.” Eventually, she would burn André’s photograph along with his death certificate. She writes, “My birth is not a matter of rejoicing.”

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“. . . I am sure of it”: On Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir

February 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The readers . . . become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles.

Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, translated from the French by Alice Banks, Fum d’Estampa Press, November 2022

In Ali Zamir’s third novel, Deranged As I Am, narrator-protagonist Deranged is an impoverished man, somehow surviving on the paltry daily wages he manages to earn through hard labour at the docks from transporting goods and cargo, who keeps himself aloof from his fellow workers who make fun of him, using his clothes as a calendar: “Deranged as I am I have only seven ancient shirts in all. Seven pairs of trousers and seven pairs of shorts all pocked with holes and on each of them a day of the week so I don’t forget remaining me that I shouldn’t wear the same outfit twice you see?!” The novel itself begins intensely in medias res with Deranged trapped in a confined space, wounded and on the verge of death, his limbs tied up as flies swarm around him. His crying out, while exaggerated, highlights a jagged agony. 

The rest of the narrative recounts the incidents that led to this low point, with Deranged refusing to keep quiet and hunker down in the face of his many painful oppressions: “Let me make you understand this loud and clear as long as my heart beats your ears will bleed they will bleed until my soul is dizzy lest I disappear with a stream of tears in my charmless eyes.” Situated at the dizzy intersection of various vulnerabilities, he has minimal hope of having his voice heard or his exploitation compensated, because to the “angels of darkness,” as he calls the flies that represent his numerous tormentors, he is nothing but a speck of dirt that they can wipe away and then go about their day. The readers therefore become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles and problems. 

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Fatal to the Satire: A Review of The Master by Patrick Rambaud

February 6, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

The . . . parables [leave] Rambaud’s account of Zhuang’s life apocryphal and myth-tinged, and the China he roams becomes lurid and fabulistic. . .

The Master by Patrick Rambaud, translated from the French by David Ball and Nicole Ball, Seagull Books

Patrick Rambaud’s The Master tells the story of the life of Zhuang Zhou, a legendary philosopher, the progenitor of Taoism, and the probable author of the eponymous Zhuangzi, a collection of metaphysical teachings beloved by ancients and moderns alike. Zhuang Zhou lived two and half thousand years ago, only a few centuries removed from the misty limits of recorded history, during the Warring States period, a febrile, fractious time of geopolitical strife and civilisational flourishing. Historical accounts about him are nearly nonexistent, and what little is known of his life we can only glean from the Zhuangzi, whose lessons come in the form of parables supposedly inspired from events in his life. 

The life and times of a quasi-mythical master philosopher, so far away in time, so sparsely recorded by contemporary historiography, so enmeshed already in fable and allegory, are ripe for historical fiction: the genre’s usual constraints, born of the need to fictionalise within the bounds of the historical record, become looser as the hard truths of history become more difficult to pin down. Rambaud uses this unusual latitude cleverly, but also with scrupulousness. The Zhuangzi is his source text, and he treats it with immense respect—something clear in all of the literary inventions present in The Master, and clearest of all in Zhuang Zhou himself, his chief creation.  

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When Meaning Fails Us: A Review of A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique

February 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Language is not only adjacent to violence in this novel, but comes to physically embody it . . .

A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, Other Press, 2023

March of 2023 will bring A Sun to be Sewn, a novel by Haitian poet, playwright, and novelist Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, to bookshelves around the world. D’Amérique explores ravaged landscapes of the city and the heart, delves deep into wounds collective and individual, and parses fragments of hope shored against the ruin of a land ravaged by violence and destitution. Recounting the story of a young Haitian girl fleeing from a cruel prophecy and into the arms of her beloved, treading a path that weaves amidst the dangers of her Port-au-Prince slum, D’Amérique unfolds a panorama of pain and courage, death and desire, telling all in a wounded lyrical style that haunts the reader long after the novel’s end.

A Sun to be Sewn is narrated by a talented young girl, known to the reader as Cracked Head, living in a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her mother, Orange Blossom, is a prostitute struggling with alcohol addiction, “drowning,” as Cracked Head puts it, “to draw her halo from the abyss.” Her adoptive father, Papa, makes money from various criminal activities, working for a cruel and powerful man known as the Angel of Metal. Cracked Head is no stranger to crime herself, as it provides for survival which would otherwise be impossible. Even so, she lives off of “bread and sweetened water,” anchoring her hope in the image of her beloved: Silence, the daughter of her teacher.
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Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

My Literature, My Voice: A Conversation with Max Lobe and Ros Schwartz

January 26, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury and Laurel Taylor

I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In our December Book Club selection, Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss writer Max Lobe paints a vivid psychic landscape of migration, queerness, and class. Centred around an incredibly intimate mother-son relationship that crosses from Cameroon to Switzerland, Lobe addresses the politics of a contemporary, itinerant existence with humour, wisdom, and frankness. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to Lobe and translator Ros Schwartz about the concept of a “national literature,” textual musicality, and what it means to belong somewhere, nowhere—or everywhere. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? is a novel with an immigrant at its center, and the book has been described as a contemporary story of alienation, that feeling of belonging nowhere catalysed by migrancy. Max and Ros, how do you think the concept of belonging fits in this book? Where does the nature of belonging fit overall in books that speak of migration?

Max Lobe (ML): The fact of belonging nowhere is something that really speaks to me. I was born in Douala, [Cameroon,] and then I moved from Douala to Lugano, which is in the Italian part of Switzerland. Today, I live in Geneva, and most of the time I’m always travelling, travelling, travelling, to preach the gospel of literature, of my literature, of my voice.

In Cameroon, back in the day, I couldn’t feel at home because I didn’t fulfill the criteria of being a man. I was very girlish. And you see me with the red lipstick now because I’ve come to terms with who I am. Then, when I moved to Switzerland, there was another problem, because I discovered that I was black in our classroom at Università della Svizzera italiana, the Lugano university.

In those three years, I thought to myself: “Where is my place?” I think that we, or I, can make anywhere our own place, but you need to want it. You need a willingness if you want to belong to a place—with courage, with humour, with lots of passion. Today, I think, “Everywhere I go can be my place.” That is what I wanted to communicate in this book.

Ros Schwartz (RS): I think this idea of belonging both in this book and in other books written by migrants, is that being granted citizenship does not automatically create a sense of belonging. Mwana, the narrator, is constantly reminded that he’s an outsider—through the Black Sheep anti-immigrant campaign. At first, he doesn’t even realize it’s directed against him, and then his lover—Ruedi—goes with his family to the famous Grütli Meadow, which the book describes as: “the very one where the Swiss Oath had been signed at the end of the thirteenth century, while we Bantus were still walking barefoot in the forest among the animals.” So, there is this continual reminder of being other.

I think in books that speak of migration, it’s a thread that runs through generations. The children of migrants are continually looking at both countries through a lens of otherness; they don’t feel completely at home in their parents’ country of origin, or they don’t feel completely at home in the adoptive country. People are expected to come down on one side or the other.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 20, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

Literary news from Bulgaria, the Philippines, and India!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering newly released audiobooks by the unofficial “hero of the Philippines,” the passing of one of Bulgaria’s most notable political figures and literary critics, and an award-winning translator’s appearance in New Delhi. From a night of chilling literature in Sofia to a bookstagrammer’s compilation of all Indian books in translation from 2022, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Although usually uneventful, January has so far proved a surprise for everyone who has taken a keen interest in the Bulgarian cultural scene.

Earlier this month, the local community lost the literary critic Elka Konstantinova. Throughout her life, the scholar, who passed away at the age of ninety, managed to balance an innate passion for the written word with a desire to bring about broader societal change by being an active participant in the country’s political life. In a recent report, the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency described her as “one of the key figures in Bulgarian politics after the fall of communism in 1989.” Her research encompassed diverse topics from the relationship between the fantasy genre and the world of today to the general development of the short story during specific periods of the twentieth century.

In other news, by the time you are reading this dispatch, the French Cultural Institute in Sofia will have begun preparations for its first Reading Night (Nuit de la Lecture). The event, organized in collaboration with the National Book Centre, is set to start today, in the late afternoon, and will last well past midnight. This year, the theme is “Fear in Literature” with a focus on fairy tales, criminal investigations, fantasy, dystopian science fiction, chilling essays, and more. Younger readers and their parents will have the chance to participate in several literary workshops and specially designed games that aim to ignite the public’s enthusiasm for books and stories.

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The Winter 2023 Edition Has Landed

January 19, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Helping us celebrate our milestone 12th anniversary issue are César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, Alfred Döblin, and Choi Jeongrye in our Korean Feature!

Earthquake, war, disease, unrequited love, even a man-made hell conjured through scents—what haven’t the protagonists in our Winter 2023 edition been through? Tagged #TheReturn, this issue is not only a celebration of human resilience but also of our twelve years in world literature. Helping us mark this milestone are César Aira, one of the most beloved names in the canon, and Geetanjali Shree, 2022 International Booker Prizewinner—both give us exclusive wide-ranging interviews. Amid new work from 34 countries, we also have stunning short stories from Alfred Döblin and Dalih Sembiring, powerful drama by Anna Gmeyner, a brilliant review of past contributor Johannes Göransson’s latest publication, and a Special Feature sampling the best in contemporary letters from a world literature hotspot sponsored by LTI Korea. All of this is illustrated by our talented guest artist Weims.

In Emmelie Prophète’s slow-burning fiction, “The Return” is a dramatic answering of prayers when a former Olympic athlete turns up unannounced before his mother a lifetime after his escape from Port-au-Prince. That same longed-for return is impossible for poet Fadi Azzam—“a Syrian / who had to flee his homeland / to countries that wish to flee from him.” In Juana Peñate Montejo’s poems of exile—our first work from the Mayan language of Ch’ol—on the other hand, it’s the self that requires summoning and remembering: “Bring the scent of amber, / return me to myself.” Re-membering, in the most literal sense, is foregrounded in Kim Cho Yeop’s macabre but fascinating story, one work in a sci-fi-tinged Korean Feature of startling breadth, wherein we are initiated into a community of amputees-by-choice, since “the body is hardly capacious enough to contain the human soul, which is so full of potential.” So full of potential, perhaps, that even a lover’s reincarnation on the 49th day of his death in the womb of a stranger seems possible in a transcendent story by the Mongolian writer Bayasgalan Batsuuri.

“Six months before his death in 1991, Menke Katz had a dream. In it, his long-dead mother admonished him to return to writing in his native language, Yiddish.” This dream resulted in the Oulipian poems that Jacob Romm has beautifully translated for this issue. Proving an exception to Shree’s claim that “the creative writer is instinctively drawn to her mother tongue,” Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine describes an opposite impulse in his essay: writing in French—a second language—is his deliberate choice, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, isn’t the true writer one who is “always a stranger in the language he expresses himself in”? In any case, even if the process of writing is estranging, the outcome when a piece of writing finds its intended reader can be sublime. For Lynn Xu, “the act of reading is the act of making kin . . . For example, when I read [César] Vallejo, I recognize that he is my mother . . .” By utter coincidence or divine fate, César Vallejo is also featured in these very pages, translated by another César, the intrepid César Jumpa Sánchez, who is determined to project Vallejo’s breakthrough collection, Trilce, to, in his own words, “a network of planetary outreach.”

Just as “encyclopedism has been the permanent horizon of [César Aira’s] work,“ the asymptotic impulse to realize a world literature that truly reflects the world has been our north star from the get-go. If our very existence has connected you with your kindred authors, help us get to our big 5 0 (in issues, not years!), just around the corner. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member—the New Year brings new perks and we’ll even put together a care package (rabbit theme optional) for supporters at the USD500-a-year tier and above. Thank you for being with us all these years!

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Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe

December 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.

For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022

As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.

In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.

A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #7 An Interview with Emma Ramadan

December 23, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

What I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion.

We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.

For longtime followers of Asymptote, it will come as no surprise that our seventh most popular article of 2022 was Claire Mullen’s interview with Emma Ramadan from the Fall 2022 issue. An established, sensitive and sought-after translator from the French who not only interned with us way back in 2012, but also appeared in our pages throughout the years thereafter, Ramadan is the recipient of a Fulbright, NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize, and the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.

In this interview, which easily topped our internal survey of favorite articles from the issue, Ramadan shines a spotlight on the lesser known role of the translator—that of the archive researcher, as demonstrated by her work on Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

For example, she describes following a “little tingle” into the Providence Public Library where she finally discovered the elusive French manuscript of Panics that she had been looking for, to no avail, in France—no less.

This illuminating interview surely sets her apart as a translator whose practice goes beyond mere questions of language.

After reading what she has to say in our current issue, we invite you to revisit her other appearances throughout the years as well. For just a taste:

Former Blog Editor Allison Braden interviewed Emma Ramadan in October 2020 on her translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, in which Ramadan reveals “something that I do with every book, actually—is that I read out loud as I translate.”

In her September 2018 conversation with former intern Mallory Truckenmiller, Ramadan discusses her dual role as character and translator in Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, and the embodiment of the act of “Translation as erotic.” ”Getting inside the author’s psyche, recreating their words,” she says, is “incredibly intimate . . . intellectually stimulating . . . sexy.” 

If you find yourself itching for more insights into translation direct from the horse’s mouth—including the opportunity to pose direct questions to translators during the live Q&A session with the author and/or the translator of the title that we conduct each month—we invite you to join the Asymptote Book Club, for which past members have read Ramadan’s translations of Alaouai and Matthieussent alongside other cutting-edge works of world literature!

REVISIT OUR SEVENTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #9 Two Stories from Hervé Guibert

December 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In deft strokes, these brilliant short stories illuminate the tortured inner lives of an art critic and an editor

He lived off the economy of his body. After putting it deliberately to bed, he would annihilate it, as it were, when he forced himself to wake up early to write an article. And this was what displeased him: to be—just like a laborer—a producing machine, with even his body brought to heel, his sleep transformed into a positive, mechanical phase of work, a sort of battery, a rejection of sensual pleasure.

What happens when the bodily economy of writing meets the market economy of publishing? From the Summer issue, coming in at number 9, The Photography Critic and The Editor by cult author Hervé Guibert (tr. Daniel Lupo) captured the universal anguish of sacrificing your very self to fulfill the base needs of subsistence. Written in the 1980s, Guibert’s writing feels eerily timely, bringing into focus the relentless droll of capitalism, whose insidious reach extends even to such “artistic” fields as publishing. For those of us who fancy ourselves creatives, the market economy’s suppression of artistic impulses is particularly chilling, compelling the art critic of the story to write for money as opposed to for his own satisfaction.

Guibert, who was also a filmmaker, photographer, and critic, wrote prolifically in his last year, before dying at the age of thirty six from complications of AIDS. It is not surprising then that his writing is “close to the body,” as translator Daniel Lupo points out in his interview with Meghan Racklin, our Assistant Editor for Fiction, who wrote elsewhere that she is  “a fan of Hervé Guibert’s writing generally, but hadn’t encountered him in quite this mode before; the sentences are shorter, the stories more barbed and direct. It was a pleasure to see this different gradation of his work and his commentary on artistic production, the labor of writing, and the market realities that surround the creation of art seem enormously relevant to the work of writing today.”

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