Language: Hungarian

KHER, A Home For Roma Literature: In Conversation with Radka Patočková and Karolína Ryvolová

April 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

We have to keep exploring the potential of Roma literature so that we are still here in the years to come.

Roma literature has long been suppressed, persecuted, and overlooked in the Central European literary scene, despite its wealth of stories and importance. Founded in 2012, KHER—which means a house or a room in Romani—is the only independent publishing house in the Czech Republic to focus exclusively on the publication and promotion of Romani authors, a homeland for the support and respect of Romani writers’ creative endeavours. In this two-part interview, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood has spoken to KHER’s co-founder and director Radka Patočková, and one of its editors, Karolína Ryvolová, first on the founding and development of KHER as a renowned publishing house, and then on Roma literature and identity in the broader literary scene.

Julia Sherwood: It must have taken some courage to found a press focusing exclusively on Roma writers, particularly in the Czech Republic, a country that—as you, Radka, put it in a recent interview—”has a long way to go in terms of its relations with the Roma.“ You went on to describe common reactions you received: “How many Roma authors do we have? Who would buy and read their books? What might the quality of Romani writing be like?” So my question is: What made you embark on this risky enterprise despite all these challenges, and what was the personal and professional path that brought you to this project?

Radka Patočková (RP): Let me start with the end of your question. Since the early days, when we founded the publishing house, our team at KHER has undergone some changes. In those days we were in our thirties, full of youthful enthusiasm and convinced by our previous experience that one could take action and effect change, rather than just talk about it. Had someone told us about everything this would involve over the years, and had we known what we would have to go through professionally as well as in terms of our private lives, we might have become disheartened. Some have gradually drifted away, but they continue to root for us from the sidelines and we are grateful to them for their time and enthusiasm at the start.

We met as students of Romani studies at Charles University, and our shared interest in literature brought us to publishing. Cultural and financial management, on the other hand—the nitty-gritty of publishing, marketing, and accounting—were areas we had to get into gradually. We learned that love of literature, closeness to the Roma people, knowledge of Romani and the realities of the life of the Roma, or friendly relations with authors—all of that is not enough to bring a book into the world. We had to blaze the trail slowly, one step at a time, sometimes going back or hitting a dead end, but now we feel increasingly at home in the vast area of activity that publishing entails. To sum up: in April 2023 we are much wiser but also more realistic than we were when we set up KHER eleven years ago. And that’s a good thing; perhaps too much rational thinking in 2013 could have meant that the idea would have remained on paper and in discussions in cafés.

JS: Since its inception, KHER has published over a dozen books—starting with e-books and later moving to print—ranging from history, biography, memoirs, and fiction to children’s stories, and you have also organised writing workshops and educational activities. How many people are involved in running KHER and how is your work funded?

RP: KHER is an association made up of eleven members, some with a background in Romani studies or economics, and the rest Roma professionals—an IT specialist, historian, journalist, author, and translator. However, the core group that ensures the day-to-day running of the publishing house consists of just five women. So when people want to come to see us, we tell them with a smile that they’re welcome as long as they don’t mind visiting us in our kitchens. That is another thing I think is remarkable: we don’t have an actual office, a space for working, discussing things, and coming up with creative ideas, which can sometimes be a disadvantage. Fortunately, Prague is full of cafés and some are prepared to have our group working there on a regular basis. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Earth Mounds” by Ahmed Amran

April 4, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

He wanted nothing else, just to live in respect and dignity.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a quiet and devastating tale of abuse, escape and dreaming, told with care and gentle detail by Ahmed Amran. Yemeni-born but a naturalized citizen of Hungary, Amran writes in Hungarian and here draws inspiration from its vast and “dazzling” plains—the story of Earth Mounds hinges on his protagonist’s first glimpse of a steppeland that stretches to the horizon. Its very endlessness holds the promise of a future; he need only grab it.

We were still kids, all of us short. While of our age group, he was smaller in bearing. He barely spoke. He would rather observe our games than join in. He was fearful, almost terrified, of ending up in the sort of squabble that would spill over into a fight. Yet once in a fight, he slowly turned into a wounded lion. Then he would strike hard, unstoppably, sobbing as he fought, and when he sensed his victory, he would pull his most grievous punches. Then he would break into a run. Later we found out his refuge. On the edge of the village, on the other side of the fearsome graveyard, several low earth mounds lay. He would run there, climb up them, and roll down.

I remember when we noticed his growth spurt. Under his pitch-dark hair, the brown of his forehead had darkened. We hardly ever saw him on the village’s narrow streets. Instead, he would turn up in the deep, steep valleys engirdling the village. Later we heard about how his stepmother used to torment him. She would accuse him of stealing; almost every day she would find some excuse to kick him out of his father’s house. His father, to stay on his young wife’s good side, berated and beat his son. The boy had no strength left to cry. Out of sheer exhaustion he would often fall asleep during a beating. But sometimes he found refuge in the house of a hobbling old woman, where he could rest his worn body.

From the proximity of our old house we saw and heard them every evening. As if he enjoyed it, his father would raise his voice while throwing stones after his fleeing son. His young wife, like a hawk swooping down, would snatch up any of her little children who were playing nearby. A sly smile, visible only to those familiar with her wicked nature, etched itself in the corners of her mouth.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2023

February 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Cecilia Weddell, Charlie Ng, and Meghan Racklin

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

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The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

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What’s New in Translation: January 2023

January 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Matthew Redman

The latest reads from Hungary, Sweden, and Kurdistan!

2023 is already setting up to be one of the most wide-ranging and bounteous years for literary purveyors of the world, with an abundance of exciting works slated for publication. This month, we’re presenting three texts that enrapture the imaginative prospects of a world in translation: László Krasznahorkai subverts every expectation for the travelogue, Bachtyar Ali braids storytelling and truth-seeking, and Maria Adolfsson reasserts feminist presence in the male-dominated mystery genre. 

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A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions/Serpent’s Tail, 2023

Review by Matthew Redman, Digital Editor

László Krasznahorkai is among Hungary’s most feted writers in the Anglophone world. His works, characterised by inordinately long, slow sentences which chart the depths of obsession and madness, have earned him a cult of devoted readers and international acclaim, while his translators—Georges Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet—are lauded writers in their own right. However, his most recent novel to be translated into English, A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East, is an intriguing departure from the works that have made his name. The vast sentences he is known for are intact, but they are used in service of a radically different tonal palette. Where his other novels use length to induce futility and despair, A Mountain to the North explores the beatific, languorous, and even beautiful possibilities of extreme syntax.

Set in Japan, the novel takes the form of a travelogue—albeit with the sheer mass of textual detail slowing the journey to an ooze. Strip this away and you find comparatively simple structural bones: a train deposits us at a deserted platform somewhere in Kyoto, we leave the station and wander half-lost through empty streets until we arrive at our destination, a Buddhist monastery in which we remain for most of the novel, touring the grounds and slowly penetrating the interiors. It is a balmy late afternoon, there are beautiful gardens all around, the monastery is silent and exquisite. This part of Kyoto is almost entirely bereft of inhabitants, but the emptiness is one of the rare details that Krasznahorkai chooses not to linger on. In fact, the absence is fortuitous, because the novel is uninterested in people; what consumes the author instead is the immutable, near indescribable beauty of things wrought in accordance with Japanese tradition. With the streets and monastery empty, the prose is freely devoted to the description of his sublime surroundings. Plants in their carefully tended gardens; the shrine’s architecture—their calculations and materials, the minutiae of their construction; the nigh-divinely sagacious prescriptions according to which every detail within the monastery was planned, planted, and built; the commitment at every turn to the tireless refinement of perfection; and above all the feel of all of this beauty—the texture and the grain, and the effect on the soul.

Each chapter houses a single enormous sentence that describes and extols a single beautiful object (a gate, a shrine, a statue) or craft (carpentry, gardening), and ends only when Krasznahorkai deems the subject exhausted. As demanding and unconventional as this novel is, it is not difficult in the way that experimental fiction is often thought to be.  For all its density, there is a deceptive simplicity, even a solicitousness to Krasznahorkai’s prose. His sentences are slow enumerations in service of a simple message that never changes: the monastery and everything within it are perfect, and it could only ever have been so, for it is all the product of patient, genius craftsmen adhering immaculately to faultless prescriptions. The long succession of accounts of perfect things has an incantatory quality, the meticulousness neither torturous nor bewildering, but rather intended to soothe. Krasznahorkai wants to leave you tranquil:

[…] it was something like a labyrinth, of course, but at the same time the chaos causing the oscillation of the layout of these streets wasn’t frightening and even less so futile, but playful, and just as there were finely wrought fences, the grated rolling gates protected by their small eaves, above, leaning out from both sides here and there, were the fresh green of bamboo or the ethereal, silver foliage of a Himalayan pine with its firework-like leaves unfolding; they bent closely over the passerby as if in a mirror, as if they were protecting him, guarding him and receiving him as a guest within these tightly closed fences and gates, these bamboo branches and the Himalayan pine foliage; namely, they quickly gave notice to the one arriving that he had been placed in safety […]

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Announcing an Animal-themed Special Feature

January 12, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

“There is a different way of knowing here and I see all around me a constellation of animals.” —Linda Hogan

For our Spring 2023 Special Feature, we will be putting together an animal-themed feature that looks at wildlife in a new light. We seek fictional and nonfictional narratives that place such animals at the center, whether in natural or urban environments (the animal or animals in question must play a central role in the story’s plot; we also welcome stories where the narrator is an animal).

Of special interest are texts that illuminate what Linda Hogan has called a “different way of knowing” or imagine the coexistence of the animal in question with human beings. Hrant Matevossian’s “The Green Field” from the current issue, or Zsófia Bán’s “On the Eve of No Return” from the Summer 2014 edition are excellent examples of the kind of work we are looking for. The Feature is intended to be a showcase of the many nonhuman existences who share this planet with us.

For once, we’ll be accepting original English-language submissions (although translations will still be prioritized in our curation). Fees will be waived for the first submission to this Special Feature; in addition, contributors whose work is accepted will receive an honorarium of USD100 per article. Check out our full guidelines and send in your best work today!

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #3 An Interview with Georges Szirtes

December 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In her brilliant interview, Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality.

“Pulling narratives together is an act of blind construction, an exploration of the valid. Constructions suggest artificiality. And it is true, in legal prose terms, that poems, as constructions, are artificial and therefore unreliable. But poets should not be afraid of construction: construction is the poem’s natural way of witnessing.” 

Acclaimed poet and translator from the Hungarian Georges Szirtes comes in at Number 3 in our countdown of the most-read articles of the year, via his interview in the Winter 2022 issue. Renowned for both his poetry as well as for his translations, Szirtes writes prolifically and without pretense in print and on social media. As a translator, Szirtes is perhaps best known for his work on Hungarian phenom László Krasznahorkai (his translation of Satantango won the Best Translated Book Award in 2013; while you’re here, why not also read our interview with László Krasznahorkai?).

In her brilliant interview, our very own Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality. Szirtes offers intimate insights on the lasting impact of his experience of migration in childhood and the memories—“small fragments of coloured glass that may—with a lot of luck—add up to a stained glass window of sorts”—that he has pieced together from the family photographs that he carried on the journey from Hungary to England. These memories drove Szirtes to reclaim the Hungarian language twenty-eight years after it “went to sleep.” Visualizations of what might have been permeate Szirtes’ poetry; taken as a whole, his collections reconstruct the story of his life, with glimpses of reality that appear as if frozen in film.

For example, of his latest work Waking in the Yellow Room, Szirtes says:

These are exercises of the imagination based on my experience of him [my father] and on my own sense of what Jewishness entailed for him then and what it entails for me now . . . The yellow room is the house of the soon-to-be dead. I see him as the child squatting in the corner. 

In this experiment, Szirtes rewrites the constraints of memory, suggesting a new reality in which his father didn’t eschew Judaism for Atheism in the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust. In addition, “there are increasing reminders of mortality as one grows older; in my case the death of friends, the pandemic, my own state of health . . . my mother’s early death . . . I have been sure from the start that the apprehension of mortality is what drives the whole artistic project.” 

This is not the first time Szirtes has been featured in Asymptote, his poem The Swan’s Reflection: two sides of a postcard headlined our English Poetry Feature as far back as in our Fall 2011 issue, alongside Lydia Davis’s very first translations from the Dutch, new translations of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and a survey of Croatian novelists by Dubravka Ugrešić. Find contributing editor Sim Yee Chiang’s behind-the-scenes look at this issue from our #30issues#30days showcase. If you’re inspired to submit your own work after dipping into our twelve-year-old archive, check out our submission guidelines here and send in your best work today! 

CLICK HERE FOR OUR THIRD MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

The Possible Transformations Between Covers: On Storybook ND

December 15, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

The series’ humor, experimental spirit, and eye-catching design serve as the literary equivalent of an invigorating rollercoaster ride.

Storybook ND, by various authors and translators, New Directions, 2022

In autumn, literary publishers New Directions released a new compilation, corralled under a dreamy concept: Storybook ND offers fiction “to be seen and read for an hour or two . . . [Books] to fall into for a spell, in the space of an afternoon, or early evening, or on waking.” Curated by writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, the series introduces six “long stories or short novels” that can be read as parables, travelogues, or auto-fiction. While startlingly diverse in narrative approach, the common thread among these works seems to be the writer’s classic zeal to bridge a gulf—between life and art, flawed reality and transcendent fiction.

With each book ranging anywhere from sixty to ninety-six pages, Storybook ND currently features one original English-language story—Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool—and five translated works: The Woman Who Killed The Fish by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser; Three Streets by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani; Early Light by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene; Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki; and The Famous Magician by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. While DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is not a translated work, it can be read as a virtuosic reflection on aesthetic representation and translation; specifically, DeWitt illustrates how both fiction and translation, in transforming reality or a foreign context into something intelligible, can also reflect the writer/translator’s inherent bias and their latent wish to control content.   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Kristina Tatarian, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

This week, our editors on the ground are watching out for multilingual poetry events, emerging Armenian writers, solidarity in language and literature, the favourite texts of Filipino readers, translation in Southeast Asia, dialogues between authors in Nairobi, and PEN/HEIM Translation Grants winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia

The beautiful auditorium of the Carfesjian Center for the Arts, located at the Cascade Complex in Yerevan, is a frequent stage for literary readings. On the night of October 8, the center hosted a performance as part of antiBabylon, a multilingual poetry event that brought together literary communities from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Germany. Organised by PANDA Platforma, an NGO from Berlin, the event took place in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as poets visited each other’s countries for joint workshops and performances to create, translate, and perform. The Project’s aim is to create a “free multilingual poetic space,” and test if poetry can answer the most burning existential questions of today’s troubled world.

On the same day, IALA’s Emerging Writers Showcase took place online. This showcase featured readings from Armenian authors championed by the organisation as mentees or winners of the Young Armenian Poet Award. By supporting emerging literary talent, the organisation adds to the global effort of Armenian artists to accelerate cultural revival in the country.

The Armenian diaspora around the world plays a crucial part of setting the cultural agenda for Armenian literature, and now, the groundbreaking collection We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, edited by Aram Mjorian, is available from University of Texas Press. The collection will feature essays from writers and poets of Armenian origin, shedding light on diverse experiences of “Armenianness” and personal perspectives on ethnicity, identity, and the sense of home. READ MORE…

The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!

October 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages

Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.

On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.

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No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!

READ THE NEW ISSUE

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

September 12, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Rachel Stanyon

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member. 

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The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 20, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Kent Kosack and Liam Sprod

This month's edition takes us to Germany and Hungary!

Looking for a summer read? Our editors are here to discuss some of what they’ve been reading lately, which range from German theology to QR code-studded Hungarian novellas. Read on to learn more!

László Krasznahorkai’s latest novella, Chasing Homer, is an experience. Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki and published by New Directions, the novella includes an original score by Miklós Szilveszter and images by Max Neumann. The music, accessed by QR codes at the start of each chapter, offers an anxious and propulsive accompaniment to Krasznahorkai’s virtuosic sentences: soundscape as panic attack. The plot follows a paranoid and unnamed narrator fleeing unknown killers—or, parable that it is, perhaps his, and our, mortality—in short bursts of manic interiority. The music, prose, and Neumann’s images, which have echoes of Edvard Munch’s moody lithographs, combine to pull the reader along as spectators to a timeless chase and maybe even as sympathetic fellow prey.

–Kent Kosack, Director of the Educational Arm READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…

Mapping the Vast Landscape of Romanian Theatre

January 19, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by MARGENTO

[T]he anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity . . .

Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021

In the pretentiously Francophone Bucharest of the late nineteenth century, Ion Luca Caragiale’s plays were met with harsh criticism for their alleged sexual innuendos and outrageous immorality—what one might nowadays call subversion. Caragiale, whose reputation has now grown into that of an unparalleled classic and a quintessential influence on a host of Romanian/international avant-garde luminaries, was in fact of mixed Balkan heritages. He spent his later years as an émigré in Berlin, thus proving himself an ambivalent maverick and avant-la-lettre transnational.

Almost 150 years on, Romanian drama boastfully continues this legacy of subversiveness, diversity, and transnationalism. In that respect, the best possible illustration of such variation is the recent anthology, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly. From the very introduction, Komporaly pertinently places contemporary Romanian theatre at the crossroads of the culture’s emergence from communism thirty years ago, and situates its ever increasing representation of minorities—particularly Roma—in a global context. The very rich and nuanced landscape that Komporaly aptly charts is further complicated by the dualism of state-funded (more traditional) and independent (more avant-garde) theaters, as well as formal genre-related features—both text-based and experiment/performance-informed. The picture is then rendered even murkier by companies specializing in minority drama and/or being run by representatives of minorities striving to gain state-funded status.

While informed therefore by a knowledgeable historical and cultural perspective, the anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity by illustrating the common grounds of “burning concerns rooted in Romanian realities” and the experiments “push[ing] the boundaries of the genre.” And indeed, unconventional approaches are featured from the very opening play: a stage adaptation by Mihaela Panainte of Noble Prize winner Herta Müller’s short story collection, Lowlands (thus forging a connection to the German minority in Romania). Panainte’s staging of Müller’s fiction rivetingly captures the latter’s poetic fragmentariness through what Komporaly rightly calls textual modularity—just as the translator herself lithely renders that same combination of poetry and alert colloquialism alongside a more ponderous social grayness and a haunting sense of death’s ubiquity. READ MORE…

To Learn the Wider World: The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide

August 2, 2021  |  in Asymptote for Educators  |  by Anna Rumsby, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Kent Kosack, and Mary Hillis

Stories set in other places and cultures, written in different languages, widen the world; I try to bring that feeling into the classroom.

Since its inception in 2016, the Educational Arm has developed instructional materials to accompany select pieces from the nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and visual sections of each issue of Asymptote. Now with twenty Educator’s Guides in our archive, and over one hundred lesson plans based on translations from over fifty different languages, teachers can truly experience the world with their students. We encourage educators to explore the myriad of ways Asymptote content can be adapted and used in their curriculums; most lessons can be readily applied in literature courses at the high school or university level, but are also flexible enough to be adapted for a variety of humanities classes such as English, creative writing, cultural studies, and modern languages. They can also be easily applied to engage lifelong learners at community centers or arts organizations.

The Summer 2021 Educator’s Guide features lesson plans based on a diverse array of texts from the latest issue of Asymptote, including nonfiction translated from Czech and Spanish, poetry from Brazil and Iceland, and visual art inspired by China and the U.S. In these lessons, students are invited to observe urban life through the lens of psychogeography; explore the multifaceted relationship between art, memory, and cultural identity; research poets and critically examine the concept of literary canon; and delve into the translation process while reflecting on their own experiences reading works in translation. We hope that the Educator’s Guide will serve as a springboard for the use of world literature in your own classroom.

In this following roundtable, four members of the Educational Arm—representing a variety of teaching contexts—sit down for a discussion about the Educator’s Guide. Anna Rumsby (English language teaching, U.K./Germany), Mary Hillis (English language teaching, Japan), Kent Kosack (creative writing, U.S.), and Kasia Bartoszynska (literature, U.S.) discuss their favorite lessons from previous Educator’s Guides—why they chose the pieces in question, how they adapted them, with additional discourse on teaching through the pandemic and the importance of reading world literature.

Mary Hillis (MH): How does translated literature fit into your teaching practice? Have you taught any lessons from the Educator’s Guide, or do you have any favorite lessons from previous guides?

Anna Rumsby (AR): I teach English to German speakers; most of my lessons revolve around the German school system, and therefore involve rather more pedestrian areas such as grammar and traditional style essays. As a relatively new addition to the Education Arm, I was deeply impressed and invigorated by the creative freedoms we enjoy in producing the incredibly unique material at hand, working from some incredibly talented authors and translators. It definitely highlighted what had sometimes been lacking for me in my other work. I suppose that, in a way, working on the Educator’s Guide means I can design lessons which I would love to teach, rather than those I teach day to day.

In the Fall 2020 Educator’s Guide, I was particularly struck by the lesson plan called “Writing About What is Lost,” on “Living Trees and Dying Trees” by Itō Hiromi, translated by Jon L. Pitt. I am a great lover of both folklore and the botanical world; my MA dissertation involves a lot of Black Forest folklore, and my partner is a gardener, so the exercise on the importance and meaning of trees in Japanese culture really struck me. It reminded me of strolling through botanical gardens in the pre-COVID age, being told the Latin names and significance of all the trees I pointed at. I love how the lesson plan uses Itō Hiromi’s work as a springboard for further research, which in turn explores specific topics in more depth.

Kent Kosack (KK): I’m glad you mentioned “Writing about What is Lost.” It’s a great example of what teaching world literature and literary translation can do—letting the students explore a different place, a culture or sensibility, and using it to learn more about the wider world. By the end of the lesson, they’re making connections to their own lives and—in this case—reflecting on what’s been lost. It’s difficult work, but especially during this pandemic, necessary and potentially cathartic.  READ MORE…