A Metaphysical Mistake: On Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death

June 13, 2024 | in Reviews | by Sebastián Sánchez

Death, to Cannetti, is not one part of what we might call a life-cycle, but rather a metaphysical mistake.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, Fitzcarraldo/New Directions, 2024

The fact that the twentieth century saw the greatest number of conflict-related deaths in human history might be considered fundamental in explaining the over two-thousand pages Elias Canetti wrote in preparation for his book against death. However, reading the abridged version—published by Fitzcarraldo (UK) and New Directions (US)—one will find that Canetti would object strenuously to this causal explanation. This relation between factuality and literature, Canetti would say, concedes far too much to death in two ways. Firstly, it allows death quantity: by remarking on the sheer numbers, we suggest that the tragedy of death is quantifiable; that the more death there is, the greater the tragedy. Secondly, it allows death quality: by remarking on the specific kind of death—those caused by conflict—we suggest that its calamity is measured in part by the nature of the dying. To Canetti, a lone Don Quixote who ceaselessly struggled for life in a century of death, all death is singular and its tragedy is infinite. In order to better understand this, we must turn to one death: his mother’s.

June 15, 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. . . I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Thirteen Keys to a Doorless House in Toledo: On Tela de sevoya by Myriam Moscona

May 16, 2019 | in Essays | by Sarug Sarano

The Ladino language has etched on her tongue the addresses of countless houses in the Jewish Quarters of Toledo and Burgos.

Myriam Moscona’s Tela de sevoya (Onioncloth) was published in English in 2017, translated from the Ladino by Antena (Jen Hofer with John Pluecker). In today’s essay, Asymptote’s Sergio Sarano, himself a Ladino speaker, uses Moscona’s book as a starting point to explore the language and its history, shaped by the complex migrations of the Jewish diaspora. Sergio also discusses Ladino’s current status as an endangered language and highlights the important role that Moscona, as one of just a few writers who continue to publish in Ladino, has to play in keeping the language alive.

“I come upon a city
I remember
that there lived
my two mothers
and I wet my feet
in the rivers
that from these and other waters
arrive to this place”

—Myriam Moscona

In Conversation: Rita Stirn

May 10, 2018 | in Interviews | by Hodna Nuernberg

My book seeks to understand how women manage to become musicians in Morocco.

Rita Stirn is a translator, author, and musician who lives in Rabat, Morocco. Her book, Les musiciennes du Maroc: Portraits choisis (Morocco’s Women in Music: Selected Portraits) was published by Marsam in late 2017. Asymptote’s Editor-at-large Hodna Nuernberg spoke with Stirn about her new publication, Moroccan music, and language politics in the region.

Hodna Nuernberg (HN): How did you decide to write a book on Morocco’s women musicians? And how did being a woman musician yourself shape your approach to researching and writing the book?

Rita Stirn (RS): I’ve always been interested in the silences of history concerning women in art and music. When I started listening to the blues as a teenager, I realized music was a man’s world. Sure, there were plenty of female singers, but very few instrumentalists; I wanted to learn about hidden talents—the women in music who weren’t getting much recognition.

I came to Morocco in 2011. I paid a lot of attention to what was going on here musically. Whenever there was a celebration out on the streets—a marriage, for example—there were inevitably women playing music. So, I’d talk to them. They’d say, “Yeah, sure, people know us,” but none of them were online anywhere. They got all their gigs by word of mouth, and little by little, I began to find out about more and more women musicians.

Around the same time, I was looking though archives for photographs of women in music. All the images were of men. There was no focus whatsoever on women’s talents or the tradition of women instrumentalists, and that’s when the book project started to take shape in my head.