Language: Spanish

The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders

June 2, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Alicia and María constantly think about the other women missing from their lives.

What makes us who we are, what shapes and defines us? Is it the country that we come from or the language we speak? Is it our sex or sexual orientation? The generation or political system into which we were born? Is it our job, the class we belong to, or the education that we are privileged with or denied? Is it our family, and, if so, as one character from Elena Medel’s The Wonders puts it, “What if genes determine your character, not just your eye colour or the shape of your mouth?” And in all this, how much is pre-ordained, what role is there for choice and free will?

Medel’s debut novel,  translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, does not presume to offer a single, clear-cut answer to these questions, but one thing is obvious right from the start through the Philip Larkin quotation she has chosen as an epigraph: “Clearly money has something to do with life.” Weaving together the stories of three generations of women from a single family over the course of half a century, from the ’50s to the death of Franco in 1975 to the 2018 Spanish Women’s Strike, the novel seems to suggest that gender clearly has something to do with it, too.

As the novel opens, Alicia (the third generation in the family), finding herself without “so much as a used tissue,” feels uncomfortable from the sense of material limbo. Even at the age of thirteen, she understands that “money tempers [mediocrity], helps to conceal it.” Although she defines her life through money, or the lack thereof, her experience has also been shaped by another great absence that is inextricably linked to financial ruin: that of her father, who feigned the life of a successful businessman while getting increasingly into debt and committed suicide after a bungled attempt at life insurance fraud. From thereon out, Alicia is denied the expensive school and new apartment she’d expected and must move back to the suburbs of Córdoba, eventually moving to Madrid and a mundane life of insecure work and an unsatisfying relationship of convenience punctuated by anonymous casual sex with men who she can approach cynically as “safe bets.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 27, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from the Czech Republic and Mexico!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on new translations of Czech poetry, as well as books fairs and celebrations of acclaimed writers in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Czech Republic

On 19 May, Bianca Bellová launched the English translation of her award-winning novel The Lake at the Czech Centre in London. “Whether The Lake is better described as dystopian or realistic depends, I suppose, on one’s opinion about the state of the world and what can be done about it,” said the book’s translator Alex Zucker. For him, the book “stands out for the incisiveness of its style and the evocativeness of its setting,” he told Alexandra Büchler in an interview published as part of Parthian Books’ Talking Translation series.

Meanwhile, Büchler’s own translation of the poetry collection Dream of a Journey by Kateřina Rudčenková has been longlisted for the coveted Oxford Weidenfeld Prize. You can read a tribute to Büchler, a tireless advocate for the translation of literature from Wales in both English and Welsh into languages across Europe through her role at Literature Across Frontiers. Those in the UK can catch Rudčenková and her fellow Czech poet Milan Děžinský at the Kendal Poetry Festival on 25 June, while poets Stephan Delbos and Tereza Riedlbauchová will be reading translations of each other’s poetry in Prague on 26 May.

There is more Czech poetry just out from Karolinum Press as part of its Modern Czech Classics series: The Lesser Histories by Jan Zábrana (1931-1984). In the words of its translator Justin Quinn, the collection “at times resembles a loose, shifting congregation of voices, some talking clearly, others muttering indistinctly, on occasion shifting from one language to another.” Quinn’s foreword, excerpted in LARB, provides a great introduction for Anglophone readers to Zábrana, a towering figure in Czech literature who, in addition to being a poet, was an outstanding translator from Russian and English, as well as a diarist whose “thousand pages or so of selected diaries bear witness to a splendid, if bitter, solitude.”

READ MORE…

On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

May 25, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 20, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Josefina Massot

Bringing news from Argentina, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

Book fairs, festivals, competitions, new publications—the literary world this week is filled with a flurry of events and announcements. From the ongoing debate between culture and commerce in Bueno Aires, to new releases from Hong Kong icons Dung Kai-Cheung and Xi Xi, to a celebration of poetry debuts in Haskovo, to a renewal of a beloved book festival in Karlskrona, the world of letters has no shortage of things to offer.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Buenos Aires

In his opening speech at the 46th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, author Guillermo Saccomanno issued a complaint: “When we talk about a fair,” he declared, “we’re talking about commerce. This is a trade fair rather than a cultural one, even if it claims to be the latter. At any rate, it represents an understanding of culture as commerce.” What’s more, he added, the country’s dire economic situation does not bode well for the Spanish-speaking world’s largest industry event.

Saccomanno was both right and wrong: right that the Fair’s pursuits are largely commercial, wrong that they’d be somewhat of a bust this time around. Perhaps to make up for two years of pandemic torpor, over 1.3 million visitors crowded La Rural’s sprawling halls in just under three weeks, from April 28 to May 16—a 30% increase relative to pre-pandemic figures. Sales, too, went up by about 10-20%.

In addition to bestselling genre sensations (American John Katsenbach among them), the Fair featured critically acclaimed writers from over forty countries. Stand-outs included Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Chileans Diamela Eltit and Paulina Flores, Spaniard Jorge Carrión, and locals Mariana Enriquez, Selva Almada, and Guillermo Martínez. There were over 1,500 book stands on display, helmed by everything from multimedia conglomerates to artisanal press co-ops, as well as over 1,000 programmed events that spanned readings, conferences, panels, book signings, and courses for every taste and age group.

It would be impossible, given this near embarrassment of riches, to mention just one or two based on quality alone. I’ll appeal to our journal’s métier, then, and focus on a few events related to the art (and, yes, the commerce) of translation. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2022)

May 19, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Despite a quarter marked by global upheaval, our team members continued to publish and organize literary events

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently co-organized—jointly with Isabelle Gribomont—an international week-long event on Literature and Computation which he capped off with an intermedia computational performance titled Code Is Poetry.

Blog Editor Darren Huang reviewed Diana Abu-Jaber’s “Fencing with the King” for the Los Angeles Review of Books on April 1.

In March, Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac was asked by the ALTA board to come back as interim president, after Anne Fisher resigned as president following the invasion of Ukraine. Elias-Bursac will serve in this capacity until November 2023.

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood’s joint translation (with Peter Sherwood) of her mother’s memoirs My Seven Lives: Jana Juráňová  in Conversation with Agneša Kalinová, published by Purdue University Press last October, was launched at an event in London on  April 27.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new braided essay out in The Rupture and a short story in The Baltimore Review.

Assistant Managing Editor Marina Dora Martino’s poem “Death with Three Left Feet” was published in POETRY’s April issue, Exophony, featuring poets who write in English as an additional language.

Assistant Managing Editor Michal Zechariah published a review of Maayan Eitan’s Love (tr. by the author) at 3:am magazine and a review of Elizabeth Clark’s Boy Parts at The Rumpus. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 13, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Carol Khoury

New magazine releases in Palestine, book launches in Mexico, and more!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on new magazine releases in Palestine and book launches in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

Even amidst the present global turmoil, the independent editorial scene in Mexico has been thriving. In the first quarter of 2022, thirteen independent publishing houses joined forces to put out Placeres mínimos, a book with texts by a diverse group of both local and international authors. The book is free for readers with any purchase from one of the participating publishers. The writers anthologized in the collection include several authors familiar to Asymptote readers, such as Mariana Enriquez, Ariana Harwicz, and Patrycja Pustkowiak. It is the second year that such a collaborative effort has taken place, and Jacobo Zanella and Mauricio Sánchez—the editors who coordinated the collection—show enthusiasm for continuing the tradition every year.

I attended the book’s launch event on April 29 in Querétaro’s Center for the Arts. Editors from the publishing houses Gris Tormenta and Minerva talked about the long process of coordinating the collection, highlighting how enthusiastic and committed to the project all the editors involved were. The collection’s theme was “Environments,” an abstract prompt that allowed the editors to curate an eclectic selection of texts. Among these are older pieces such as “Pasaje del diario de viaje de un navegante”—an except from the travelogue of Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian from the sixteenth century—but also more modern texts, such as “The Painter of Modern Life” by Charles Baudelaire, and many contemporary essays by living authors.

READ MORE…

Multiplicity as Part of the Process: An Interview with Robin Myers

May 11, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

I’m always trying to think about what sounds harsh, or sweet, or fluid, or abrupt—about the consequences of sound.

I had wished to interview Robin Myers for a while now, particularly after reading her bilingual book Tener/Having and finding out that she had translated into English some of my favorite contemporary writers, including Isabel Zapata, Andrés Neuman, and Ave Barrera. My interest in meeting her only grew stronger when I discovered that she lived in Mexico City, where I grew up. Though we live in quite distant parts of the city, I feel like sharing the experience of living in this chaotic yet exceptionally effervescent place immediately made us neighbors, peers, and even accomplices.

The interview took place in a bright and slightly too warm day in Coyoacán. We sat down at a lovely café that is also home to the most important feminist independent bookstore in Mexico. The original interview is almost three times longer than what I present here. But even though this is an abridged version, readers can get a full sense of Myers’s thoughtfulness, creativity, and generosity. I hope they enjoy listening to her as much as I did.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): What were your earliest experiences with translation?

Robin Myers (RM): I loved reading as a child, and as a teenager I became especially interested in poetry. In retrospect, I realize I did have experiences of reading poetry in translation, but I didn’t really think about what that meant. As a high school student, somebody had given me a book by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who I loved, and there were a few poems that made a strong impression on me, but I don’t remember actually stopping to think about who had made that happen in English.

I would say that my path into translation happened in two, for a long time parallel, ways that didn’t actually touch. One was a love of poetry—both reading and writing it—and the other was an interest in Spanish, specifically because I was really curious about Mexico. I have some family history in Mexico, and I wanted to spend time here, and I understood as a kid that that meant I had to learn Spanish as well as I could. So I studied it in school and began reading in Spanish to the extent that we were given literature to read in class. Once I had learned enough Spanish to be able both to read and to speak more comfortably, I had the experience, living in Oaxaca, of coming across a poem in English that I loved and wanting to be able to share it with a Spanish-speaking friend. So my first experience as a translator was translating a poem into Spanish, which I’ve never done ever again.

AM: I read about this poem in one article, and from what I understood you haven’t published it, right? And you are not planning on doing so.

RM: Nope. Somebody else can do a much better job.

AM: But that’s a good question that I often find myself asking. What do you think about translating to a language that isn’t your mother tongue? Because I feel like sometimes people who study or engage with translation fetishize the mother language. Do you know what I mean?

RM: Yes, absolutely. To be honest, I think that’s something I did for a long time. I had this sense of the first language as the “dominant” language, and it’s been through talking with and reading other translators that I’ve come to realize what a problematic way of thinking that is—about language and about the multiplicity of languages in our lives and how multilingual so many people are, and how many different kinds of intimacy there are with different languages. I think it’s been a continual process of moving away from that mindset. In my case, I don’t personally feel very comfortable translating into my second language, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think other people can and should. Or that it isn’t crucial that they do. You know?

READ MORE…

Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

May 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by AM Ringwalt, Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, José García Escobar, and Liam Sprod

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 29, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Thuy Dinh

We report from Guatemala and Vietnam in this week’s literary round-up!

In this week’s dispatches of literary news from around the world, the struggle of Vietnamese refugees is commemorated in text and art, a new documentary celebrates Thích Nhất Hạnh, and a new Guatemalan award honours the country’s female writers. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Besides T.S. Eliot, April also seems problematic for refugees of the former Republic of South Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Communist forces captured Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—ending the Vietnam War, yet triggering a mass exodus of South Vietnamese who fled their fallen nation for political asylum in the West. In recent years, descendants of these refugees have pursued creative efforts to redefine/translate “Black April” as a time of remembrance and rebirth. For example, the traveling exhibit Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora, curated by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), and currently shown at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, in Oakland, California, introduces a spectrum of “textured” responses to April 30 via visual media, poetry, and prose, to construct an intimate yet diverse composite of the diasporic experience that has been collected, recollected, and reimagined since 1975.

The theme of remembrance and rebirth also manifests in a new Vietnamese translation of The Song of Quan Âm (Quan Âm Tế Độ Diễn Nghĩa Ca), about the life of Avalokiteshvara—the bodhisattva of compassion—known commonly as Quan Âm, who is endowed with the ability to see (quan) and hear (âm) all human sufferings. Translated and annotated by scholar Nguyễn văn Sâm, this anonymous 7,228-line poem—the longest poem originally written in Nôm or the Southern script—vividly illustrates Buddhist concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and filial piety. The book’s magisterial scope, only the second translation since 1925, also reflects the translator’s fervent wish to preserve Nôm—a writing tradition adapted from Chinese ideographs and containing a wealth of premodern Vietnamese thought—yet is mostly neglected today due to the adoption of the Romanized script.

Compassion, inextricably linked to remembrance and rebirth, is eloquently evoked in A Cloud Never Dies, a twenty-seven-minute documentary on the life and teachings of the late Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. Released on April 2 by the International Plum Village Community in response to the war in Ukraine, the film highlights Thích Nhất Hạnh’s philosophy of engaged Buddhism­ that combines meditation with antiwar activism. Articulated in his 1967 book Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hoa Sen Trong Biển Lửa), Thích Nhất Hạnh’s practice lent moral support to Vietnamese during the war who refused to take sides and simply wanted the bombing to end. This perspective, however, resulted in his thirty-nine-year exile in the West. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

April 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 22, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

Longlists and talks in Slovakia and Mexico

This week, our editors-at-large report on paper shortages, literature prize longlists, and efforts to deconstruct the writing workshop. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

Over the past year, Slovakia has not escaped the paper shortages that have affected the publishing industry all over the world, increasing printing costs and extending production times which, in turn, led to fewer titles being published. All this is likely to push up the price of books, in some cases by as much as 10-20 per cent, making Slovak readers, who already tend to spend less on books than their counterparts in many other European countries,  even more reluctant to buy new works of literature, particularly by Slovak authors.

On 9 March, the longlist of Slovakia’s  most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, was announced. The eclectic mix of nominations includes new works by four previous winners, two of them past Asymptote contributors: Šesť cudzincov (Six Foreigners, excerpt here) by Marek Vadas, and Balla’s ‘polyphonic novel’ Medzi ruinami (Amidst the Ruins), as well as Stanislav Rakús’s Ľútostivosť (Mournfulness) and Ivan Medeši’s Vilkovia (Two Vilkos). The longlist features two other previous Anasoft Litera nominees: Ivana Dobrakovová for her latest novel Pod slnkom Turína (Under the Sun of Turin) and Vanda Rozenbergová with Zjedla som Lautreca (I’ve Eaten Lautrec), and two further women writers, Ivana Micenková with Krv je len voda (Blood Is Only Water) and Nicol Hochholczerová with her taboo-breaking  debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Is Inedible). Another debut, Lukáš Onderčanin’s Utópia v Leninovej záhrade: Československá komúna Interhelpo (Utopia in Lenin’s Garden: The Czechoslovak Commune Interhelpo), is the first book of literary reportage to make it onto the longlist, while Arpád Soltész’s thriller Zlodej (The Thief) is the second genre novel in the prize’s history deemed worthy of inclusion among the top ten titles.

On 17 March the town council of Kremnica, a medieval gold-mining town and site of the world’s oldest still-working mint, unanimously approved an application to set up the first European Translators’ House in Slovakia. Named Zechenter House after the doctor, travel writer, and journalist Gustáv Kazimír Zechenter Laskomerský (1824-1908), it is expected to open its doors in two year’s time. The organisations behind the initiative are SOS Kremnica, a local NGO for the preservation of the town’s crumbling architectural heritage, and  Mona Sentimental, run by translators Renáta Deáková and past Asymptote contributors Eva Andrejčáková and Gabriela Magová.

READ MORE…

Our Spring 2022 Issue Has Landed!

April 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Individuals of the woodland canine persuasion run amok in our Spring 2022 issue, thanks to Theis Ørntoft and Nina Yargekov!

Welcome to our Spring 2022 edition, released just as Russia’s invasion enters a brutal new phase. We’ve been curating a space for writers in support of Ukraine in a new Saturday column. Now, we proudly bring you Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s letters from Kharkiv, Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins, and Ian Ross Singleton’s review of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Complemented by guest artist Shuxian Lee’s poignant cover, these pieces and the new issue remind us that if “humans are destructive”—as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it across so powerfully in his essay “Our Days in Paradise are Over”—“we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos.”

An absolute highlight amid new work from thirty-four countries, Ørntoft’s essay is itself an organizing phenomenon that deserves to be dwelt on. According to him, civilization “began with the delineation of a garden,” but capitalism has taken it to the point where every inch of planet Earth has been altered and nature no longer exists “out there”—no wonder, then, that his expedition to the West of Jutland yields zero sightings of wolves. Heavily mythologized across cultures, wolves most often represent danger, chaos, the unknown—yet, in the author’s telling, they also stand for the primeval and, therefore, a certain elusive real, in stark contrast to the various symbolisms thrust upon them. Ørntoft then inverts the anthropocentric paradigm that humans are used to—with them at the top of the food chain, even though they do not necessarily self-identify as animals—and asks us to consider what message wolves might hold for us instead.

Apart from Nina Yargekov’s uproarious adaptation of “Little Red Riding Wolf” for the age of the #MeToo movement—the obvious story with which Ørntoft’s nonfiction might be paired—“Our Days in Paradise are Over” echoes Nobel laureate Hermann Karl Hesse’s empathetic Weltanschauung in two new translations of his poems by Wally Swist; it also asks us to pay attention to the various animals conjured in this edition: from the suffering, captive bat in Bosnian author Aljoša Ljubojević’s “How We Started the War” to the suffering, liberated “Fish” in Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli’s story about a man who jumps into a lake and renounces his very own humanity along with the social contract it entails. Then there is the elusive boar in Pedro de Jesús’s slippery poem, in which various hunters discuss the “art of the hunt” only to miss the point; the cats with beautiful eyes in Agnieszka Taborska’s fascinating piece on surrealists vis-à-vis their chosen suicides, “yawn[ing] and stretch[ing] in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Four Poems by Jonatan María Reyes

April 19, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Shannon Barnes

a gunshot, popcorn / popping, a bullet tearing / into flesh, the mouth chewing

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you four poems by the Puerto Rican poet Jonatan María Reyes that focus on the minutiae of place and neighbourhood. Resembling photographic snapshots of everyday urban scenes looked at from the different hours of a day, these poems stare at flies, neon signs, garbage bags, dryers. They stare, through the modest crack that each short line pries open, at “what lives / in the background” to borrow the language of Shannon Barnes’s evocative translation, “and demands / of the system another / kind of resistance.”

1.3

a fine steam bursts
from underground.
sparks fly from the neon light
of a giant sign.
somebody at the bus stop
eats cheetos and licks
their orange fingers.
random newspaper pages
crunch and float through the air.
they’re later lost.
a green liquid seeps
out of a garbage bag.
it leaks slowly and flows
towards the sewer.
someone gets off a bus
puts gum in their mouth
and pretends that
everything stops there READ MORE…

A Gesture of Togetherness: An Interview with Ian Russell

April 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

In my reading of the current Winter 2022 issue, I was drawn to the vivid and imaginative poetry of Spanish artist Pepe Espaliú. The featured excerpt, translated beautifully by Ian Russell, was taken from Espaliú’s only collection of poetry, En estos cinco años (Through These Five Years). The collection was written in the years preceding his death from AIDS, gracefully exploring the topic of mortality. Russell’s translations introduce a new audience of Anglophone readers to a dynamic activist, who fought to call attention to AIDS through his art while many political leaders refused to even acknowledge the disease. Russell was generous enough to agree to speak with me over email, and in the following interview we discuss Espaliú’s legacy as a performance artist, the communal aspect of translation, and some interesting parallels between birding and poetry.

Rose Bialer (RB): Before we start discussing your translations of Espaliú’s work, I’m curious to know how you became interested in translation in the first place. What was your introduction to the craft?

Ian Russell (IR): I can think of two starts. I got offered some freelance work to translate articles from Spanish to English while I was in grad school and took them purely to make a little extra money. I actually felt like I wasn’t very good at it. But right around that same time I had some friends that wrote poetry ask me to help translate their work. I felt totally unqualified since I had only done these academic articles, but after working on them and talking through the poems it became a really gratifying creative outlet for me.

RB: How did you come across Pepe Espaliú’s art? What initially attracted you to his poetry?

IR: I came across Espaliú’s visual work in researching HIV/AIDS in Spain. Later, I discovered he had written quite prolifically, and I found a copy of the first printing of En estos cinco años in the library (this was before Jesús Alcaide’s stunning 2018 La imposible verdad); I really loved the sort of smallness, the roundness, that I encountered in that short edition. I don’t know if that makes sense—the book is comprised of several different sections that seem pretty hermetic at first read, and many poems have an aphoristic quality. Other prose poems sit in their text blocks on the page. I felt a smallness and roundness that was easily digestible, maybe.

RB: In your translator’s note you mention that a challenge you faced in rendering this excerpt of Espaliú’s poetry was understanding that his poems are only a part of his artistic repertoire—he was also a visual and performing artist. How did you go about translating this poetry with consideration of Espaliú’s larger body of work? Did you translate while immersing yourself in it?

IR: I actually started writing about Espaliú’s performance work first. During the pandemic, I found it more difficult to keep up with that sort of critical analysis, and turned to translating Espaliú as a way to think about his performances, as if translating might offer some clue to approach the visual/performance. I think the main piece that came together for me in that process was how the installation, performance, and poetic pieces all read as a reaching out, a convocation of togetherness. So, in that way, I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

READ MORE…