Language: Spanish

Translation Tuesday: “Ode to Wood” by Pablo Neruda

I carry around the world / on my body, on my clothes, / scent of sawmill, / aroma of red boards.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by the inimitable Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by Wally Swist. Oscillating between the grand and the mundane, but never stinting on lavish detail, the poet draws an entire world out of his relationship to wood—the elemental matter from which so much of our world, from houses and coffins to ships and railroad ties, is fashioned. Dwelling in particular on the physical scene of trees being felled, Neruda not only pays vivid homage to the labor of woodcutting, but also illustrates the intimate connection between the world of human industry and the natural environment from which it arises—a connection that is more salient than ever, in our current age of ecological collapse. Read on!

Oh, how much I know
and recognize
among all things
wood is
my best friend.
I carry around the world
on my body, on my clothes,
scent of sawmill,
aroma of red boards.
My chest, my senses
feel impregnated
in my childhood
of falling trees,
of great forests
of future construction. READ MORE…

To Follow the Poet Into the Tunnels: On the American Translation of Carlos Soto Román’s 11

By discourse I mean a poem, a textual device that runs through a particular set of psycho-historical contingencies.

The following essay investigates the indelible wounds of the 1973 Chilean coup—which brought to end the democratic socialist government of elected president Salvador Allende and marked the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. Seen through the fragmentary, poetic method of poet Carlos Soto Román’s collection, 11, Sarug Sarano examines the public role of the text as reflection, bringing pieces of recollection, ghostly testimonies, and sustaining structures to their archival and political context, ensuring that one does not forget about the terrors and erasure that continue to infiltrate the present.

I searched for you among the ruined, I spoke with you. What was left of you saw me and I held you.

—Raúl Zurita, “Song For His Disappeared Love” (tr. Anna Deeny Morales)

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Canada, Mexico, and Latin America!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on fascinating digital archives, literary time capsules, and a prestigious award. From e-lit cult works, to ruminations on the future, to a podcast on Mexican literature, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Canada

“Why this huge line,” I wondered, “rolling out of the University of Victoria (UVic) McPherson Library?” The bright British Columbia sunlight, the sweet breeze across the greens, not even the irresistible campus café patios could prevent people from crowding in for one of the coolest events of the year. 

The “Hypertext & Art” exhibit, hosted by the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) from June 10 to June 14, was living up to the reputation and coverage it had already garnered thanks to its exhibition in Rome at Max Planck Institute for Art History in fall 2023 and the indefatigable work done in the field by its well-known and widely awarded curator, author Dene Grigar. The tagline of the exhibit was “A Retrospective of Forms,” and that is exactly what Grigar has been doing for quite a number of years now at the Electronic Literature Lab she leads at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV), where she archived over three hundred works of electronic literature and other media alongside dozens of vintage computers, software, and peripherals. 

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Serpentine

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Guatemala, Taiwan, China, and France!

This week, our editors take us through Central America, France, and China to explore the reaches of literature, from a transcendent event honouring the poems of Robert Bolaño, to the new World Book Capital in France, and works featuring vital new voices from the Chinese language. Read on to find out more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

When I entered the room, it looked like a coven: a group of people gathered around an edition of Roberto Bolaño’s Complete Poetry. Each member of the group would take turns to step into the centre, leaf through the text for a moment, and then recite one of the Chilean author’s poems at random, like a poetic Russian roulette. As I took my seat, one of the young men was reading the final verses of “The Romantic Dogs”. I had arrived at the event without much certainty about what it would be like; the poster from Perjura Proyecto, a cultural and artistic dissemination space, only said “The Poetry Came” and had a sketch of Bolaño’s silhouette. And, of course, it also mentioned the date and time—May 23, 17:00.

When it was my turn, I decided I wanted to read “Godzilla in Mexico”, my favorite poem by Bolaño. I clumsily flipped through the text while trying to make conversation with the rest of the participants, but I couldn’t find it. I apologised to the group because I would break the Russian roulette and put the bullet in the centre; I searched for it on my phone. As I recited “Yo leía en la habitación de al lado cuando supe que íbamos a morir”, I was overcome with a deep tenderness. I saw us, in the midst of a vertiginous and infamous city—a group of no more than ten people gathered to read Bolaño’s poems to each other. I thought about the infinite forms of cultural resistance in which we exist, all self-managed, all on the margins, all filled with beauty. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Mexico, the Philippines, and

This week, our editors-at-large take us many places, from one book fair by the sea and one in the neighborhood that was once home to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Read on for news about new bookstore openings, sonic poetry readings, and upcoming chapbook publications!

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

The International Book Fair of Coyoacán (FILCO) is taking place from June 7 to 16 in the historic Mexico City neighborhood internationally famous for having been the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The event features stands from more than one hundred and fifty Mexican and international publishers, as well as two hundred events ranging from concerts and dance performances to book launches and roundtables. Among this year’s panelists are cultural luminaries such as the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, the descendants of Mexican historical figures like Emiliano Zapata, and the writer and Asymptote contributor Elena Poniatowska.

I visited the book fair on Saturday, June 9 for a presentation of the most recent book by Rocío Cerón, globally acclaimed experimental Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor. Simultáneo sucesivo is a collection that explores the sonic power of language. During her talk, Cerón emphasized how we live surrounded by sound but rarely reflect on its affective qualities. She demonstrated these qualities by reading from her book with her characteristic performance style: repeating words, modulating her volume, pitch and tone, and varying her speed. This performance style has the power to minimize language’s semantic qualities and foreground its sonic properties. She also played tracks of sound art that accompany the collection. These feature Cerón’s voice, but also include drone, ambient, and electronic sounds that induce a trance on listeners. Cerón’s performance, abstract poetry, and sound art liberate both language and sound from their utilitarian and practical everyday purposes, inviting listeners and readers to experience the texture, timbre, and materiality of language beyond its meaning.

Simultáneo sucesivo is the third installment of Cerón’s trilogy challenging the way in which we relate to language. The other two books in the series are Spectio (2019) and Divisible corpóreo (2022), which Cerón has presented in events around the world. READ MORE…

Against Containment, Attracting Meaning: Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine M. Hedeen discuss midnight minutes

. . . I don’t want any borders in poetry. I want to continue the lines, continue the poems, continue this flow. It’s a current of meaning.

In the roughly two decades since Víctor Rodríguez Núñez began writing the antinationalist salvo actas de medianoche and Katherine M. Hedeen began its translation, both have published numerous award-winning works and gained international recognition for their poetry and translations. But despite their acclaim and the widespread success of the poem in the Spanish-speaking world through various prizes and publications (Valladolid, Soria, La Habana), traditional English-language publishers resisted considering the poem and its defiance of  preconceived notions of Cuban and Latin American poetry—until this April, when the book-length poem, midnight minutes, was published in full with Action Books

Spanning over 2000 lines, midnight minutes challenges the formation of the traditional poem on the page and the formation of borders of all kinds. Rodríguez Núñez reinvents the sonnet as it curves between the rural towns of his life, from Cayama, Cuba, to Gambier, Ohio, where he lives together with Hedeen, embracing the night as homeland in “one long, dark breath.” Hailed as one of his most influential works in the Spanish-speaking world, actas de medianoche marked a new, experimental turn in both Rodríguez Núñez’s poetics and Latin American poetry overall, now extending into the English for the first time in full with midnight minutes

I interviewed Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez about the significance of the translation’s publication today, the contemporary long poem and sonnet in Spanish and in English, their influences from Cesár Vallejo to Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan, and how Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez transform the poetic subject and the object of desire. 

The following dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Pazen (SP): You both have spoken about how, despite the impact of actas de medianoche in the Spanish-speaking world since its initial publication, presses in the United States were overwhelmingly resistant to publishing the English translation, midnight minutes. This was often because of how it defies preconceived ideas of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, poetry. Why do you think right now is finally when these translations are being published? 

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (VRN): Let’s talk a bit about why there was resistance. There is a problem with long poems. Many magazines don’t publish them. Each canto in midnight minutes has fourteen stanzas. The book has more than two thousand lines. And it’s not a book about any explicit Cuban-related theme. It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about. 

Borges, for instance, didn’t like Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. He didn’t like Federico García Lorca’s poetry. I am not in agreement with him in either case, but the reason why is compelling to me. He said that Gabriela Mistral was a professional Chilean. And he didn’t like Garcia Lorca’s poetry because he said that he was a professional Andalusian. “El andalus profesional, la chilena profesional.” I am not a professional Cuban. 

READ MORE…

“To listen to new, unknown sounds”: The Crónicas of Hebe Uhart in A Question of Belonging

Uhart's . . . conception of truth-telling clearly holds an imperative to bare the process of the telling itself.

A Question of Belonging by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, Archipelago Books, 2024

A Question of Belonging, the recently released collection of crónicas by the late, acclaimed Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, offers a unique alchemy of attentive reportage, sociological and psychological insight, and incisive wit. Drawing readers in with her ability to enjoy the unexpected without judgment, Uhart continually combines humor and erudition to recreate her encounters with camaraderie and guidance, and the care she extends to vulnerable strangers is all the more self-evident when contrasted with her willingness to eviscerate pernicious cultural narratives, particularly those that serve to harm and diminish. The translation by Anna Vilner captures the tonal nuances between these modes, as well as Uhart’s authentic political sympathies—most notably with marginalized and indigenous peoples, from whom she continually attempts to learn.

Crónicas on trips ranging in destination from Río de Janeiro to the Peruvian jungle are supplemented by visits to various therapists, a “North American Professor,” and a hospital stay. Uhart’s integrated practices of reading—which include the interpretation of not only books, but people, relationships, and the self—intertwine in these textual sojourns, often revisiting the ego’s haunts, assumptions, and habits in correspondence with the journeys they narrate. Such practices deepen interactions with differing views, histories, and community structures, truly exemplifying an openness to challenge and newness. The results mirror the process itself: shifting, dynamic essays that act as flexible containers for both journey and reflection, while leaving ample space for the reader’s own impressions and discoveries.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Updates from Mexico and Palestine solidarity around the literary world.

This week, our editors share news of solidarity, legacy, and cross-cultural connection. Around the world, the literary world is showing up to express support for Palestine, with the Palestine Festival of Literature continuing their crucial work of uplifting work that urges us towards compassion, the Palestinian struggle, and a condemnation of violence. In Mexico, some of the greatest writers in Latin-American history are celebrated for their efforts in connecting their nation to a greater, global heritage of letters. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In a historic demonstration of solidarity, the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), Writers Against the War on Gaza, and Amplify Palestine have come together to organize the event “Freedom to Write for Palestine,” held on May 7 at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. This significant gathering brought together writers who had withdrawn from PEN America’s World Voices Festival and the PEN America Literary Awards, condemning the organization’s failure to support Palestinian writers facing violence and displacement in Gaza. The unprecedented withdrawal of dozens of authors led to the cancellation of both PEN America events just weeks before their scheduled dates.

The program featured opening remarks by Nancy Kricorian and an introduction by Derecka Purnell, and included powerful readings and stories from Michelle Alexander, who read the work of Haya Abu Nasser, and Mohamed Arafat, who shared his family’s harrowing experiences. Evie Shockley read pieces by Fady Joudah, while Nicholas Glastonbury presented an insightful commentary on the Palestinian struggle. The event can be watched in full here. READ MORE…

Translating the Demons on the Page: Maureen Shaughnessy on Belén López Peiró’s Why Did You Come Back Every Summer

I feel like it's a gift that she opened herself up and shared such a raw part of herself with us.

After nine years and a criminal complaint. Affidavits, expert witness reports, trips back and forth to police stations, district attorneys, national courts. A five-hundred page case record. Two lawyers. One prosecutor. A justice commission. Fifteen years of therapy. Half my life! My entire family split in two. A whole town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published. Finally. Finally. . . Now I can say out loud all the names I once could not.

Argentine writer Belén López Peiró eventually wrote these words last year, following nearly a decade of denouncing her abuser.

Belén’s first novel, Por qué volvías cada verano (Why Did You Come Back Every Summer), published five years prior to the sentencing, is an account of the abuse Belén suffered as a child and the breakdown of her family after she spoke out. It covers a number of years between the apartments and lawyers’ offices of Buenos Aires and the small town in this province where Belén spent summers with her cousins, her aunt, and her abuser—her aunt’s husband. Using mixed media, the book gossips and growls in a cacophony of voices, legal and colloquial, who question, opine, pity, doubt, support, and blame her. 

This April, Charco Press published the English translation of Belén’s novel by Maureen Shaughnessy. I caught up with the translator, who’s based in Southern Argentina, over Zoom to discuss the book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Wilson (RW): What were your first impressions of the book and how did you feel when Charco Press asked you to translate it?

Maureen Shaughnessy (MS): In Argentina it had its moment of hype, which is how I came across it in the first place, even though it was published with a small press. It came out here during a time when the #NiUnaMenos movement was really taking off, in that context of purple and green marches with women filling the streets.

When I started reading it, it was too intense for me. Right away, in the second or third entry, she tells this really intense story, the most abusive moment in the book, the most raw. Plus there’s all these dense legal documents—there are these two extremes together.

I had read it and found it too intense to think about pitching it to editors. It was too much for me to even consider, so it was a hard place to go to, to work for so long on the book.

RW: Any translation is a huge responsibility. But given this novel is so personal, and a true account, what did you feel was your relationship to the text?

MS: During the last few drafts, I got to a point where it was already typeset and we were supposed to go to print and I read it again. I had to say, ‘No, wait, not yet. Sorry, we have to keep editing it’, because I did feel responsible for trying to translate all those voices that were swimming around in her head, all those demons she brought out onto the page. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: From “Cardboard Lovers” by Víctor Hugo Ortega

Falling out of love / is meeting each other six years later / in a lift / and we’re just strangers.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by the Chilean writer Víctor Hugo Ortega C. Rendered here in plain but powerful English by Georgina Fooks, the poems are striking in their restraint; the first is blunt, almost disinterested, and the second is so sparing in its references to emotion that what little appears—a look of surprise recalled on a lover’s face, a mocking word spoken long ago—is almost unbearable. The collection from which these poems are taken is in fact named for a line in the second poem: the Amantes de cartón, or Cardboard Lovers, of the final stanza—an image suggesting not only the futility of the lovers to understand each other, but of literature to capture the narrator’s loss.

The eye of Santiago

The eye of Santiago
gazes with polluted indifference
at the romance of lovers polluted
by high rates
of heartbreak.

Two thousand one hundred and ninety

I’ll see you and you won’t see me
I’ll speak to you and you won’t hear me
we’ll breathe in the same enclosed space
and maybe you won’t realise,
look where we happened to meet
you’re going to the 49th floor
me to the 45th,
50 secondsis this how long this journey will last?
It’ll depend on if someone gets in,
although I don’t think so,
we always used to get lucky.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2024

New titles from Italy and Colombia!

In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia. 

Late Montale – New York Review Books

Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor

“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,

But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.

If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.

Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:

That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.

READ MORE…

Room of Mirrors: On Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna

It is a testament to this collection’s dizzying, wandering nature that the reader is left to consider: what if this story is true?

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman, Transit Books, 2024

Ángel Bonomini is one of those extraordinary literary figures who—despite having been lauded for his singular, masterful inventions—has somehow fallen into oblivion. In addition to being a cultural critic and prolific translator, the poems and stories published throughout Argentina in his lifetime represented a vital contribution to the nation’s phenomenon of fantastic narrative. While he remained largely unknown to international readers in his lifetime, such work earned him multiple distinguished accomplishments in his home country—including two Premio Konex awards and personal accolades from Jorge Luis Borges. In 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Bonomini passed away, and sadly, his writing seemed to disappear with him.

Now, in The Novices of Lerna, Jordan Landsman has captured the author’s wistful and pensive voice in a stirring collection of sixteen previously untranslated stories, spreading the magic to a new generation of readers. With candles melted “as if light had been slit from their veins,” theories “woven like black thread in the dead of night,” and people “like books with transparent pages where the lines don’t match up,” Bonomini glides vividly and lyrically into worlds where time warps, people live and die and live again, doppelgängers are plentiful, sentences disappear into amorphous paragraphs, and Buenos Aires isn’t quite the same urban sprawl that one might see in Argentina. While the pieces in this collection have no crossover in plot or character, some subterranean power connects them, with favored symbols and images appearing and reappearing—figs, trees, fires, death, and the landscape of the city.  READ MORE…

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…