A Trace of Justice: On At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Azher Jirjees

June 17, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Bridget Peak

Azher Jirjees does not alleviate suffering nor balance injustice to write a palatable tale of redemption or closure.

At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Azher Jirjees, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright, Banipal Books, 2024.

In 2005, Journalist Azher Jirjees published Terrorism. . . Earthly Hell, an irreverent study of terrorist militias in Iraq, against the backdrop of an expectant country. That same year, elections were held, and a constitution drafted. Subsequently, Jirjees was the target of an assassination attempt and escaped Iraq, first to Syria, then to Morocco, before settling in Norway. What might have been remains unrealized, and violence, unrelenting, pervades Iraq for years. This mix of fear and promise, all too real, sets the tone of At Rest in the Cherry Orchard, the fictional autobiography of Saeed Jensen.

The original النوم في حقل الكرز was the sardonic writer’s debut novel, and had earned Jirjees a place on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlist in 2020. Now, Jirjees’ rendering of an Oslo postman haunted by apparitions of his dead father, abused until nearly unrecognizable, has been sensitively translated from the Arabic by journalist and translator Jonathan Wright.

In essence, this novel is a retelling, a measured unburdening of the sequence of events that lead the protagonist Saeed Jensen to return to Iraq after his exile to Norway. Our narrator is plagued by nightmares, sleeping and waking, of his faceless father, fourteen years after his forced departure from Iraq. His daily life is repetitive, monotonous to the utmost degree, the rhythm of his comings and goings etched into the snow that reconstitutes itself each night. He works as a postman, following the same route, delivering to the same houses, tracing the same motions each day in bitter cold. He lives alone, a solitary life punctuated by appearances of his father’s ghost. An email requesting his immediate presence in Iraq sparks our narrator’s return, as he remembers his life before and since leaving. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 14, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Wambua Muindi

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…

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.

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Language Through the Pores of My Skin: Nedra Rodrigo on Tinai as Tamil Genre, Tinai as Tamil Geography

June 12, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I think as soon as your translation is published, you pick it up as a different person.

Born in Colombo, the community organiser, translator, art curator, and spoken word artist Nedra Rodrigo immigrated to Canada during the twenty-six year Sri Lankan Civil War. Befittingly, she has since worked to delineate refugee writings and the literature of conflict: “When a cultural identity is deeply tied to a landscape through song, poetry, story, or even film, being forced to leave that place, or witness its destruction, erodes the psyche.” She has been translating contemporary literary works from the Tamil, a language spoken widely in her homeland of Eelam or Ilankai (now a part of what is colonially known as Sri Lanka) as well as in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa.

In a panel discussion in late October 2023 titled ‘Unsettling Borders: Translation’s Intimate Labours’, Nedra spoke from her experience as the translator of Tamil Eelam revolutionary leader Thamizhini’s memoir Oru kuurvaaLin Nizhalil (published as In the Shadow of a Sword for SAGE Yoda India in 2021): “Although weaponised, literary translation is driven by hope … that we can know one another and that our experiences can be permeable to each other through language.”   

In this interview, I conversed with Nedra on tinai as the affinity of literature and land; her translations of Tamil writers; refugee-settler writings, and the literature of war and exile, among other things.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You have rendered the works of Tamil-language writers R. Cheran, V.I.S. Jayapalan, Puthuvai Ratnathurai, and Rashmy into English. I wonder about your translation process, given the variety not just of writers but also of genres, aesthetics, and modes you translate from.

Nedra Rodrigo (NR): The first few poems I translated, I did so out of necessity. I had approached a wonderful Tamil translator, Prof. Chelva Kanaganayagam, for some poems, and he pushed me to translate them myself. I entered into it with a lot of hesitancy because I was never convinced that I could bring the kind of emotion I experienced while reading the Tamil poems across into English. Once I became more confident in my capacity to reclaim the language, I could go beyond the words to think more about the contexts and genres of the poetry, and try to bring different tones and textures to the translation. The work I’ve translated is generally focused around the war in Sri Lanka, so I also see the ways in which these texts act as archives, containing forms of knowledge that the majoritarian state continues to try to erase. So, my process is often a balancing act between maintaining the aesthetics and the historical content of the source text. The more I read, the more I realise how much these texts are also often in conversation with each other, and with the literatures of other oppressed cultures.

Very few translators have the luxury of doing nothing but translate, and I often have to juggle my translation work with my paying work and community work. I try to give my headspace over to one text at a time, so I ‘live’ with one author or poet for a while. It’s a challenge of translation, that you hold meaning in your head in two languages as you weigh it back and forth. Precision means a lot to me, so I often sit with my research as well as my own memories to try to do justice to this work. I think I’ve done best when I have been able to work consistently, every day—even if it’s just a page.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: From “After Celeste” by Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve

June 11, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Kate Lofthouse

“It’s no big deal, it happens to one in five pregnancies.”

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant excerpt from the latest novel by Québécois author Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, translated into English by Kate Lofthouse. In plangent, methodically-detailed vignettes, Nepveu-Villeneuve’s narrator describes her return to Moreau, the village of her childhood. In the wake of a recent tragedy, her perception of the world around her comes unmoored; she feels as if she has never left Moreau, as if her years away were only a nightmare, yet Moreau also seems unreal, “a figment of my imagination.” Struggling to engage with the world as a thing separate from herself, the narrator spirals into her past, moving from distant memories of childhood vacations abroad towards the cause of her present alienation.

     I’ll just . . . go home to my sad life and be miserable forever.
—Maddy Thorson, Celeste

Summer is darker than winter on my parents’ street, once green leaves fill the branches of Moreau’s trees and their ancient foliage has cast its shadow over the houses. My parents escape in search of sunshine every year, to Spain, Morocco, Belize, anywhere the July heat is more oppressive than it is on their little shaded street in a small village lost up in the north, a little town I never name when people ask me where I come from, because it doesn’t mean anything to anyone, so I always go back to the closest big city saying around there, and people nod and shrug, because even that city is a minor one, insignificant, one never mentioned in weather reports and which people struggle to picture.

They took me with them when I was little. The three of us went, a close-knit and indestructible family unit with the same sturdy blonde heads and indistinguishable laughter, we fled the shade cast by the old trees over the bungalows and the lawns, and we walked along the shores of Caribbean islands or through the streets of Cairo or Terceira. I would have preferred the cool air of our little street, riding my bike around the block for hours, napping in the hammock in the backyard, drawing on the pavement with Laure, my neighbour from across the way, my best friend. But my parents had other ideas, we left at the end of the school year and came back at the beginning of August, in time to buy supplies and new clothes.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2024

June 10, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Mary Hillis

New publications from France and Japan!

Exciting destinations are in your future with these selections from some of the most delightful new publications in world literature. Futaro Yamada takes us back to nineteenth century Japan with a scintillating mystery of imperial intrigue and murderous plots; and Eric Hazan takes us along the streets and districts of a Paris as seen by one of its most vital figures: Honoré de Balzac. Read on to find out more, and bonne journée!

yamada

The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada, translated from the Japanese by Bryan Karetnyk, Pushkin Vertigo, 2024

Review by Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant

A driverless rickshaw, a bizarre sighting through binoculars, a corpse holding its own head—these are a just few of the perplexing scenarios that Chief Inspectors Toshiyoshi Kawaji and Keishirō Kazuki investigate in The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada (pen name of Seiya Yamada).

The story begins in Japan after the Boshin War, in which the several domains fought against the Tokugawa Shogunate to restore imperial rule. During the Meiji period, strides to modernize the country continued, resulting in tumultuous changes to the economy, politics, and society. As officers of the Imperial Prosecuting Office, Kawaji and Kazuki are concerned with these developments, especially the role of justice within the new government. Both men are dedicated to their convictions, and early in the novel, Kazuki contends:

Corruption is, after all, the muddying of the distinction between the public and the private, between right and wrong. That’s why the public lost faith in the shogunate. Truly, it’s a good thing that it fell. And yet, the newly formed government is already showing signs of corruption. You ought to know this better than anyone. Otherwise, what was the point of our revolution? Or will there be another, and then another? Would it not be absurd to go on repeating it for all eternity? The government doesn’t exist merely to protect the people. Its aim must be the embodiment of justice.

One way Yamada renders this transformation and the accompanying influx of imported ideas and innovations is through the characters. Kawaji is based off of a real-life figure, the eponymous man who traveled as part of the Iwakura Mission to study systems in Western countries, and who is recognized as the founder of the modern police force in Japan. Kazuki, meanwhile, is a fictional character who returns to Japan from France to introduce the guillotine, and as the book’s title suggests, its chilling presence looms over the novel. There is a great deal of curiosity surrounding the new execution device, and when it is demonstrated at the prison, he addresses the doomed inmate:

“You are to be put to death, but in this enlightened age you shall be beheaded in the French fashion,” Kazuki boomed, as he clutched the hanging rope. “At least you shall have the honour of being the first in Japan to be subject to an experiment of this kind.”

In addition to Kawaji and Kazuki, another recurring character is Esmeralda Sanson, a French woman with an interesting family background. She is in the country working on translation projects; nevertheless, local residents are surprised to hear her speaking Japanese or singing ancient kagura songs. Often dressed as a shrine maiden, her features are captivating and give her an aura of mystique.

To Kawaji, her wide blue eyes seemed like a pair of mysterious jewels. Though he had seen them before, he could not help feeling mystified that such a beautiful creature could exist upon this earth.

After the introductory chapters, Kawaji and Kazuki investigate a confounding series of murders which juxtapose the old and the new: “A Strange Incident at the Tsukiji Hotel”; “From America with Love”; “The Hanged Man at the Eitai Bridge”; “Eyes and Legs”; and “The Corpse that Cradled its own Head.” Each begins with an excerpt from their reports filed with the Imperial Prosecuting Office, and finishes with a dramatic appearance by Esmeralda. These five baffling cases drive the narrative forward until they are ultimately connected and resolved in the final chapter. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 7, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia and Japan!

This week, Asymptote‘s team brings us up to date on the most recent releases and awards around the literary world! From a meditative poetry chapbook on the broad concept of motherhood from North Macedonia, to a Japanese thriller shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger Awards, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from North Macedonia

Spring of 2024 marked an exciting new beginning in the Macedonian literary scene: in mid-April, Majkata na Svetot (Mother of the Universe), the debut poetry chapbook of Marija Svetozarevikj, was promoted in the bookshop cafe Bukva in Skopje. Concerned with themes both timely and timeless, the chapbook is centered around a “maternal approach to spirituality and life,” as Svetozarevikj explains, and celebrates the mother figure in a broader sense, which includes planet Earth. 

Svetozarevikj (b. 1998) is a graduate of the Fine Arts faculty at the University of Skopje. Her approach to writing is accordingly visual; Aleksandar Rusjakov, a fellow Macedonian poet, who admitted to having read Majkata na Svetot multiple times, describes its author as someone who “paints with words and sings in images”. This is one of the several dichotomies that Rusjakov believes are resolved within the chapbook: its pensive and loving lyricism reconciles “kindness and cruelty,” finds “peace amidst rebellion and rebellion within peace,” and remains “simple in its complexity”. Poems such as “Waterfalls (A Love Letter to Humanity)” affirm his exegesis. In a lyrical voice that is equally oracular and conciliatory, Svetozarevikj dives into the human tendency to inflict artificial boundaries upon existence as the ultimate cause for suffering. Trapped in a “dire cycle” of “denying facets of our selves”, and struggling to mold our lives into a linear “track” moving single-mindedly towards self-satisfaction, humans lose touch with being, where “there are no mistakes, but everything is part of a unity.” 

READ MORE…

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

June 6, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Pazen

. . . 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. 

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

June 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Michael Collins

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.

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Translation Tuesday: from “The Atlantic Express” by Georgi Tenev

June 4, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Traci Speed

Different people are travelling on the express. A lot of Italians have sold their collections of African bones to be able to board this train.

This Translation Tuesday, a grim vision of the future comes to us from Bulgarian author Georgi Tenev and his translator, Traci Speed. Rado is on a train through a dystopian but dimly recognisable Europe, trying to get off the continent before apocalypse sweeps in from the east. As the carriages inch around a radioactive Mediterranean, he muses about how things came to be so wrong. The signs of moribund civilisation that spring from Tenev’s imagination are graphic and pointed. Passengers trade in the bones of migrants who died trying to enter Europe in the ‘better days’. Mutant rabbits, originally bred for KFC, serve as ‘edible companions’ for the journey ahead. There are whispers that Hitler has come back from the dead. When things go catastrophically wrong, Tenev shows, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

This war’s been going a long time, and it’s being fought for what’s most important inside of you. The struggle’s between those of us who want to save you and that animal force that wants to swallow you up. We found the subgenetic formula for intelligence, for human reason. We determined the principle behind the absorption of ephermine, that subtle substance with a negative mass, that diaphanous matter. Ephermine cannot exist independently, and so it gravitates in an orbit around the photon and comprises part of its spectrum. This form is vulnerable and unstable, but without it—consciousness, thought, and reason wouldn’t exist. Something else that wouldn’t exist is that thing which, for a change, we call the soul—that which is not quite intrinsic to the body. For some time now, we’ve been trying to migrate from this body, from the biochemical base to another independent host of identity. We made attempts and we made mistakes; you, however, turned out to be a paradox, an exception to the rule. You’re too attached to the biological, to what you consider life. We have to put people like you under quarantine until we’ve researched the vector of your development better. Until we write the story of your—yours personally, in this case—your rise and fall. You call it birth and death. Fine, call it that. In order to reach the heart of the ephermine, however, the casing has to be destroyed. A person has to be crushed and broken down before receiving a new unrestricted identity. But you stubbornly persist, you want to maintain the status quo. Fine, listen to your story. Then you can evaluate whether or not you have anything to be sorry for.

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The Double-Edged Possibility of Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Hanna Johansson

June 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

I think this kind of [queer] isolation can be generative for an author—it provides you with this ability to see while not being seen.

In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson unleashes a rapturous, sinuous tale of desire and its reckless vehicle. After falling for an older artist, a misguided journalist follows her and her teenage daughter onto a trip to the Greek islands in an almost-instinctive sense of codependence, and soon the gorgeous shores are turned into a stage of ruins, in which a self-deluding passion lays bear the tensions between the wanting and the wanted. Shifting between the incantatory posturing of someone captivated by the forbidden and the anxious distortions of unreciprocated intimacy, Johansson deftly grows an explosive triangulation in which closeness begets isolation, and isolation begets tragedy. In the following interview, Sofija Popovska speaks to Johansson about Antiquity’s queerness, ancient Greece as a specter, and how the novel considers power.

Sofija Popovska (SP): Firstly, congratulations on your gorgeous debut novel! Before we dive into the text itself, could you tell me a little about how Antiquity came into existence?

Hanna Johansson (HJ): I started writing it seriously in 2018, and I had at that point been trying for a while to write a story about a trio of some sort. I find that kind of social structure to be very interesting and enticing—not the kind of love triangle where two people desire the same person, but a triangle where two people might belong to each other in this obvious, indisputable way, like a couple, or, as in Antiquity, a mother and her daughter, with a third person sort of looking in, desiring their bond more than anything else. I had also had a little bit of a personal crisis in 2016 and went to Ermoupoli for three months and realized pretty quickly that I would like to write something set in that city. It’s so beautiful and glamorous and strange at the same time. So, all of that had been brewing for a couple of years, and then, in the fall of 2018, I moved from Stockholm to a smaller city with my partner, who’s also a writer, while she was getting her MFA. I’m not sure I could have written it without those circumstances—the fact that she was incredibly supportive, and that we were living in a way that left me plenty of time to write. 

SP: Described in its promotional materials as a “queer Lolita story” and as reminiscent of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, Antiquity is, from the outset, embedded in a specific literary tradition. Was this cultural situatedness a planned feature? Were you ‘in conversation’ with any of these works—or other texts—during the writing process, and, if so, what effect did you hope to achieve by recasting (and subverting?) their themes and elements in Antiquity?

HJ: Yes, the cultural situatedness was a planned feature, I would say. I was very preoccupied, while I was writing Antiquity, with these sorts of queer or gay tropes—the age gap love story, for instance, which is one, although maybe not very nuanced, way of describing the novels mentioned—but probably even more the story of the guest who overstays their welcome, like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I read The Line of Beauty in my late teens and it made a huge impression on me. Saltburn is another example of that trope, to mention something even more current. These are all stories of people who are obsessed with beauty, and who have a desire for luxury, but they also have this seemingly unquenchable thirst for belonging—and an equally intense conviction that they can’t belong anywhere unless they are deceptive and not themselves—and this very much informs the narrator of Antiquity.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 31, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and René Esaú Sánchez

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…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale

May 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone.

In the fifty short stories that make up Butterfly of Dinard, the great lyric poet Eugenio Montale turns to prose to inscribe the world that moves the psyche to its most extraordinary heights. As one of the most inviting additions to a remarkable oeuvre, the collection moves from mystery to comedy, from reminiscence to fantasy, taking the reader on excursions and immersions, introducing an Italy grasped in historical and personal material alike. The Montale admirer will find motifs that correspond with his most famed poems, and anyone new to the writer will find an assured, perceptive voice, dedicated to documenting the most curious and complex intersections of our social reality. Reissued now by New York Review Books in an updated translation from Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, and with an illuminating introduction by Jonathan Galassi, we are delighted to introduce Butterfly of Dinard as our Book Club selection for the month.

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

Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, New York Review Books, 2024

After the walkman came into common use, a reporter in the Nouvel Observateur did a self-directed study on its effects, going around and asking its users if they considered themselves psychotic or schizophrenic. Clearly, the world of music had grown a new frontier. There would be communal listening, through the radio or some other form of public broadcasting, and solo listening; one could have a personal sonic timeline, running separately—though parallel—with the rest of the world’s sounds. Since then, we’ve only found new and improved ways to insulate ourselves from the social environment, so when a friend and I took a rental car around Los Angeles a month ago, I hadn’t heard the radio in probably a decade. When we turned it on, running through station after station, I catalogued the brief soundbites of the local airwaves—jockey banter, garbled trap, Christian rock, upbeat grupera. That frenetic soundscape accordioned over the brushed hills and highway traffic, and we synced to it, suddenly adopted into the city’s musical timestream as insiders. After a little while, we stopped at a light, and I looked to the car beside me. I couldn’t hear what the driver was listening to, but the taps of his fingers hit the exact same beats as those from our radio.

Music, and its innate potential for disrupting separation, was on my mind while reading Eugenio Monatle’s Butterfly of Dinard, a collection of prose pieces first published in the daily Corriere della Sera. The newspaper, similar to the radio, is a halfway-abandoned arena of public consciousness—a gathering place where people can experience the same thing at relatively the same time, and be joined, if not in opinion, then in engagement. But the days in which radically dissonant lives and perspectives could be unified via song or text are largely gone; though the cultural artifacts themselves are more proliferate than ever, we meet them on terms that are ever more individualised, ever more catered to the psychic patterns that we build, alone. Passing through Montale’s slice-of-life writings, some tell stories of the past, some follow the mania of dreams, but running through all of them is a sense that they are being told in the textual version of the town square—meant for all to hear, no matter if you are sat in the audience or just passing through. These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Matthew Landrum on Faroese Writer Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir

May 30, 2024  |  in Podcast  |  by Vincent Hostak

If you loved the spotlight on Faroese Literature in our latest issue, this episode is for you!

In today’s thrilling conversation with author and translator Matthew Landrum, Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak explores the compelling poetry of Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir and the renaissance of Faroese literature as spotlighted in Asymptote’s Spring issue. Nine Faroese authors from multiple generations are represented in our Special Feature organized in partnership with FarLit. The showcase, which readers can access here, affords a rare glimpse into literature from the Faroes. In addition to contextualizing Faroese literature and sharing how he came to translate Faroese literature, Matthew Landrum also reads in English a dramatic excerpt of Anna Malan Jógvansdóttir’s eerie and existential poem. Listen to the podcast now.

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