The Delimitation of Self: Kevin Claiborne on Mixed-Media Art, Blackness, and Material

September 5, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

I’m interested in how the layering of text and image can create or disrupt tension, structure, rhythm, perception, and interpretation.

In Kevin Claiborne’s multimedia work, he sources from personal archives, landscape, and anthropological studies to coalesce a vision of Black American history into its contemporary variations, spanning the realms of collective and private histories. “Starting with the gaps in my own family history, and the space between ‘what I know vs. what I should know,’ the missing information between where my ancestors come from and where I am today, I am digging and mining the sediment of histories, passed down, erased, and avoided,” he writes. In “BLACK ENOUGH,” his 2020 exhibition at Thierry Goldberg, he poses a series of questions against the landscapes of Joshua Tree. Some of his questions, such as “Is Black enough?” and “When is Black enough?,” are clipped in the frame, leaving the sentences unfinished, like the Black lives that are prematurely cut short. Extending his reflections on Black identity and memory, Claiborne’s 2023 exhibition, “Family Business,” took a slightly different turn. Drawing from a box of family photographs, he applied green and blue pigments to the images, condensed moments in which his mother, beaming with a radiant smile, once gazes affectionately at his father. The result is a heightened revision of his family archive, a rediscovery of the ties that bind him to his kinsfolk: their shared passions, dreams, and tears. In this following interview, he speaks on materiality, capturing Black lives in Black contexts, and embedded dialogues within his visuality.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): From the beginning of your career, you’ve combined written texts with visual materials. How did this idea come to you initially?

Kevin Claiborne (KC): For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in the power of words—their potential, their malleability, their limitations, and their ability to shape meaning. I’ve always been impressed with people who have mastered their expression of the written word, and who understand how to literally and metaphorically paint with text. My earliest inspirations were graffiti artists, poets, and rappers, all of whom understood the nuances of language, how the weight of words changes with scale, and how to use text as a material.

When I first started using photography and archival images in a conceptual manner, incorporating text seemed like a logical next step. Words change meaning depending on present context, and context can change depending on the words that are present.

JZ: I know that you started out as a photographer. How do you see your multimedia/cross-media approach? Does it impose certain limitations on your objective (if there is one) as an artist, or is it the ultimate means for you to channel your message?

KC: Sometimes my mixed-media or multimedia approach offers the ability to enhance and increase the complexity of my work, and other times, it shifts the focus from the material composition of the work to the ideas embedded within. Every material has a story, a purpose, a history, and a language or logic to its usage. Sometimes, the material becomes the focus, and sometimes certain material combinations allow the viewer to have more entry points into appreciating, understanding, or engaging with the work. It depends on the context. READ MORE…

The Teacher’s Task: Translation in a High School English Classroom

September 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Kena Chavva

They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?

Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own? 

It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.

For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:

In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.

Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Diary” by Edogawa Ranpo

September 3, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Erin Vastola

A sudden thought struck me—could my brother have been in love with Ms. Yukie?

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an intricate puzzle by master mystery-writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from the Japanese by Erin Vastola. An admirer of Edgar Allan Poe (to whom his pen name was an homage), Edogawa is celebrated both in Japan and abroad for incorporating Japanese cultural elements into suspenseful narratives driven by rigorous logic, and “The Diary” is no exception. Following the death of his younger brother, the unnamed narrator of this peculiar short story mourns the fact that his sibling died too young to experience romantic love. But as he inspects his brother’s diary and letters, he begins to doubt his assumptions. What follows is an elaborate psychodrama of code-cracking, thwarted courtship, and the correspondence culture of early twentieth-century Japan. Read on!

It was the evening of my younger brother’s memorial service, exactly seven days after his passing. I entered his study and picked up the writings he had left behind. Alone with my thoughts, I sank into deep contemplation.

Though it was not particularly late, the household—still damp with tears—had fallen into complete silence. From afar came the plaintive echoes of street vendors’ cries, somehow imbuing the scene with the flavor of a modern play. Touched by the gravity of long-forgotten childhood emotions, I unconsciously opened the diary on my brother’s desk.

Gazing at the diary, I mournfully thought of my twenty-year-old brother, who, I feared, had left this world without ever knowing love or romance.

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How the World Appears in States of Language: On A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol

September 2, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly. . .

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol, translated from the Portuguese by Audrey Young, Deep Vellum, 2024

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight, the diaries of Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol, is divided into three sections: “Finita”, “A Falcon in My Wrist”, and “Inquiry into the Four Confidences”. Comprised of three books from the seventies that Llansol left behind when she passed away in 2008, these volumes were the only ones to be published in Portuguese during the writer’s life, and are also the first of her non-fiction writings to appear in English, thanks to the work of translator Audrey Young. In his introduction, the critic João Barrento describes these private texts as “osmotic diaries: their genesis, their development, and their final form are inseparable from Llansol’s other books, which always accompany them and are interwoven with them”. This is true not only in the conceptual but also the literal sense; the first diary begins the day she finishes The Book of Communities—the first volume in her acclaimed trilogy Geography of Rebels—and ends the day she finishes The Remaining Life, the second volume, in 1977. The second diary picks up when she is finishing In the House of July and August, the final volume, and beginning to write her second trilogy, while also providing glimpses at the author brainstorming her duology, Lisbonleipzig.

Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly, coalescing history, philosophy, and physical experience; these qualities are boldly apparent in her fiction, but appear with an experimental and kinetic mode in these diaries. A common thread across the volumes is silence: everything that remains in the journal is a “draft”, consisting of left-out pieces and vacant spaces for contemplation, and this attention and appreciation reserved for emptiness becomes integral to the diaries’ form. Silence manifests in the common use of gaps in the text, indicated in certain places by a horizontal line (________), and more compellingly in other places as unannounced fragments of poetry. And in between these fragments is life. She moves all around Belgium, from Louvain to Jodoigne and finally to Herbais, where she and her husband Augusto Joaquim run an experimental school as part of a cooperative—which also makes and sells furniture and food. There, Llansol cultivates her own garden, which provides a bouquet of scenes and observations for her diaries, and immerses herself in music. Still, she never pauses in her pursuit of literature, of writing and reading about theology, philosophy, the lives of poets and mystics. It is only in the final diary that she moves back to Portugal’s Sintra, sometime in 1983, remaining there until her death. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 30, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia to the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from North Macedonia to New York with updates on literary festivals and fairs. From Jean-Pierre Siméon’s belief in the sustaining nature of poetry, to a celebration of the many languages spoken besides Spanish in Hispanic communities, read on to learn more!

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

The conclusion of the 2024 Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE) brought conversations about the meaning of poetry nowadays to the foreground of the Macedonian literary scene. The festival’s main award, the Golden Wreath—whose recipients over the years include W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes—was awarded to French poet, writer, critic, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Siméon this year. In an illuminating conversation with the magazine Nezavisen (Independent), Siméon retraced the well-known, yet often forgotten, connection between poetry, longing, and change.

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Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

August 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

The spirit of the zoo has entered her bedroom: sex without pleasure, purely for the sake of regeneration, a blind but demanding impulse.

In the latest from lauded Catalan author Eva Baltasar, an animal desire is on the rise. Tired of the city, her studies, and the vacuity of contemporary life, the young protagonist of Mammoth seeks out a supposedly simpler provincial existence, and is willing to do anything to get there. Through both physical and psychological extremes, Baltasar’s heightened portrait is both shocking and absorbing, reflecting the chaos of an ego that vibrates with desire and spirals against expectation. The prose shivers with sensuality as this journey inward and outward carves its remarkable procession—the rampage of an unencumbered self, raging against the presumptions of civilised life.

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. 

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, 2024

Following on the heels of the 2023 Booker-shortlisted Boulder, Eva Baltasar’s latest novel, Mammoth, seizes the reader in a vice grip from the opening page and doesn’t relent even after its final words; the ending, in fact, delivers the sharpest blow of all. The narrative is a raw and visceral exploration of a young woman who shatters the routine of her daily life, learning to dwell among the shards of a new form of existence. Using a rich vocabulary of metaphors and similes, Baltasar creates a fictional space that is confrontational, explosive, and evocative, demonstrating her masterful ability to delve into the psyches of queer women who find themselves on the fringes, and Julia Sanches’s translation from the Catalan deftly captures the novel’s unique tone and voice.

Through its title, Baltasar thematically links Mammoth to her other two novels translated into English, Permafrost and Boulder: all three suggest weight, immovability. The unnamed protagonist in Mammoth is twenty-four years old and dissatisfied with her life, especially her research job at a university, which involves interviewing residents in nursing homes. “I hated my tool,” she reflects, “the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people.” This threat of dehumanization threads its way through the prose, hovering beneath the surface of every encounter. It’s telling that on the first page, the narrator reveals that her bedroom window faces a zoo, establishing a proximity to an animalistic wildness that has been broken and contained, on display for public consumption and enjoyment—a metaphor for her perception of her own existence. Returning to the zoo later, she thinks, “The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there—just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers.” READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Jamal Saeed

August 29, 2024  |  in Podcast  |  by Vincent Hostak

Don’t missing this latest episode featuring a conversation with one of our contributors to the current issue!

Join us today for a heartfelt conversation with exiled Syrian author Jamal Saeed, author of the 2022 autobiography My Road from Damascus (ECW Press, Toronto). Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak recently sat down with Saeed, now based in Canada, to discuss his devastating short story, a highlight of our recent Summer 2024 edition. Written amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza and translated into English by longtime collaborator Catherine Cobham, My Mother Fatima’s Cough plumbs the depth of grief and loss that follow generations of a family displaced multiple times over. The discussion is accompanied by a reading of an excerpt in English. Listen to the podcast episode now.

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Risgröt or juk? On Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and Translating Between Small Languages

August 28, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Linnea Gradin

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.

Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.

Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.

With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Clock” by Leyzer Wolf

August 27, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Roberta Newman

Room. Night. Darkness. / Fiery, passion-armed throes.

This Translation Tuesday, a poem in the Yiddish by Leyzer Wolf (recovered and translated by Roberta Newman) presents the febrile hours before a tryst. Time ticks down with an exquisite slowness, in volatile, pyrotechnic couplets that positively shudder with anticipation.

Almost all of Wolf’s work has been lost. Though he was a prolific writer, most of his poems remained unpublished during his lifetime, reportedly stored in a stuffed-to-bursting cupboard in his apartment in Vilna. It is likely that most of the manuscripts were left behind when he fled to the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II; others were in the suitcases that went missing after his death in Uzbekistan in 1943.

The Clock

Evening-sun. Blaze.
Bushes by the bridge.

And the clock on the wall says:
Tick, tick, tick.

Rendezvous, night.
Fever on her cheek.

And the clock in her room says:
Tick, tick, tock.

Lips, park, trees, man.
Farewell by the bridge.

And the clock of her heart says:
Bliss, bliss, tick.

Room. Night. Darkness.
Fiery, passion-armed throes.

And the clock on the wall
Goes, goes, goes.

Evening-sun. Blaze.
Bushes by the bridge.

And a different hand gets kisses:
Bliss, bliss, tick.

Room. Night. Darkness.
And a bullet to the head.

And the clock in her room says:
Tick, tick, stop…

Translated from the Yiddish

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To Exist At All: On Nasser Abu Srour’s Prison Memoir

August 26, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Hanson

. . . Abu Srour exercises a poet’s iteration of prose, gliding towards the mystic wonders of his undivided, individual experience.

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, Other Press, 2024

In his opening note to the readers of his prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, Palestinian poet Nasser Abu Srour wishes a “rugged time” to those who are heading into his scintillating prose, a terrain which is also interspersed with charged moments of verse. Indicating that its author is a romantic at heart, this philosophical and nihilist work of mental abstraction was inspired by the “womb of a concrete wall” that has held Abu Srour since 1993, when he was given a life sentence at the age of twenty-three for being an alleged accomplice in the murder of a Shin Bet intelligence officer.

As literature, The Tale of a Wall is a visceral, Dionysian feast of words, lain with a delicate hand. Fired by righteous indignation and howling with a disembodied eccentricity, Palestinian self-determination is here distilled into a single voice, tortured within the echo chambers of a confession table and the paper cuts of intellectualism, finishing with a full course of epistolary melodrama. The memoir itself is cleaved in two, with the first half dedicated to letting go, to saying farewell to the world after his incarceration in Hebron Prison in the last year of the First Intifada. The latter portion is devoted to his relationship with a woman named Nanna, a diaspora Palestinian who returns to her ancestral homeland to capture his heart with a power rivalling that of Israel’s occupying force.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and MARGENTO

News from Spain and Nicaragua!

This week, our editors bring us news from their respective literary horizons and the many exciting publications being released to the delight of readers. In Spain, Romanian literature hits the spotlight as a the first text of a new series is released, covering the nineteenth century through to World War II. In Nicaragua, the lauded poet and author Gioconda Belli has announced her latest work. Read on to find out more! 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain

Within international contexts, the most important literary event of the past few months is the release of Grandes escritores rumanos (Great Romanian Writers), a collection edited by Alba Diz Villanueva and past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, and published by Huerga & Fierro (Madrid, Spain). The anthology is the first instalment of a series projected to cover Romanian literature chronologically, and samples the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, through to World War II. Numbering over three hundred pages, it starts off with both the original and the Spanish translation of the “great [three] Romanian classics”: the eruditely eclectic, formally exhaustive Renaissance man and “national poet,” Eminescu; the proverbially language-bending, comedic, and politically sarcastic playwright and short-story writer Caragiale (whom Eugène Ionesco referred to as his master, making him the true forerunner of the theatre of the absurd); and the linguistically-Gargantuan, (faux-)folkloric raconteur, Creangă. Among the featured twentieth century writers are the paradoxically modernist-traditionalist poet Tudor Arghezi, modernist-expressionist poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga, iconic Symbolist George Bacovia, landmark novelists Mihail Sadoveanu and Liviu Rebreanu, alongside significant women poets and fiction writers including Magda Isanos, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Henriette Yvonne Stahl, and Cella Serghi.

An impressive number of translators contributed to this literary tour de force—no less than sixteen—and the editors have structured the collection in a quite complex and polyvalent way. The subtitle reads Antología didáctica (course reference book), and indeed, in a Norton-anthology style, every section comes with a short introduction presenting each writer’s main stylistic features and contextualizing their contribution to the evolution of Romanian letters. Even more distinctively, at the back are quizzes addressing the writers’ style and language, as well as a rich “Further Reading” section providing more detailed bios, aesthetic commentary, and relevant historical background—plus comprehensive annotated bibliographies which act as a great resource for students but also scholars and literati, as they highlight the richness of relevant translations and criticism in both Romanian and Spanish (in Spain and Ibero-America). READ MORE…

Nocturnal Tonguejests: Susan Bernofsky on translating Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel

August 22, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Great writers use language in really weird ways, but if it’s a great writer, the work absorbs the linguistic strangeness. . .

Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is an absorbing, daring novel about collaboration, friendship, and trans-continental interpretations. Originating in the author’s own discourse with the titular German poet, the story tells of the engagement between two Celan readers, unfolding an exploration of literary texts as they traverse oceans and cultures—a phantasmagorical, radical exploration of words and their potential for transformation. Translated with great finesse by Susan Bernofsky, who has worked with the author on many of her German-language works, the novel takes further steps in English to multiply even more fascinating tangents along our globalized era, drawing on the miraculous nature of conversation. In this following interview, we speak with Bernofsky on her process and ideas of multiplicity in authorship, how the translator lives in and writes the worlds of their favorite texts.

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. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Given how richly textured Tawada’s novel is with literary and cultural references, not only to Celan’s poetry but also to other arenas of knowledge, could you speak a little to the kinds of research that you undertook in preparation for translating this text?

Susan Bernofsky (SB): Yoko Tawada wrote the book during the pandemic, and I also translated it during the pandemic, during the active period of shutdowns in the US. I had a lot of time to look things up, so I sat down and read a whole lot of Paul Celan, because I wanted to be able to spot the words and images that Tawada was taking from his poetry. The novel is also full of opera, and references to literary works by other writers who meant something to Celan. Some of it were things I already knew, because I’ve been translating Tawada since 1992, and I have a sense of who she likes and who’s important to her. Nelly Sachs is in there, and Ingeborg Bachmann and Franz Kafka, the usual suspects and her favorites in the world of German-language literature.

XYS: Were there any specific rabbit holes that you remember going down, or any particular segments that you had trouble with?

SB: I wound up reading a lot about acupuncture, because I wanted to be able to translate the passages that pertained to this subject. Tawada writes in this playful, slanting way, but you can still understand what’s going on. And as I’m translating, I’m trying to also write in a playful, slanting way—but I wanted somebody who understands acupuncture to not think that my descriptions were absurd. It’s a very Celan-ian thing to take scientific language and apply it to literature. Like his great poem, “Engführung,” has a lot of geological terminology, and he uses the words in a way that they sound psychological. I feel like Tawada was also playing with that possibility of taking language from one sphere and applying it to a different sphere. READ MORE…

Having Become the Sky’s Tongue: Leeladhar Jagoori on Nature Poetry in Hindi Literature

August 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I consider a poet’s job to consist of three things: writing about the society, the time, and the country.

Limned as an enmeshing of “lyrical ecopoetics with subtle political critique,” Leeladhar Jagoori’s 1977 Hindi poetry collection Bachi hui prithvi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan) has been translated into English by Matt Reeck as What of the Earth Was Saved—now out from World Poetry Books. His avant-garde poetic and political positioning is evidenced by this book, which was published in the last year of Indira Gandhi’s the Emergency. In the words of translator Matt Reeck, Bachi hui prithvi (1977), the Hindi original of What of the Earth Was Saved, is a testament to the fact that Leeladhar was ahead of his time, writing around “regional consciousness and environmentalism,” a literary forefather to today’s Hindi-language and Indian writings on nature and ecology.

In this interview, I spoke with Leeladhar, who is currently in Dehradun (with translator Matt Reeck translating my questions from English to Hindi, and Leeladhar’s answers from Hindi to English), on his trailblazing poetry collection—the first full volume of his poems to be translated into English—and modern Hindi verse, especially poetry on prakŗti (nature).

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your poetry collection What of the Earth Was Saved is now out from World Poetry Books—translated by Matt Reeck from the Hindi original Bachi hui prithvi, which was published in 1977 by New Delhi-based Rajkamal Prakashan. Could you take us back to 1977 and before that: what was your creative process like and what were the poetic underpinnings to the poems in this collection?

Leeladhar Jagoori (LJ): In school, I practiced everything. I wrote songs and ghazals. I wrote anuṣṭubh verse, a traditional poetic form in Hindi poetry, like it was conversational—like talking.

My first volume was published when I was a student at Banaras Hindu University. I had come back from the army and I went to Banaras to earn an MA. I was invited to read at a poetry event, and a publisher heard me and asked to publish my work, and I said fine. Those poems are about mountain life. I finally came around to seeing that it was a young person’s poetry. It was immature in a sense. It’s usually read as nature poetry. Then my second volume, Now Things Have Begun (Natak jari hai, 1971) was published from the standpoint of a young unemployed man looking for work. It’s spare, unsparing, tough-minded poetry. Its images are new, rough, not polished. In the 70s, poetic language sought to dig down to the very core of experience. Instead of ornamentation, it went in for bare language. Now Things Have Begun is full of these things, the things that young people then were thinking about.

Then my third volume was On This Journey (Is yatra men, 1974). Its poems are more tender, dreamy and full of love. Agyeya, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, and Dhumil all praised it. Manglesh Dabral, Trinetr Joshi, Prabhati Nautiyal, Madan Kashyap, and Avadhesh Preet, Prem Sahil, and Om Thanvi said the book ushered in a new direction in Hindi poetry. In the May 1975 issue of the magazine Dinman, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena wrote a review that featured the book on the magazine’s cover. It was my good fortune that Agyeya praised it, and that Nirmal Verma was taken by the poems as well.

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “The Gift” by Nevena Mitropolitska

August 20, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Zlatomira Terzieva

her answer had already been thought out: she wanted him and her grandmother to take her to a real ballet performance.

This Translation Tuesday, Asymptote presents a tale of parental love from Bulgaria, written by Nevena Mitropolitska and translated by Zlatomira Terzieva. Neda’s grandfather, a woodcarver, has always prided himself on his ability to carve whatever birthday gift his granddaughter asks for—but on her seventh birthday, she makes an unexpected request, one that tests the limits of what he can give. What follows is a touching story that is as much about class and art in late communist Bulgaria as it is about the love between a grandparent and grandchild, about the hope that our descendents will have more than what we were given. Read on!

Everything started with a question. On the eighteenth of October, nineteen seventy-eight, exactly three months before Neda turned seven years old, her grandfather, as he was sitting in front of the TV in his rocking chair and stroking its scuffed armrest, asked her what kind of present she wanted for her birthday. That wasn’t an ordinary question, but a ritual, which repeated itself every year on the same date. He needed three months to get ready. Whatever she wished for, her grandpa would create out of wood. Had she purchased a piece of clothing, he would have carved that too. He would find a large piece, he would lock himself down in his small basement workshop, full of odd chisels, and the place would buzz with activity. When he formed his creation, he would paint all over it with thin brushes and he would varnish it. She could watch for hours how his coarse fingers lovingly danced on the wood and breathed form, feelings, and even movement into it. For her fourth birthday, she had chosen a baby doll—he had made it with a hole in the mouth so she could put a pacifier inside. For her fifth birthday—a house—complete with everything—with a chimney, with two windows (they had no glass, he covered them with nylon), with a door that could be opened and had a painted handle, and inside—a miniature bed. For her sixth birthday, she received a small table with four small chairs, and she sewed a green tablecloth together with her grandmother. And on that eighteenth of October, three months before her birthday, as he was asking her the fateful question, her grandpa was already delightfully anticipating—even his mustache was trembling from excitement, the joy of his unity with the wood. This time, however, Neda was going to surprise him.

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