Place: Austria

On the Tempers of Time: Reading Christoph Ransmayr’s The Lockmaster

September 12, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Moumita Ghosh

The Lockmaster is a chronicle of an imminent future where emotional disorientations encounter environmental turmoil.

The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr, translated from the German by Simon Pare, Seagull Books, 2024

The Lockmaster, the latest novel from Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, begins with an act of killing in a small European town. The narrator’s father—the titular lockmaster—presides over a series of sluice systems for guiding river traffic around the Great Falls, a cascade over a hundred and twenty feet high on the White River. On a festive day, ironically a day to celebrate the feast of Saint Nepomuk, the patron saint of those in danger of drowning, the lockmaster floods a navigation channel carrying riverboats. Accidental or otherwise, this episode claims five lives. A year later, almost as if in atonement, the lockmaster stages his disappearance into the same foaming roars of the Great Falls.

Tortured by the possibility that his father could be a murderer, the narrator goes on to experience a series of harrowing events as his hydraulic engineering projects carry him from the banks of the Xingu River in South America to the Mekong in Asia. By the time the narrator travels back to Europe and to the coasts of the North Sea, he himself has transformed into a murderer. Throughout, Ransmayr details the narrator’s childhood with gentle premonitions of his transformation, with prose that feels like a moving panorama of the idyllic outdoors, soaked in an aesthetic genre that seems almost “cottagecore”; yet, existing collaterally with the seemingly quaint charm of strawberry-picking and kayak rides, amidst riparian forests and river spirits, there are far more disturbing scenarios. 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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European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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Two Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

October 3, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Wally Swist

and I shall stand at its edge: / where there is nothing else, pain once more

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a meditation on aloneness in the form of introspective poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, elegantly translated from the German by Wally Swist. Grappling with the immense and unspeakable, The Solitary and The Lonely One are indicative of the Austrian poet’s diverse repertoire on disbelief and mysticism. Read on and ruminate.

The Solitary

Like one who sailed on strange seas,
so I’m with the eternal natives;
the full days stand on their tables,
but to me the disgrace is full of figure.

A world reaches into my face,
which may be uninhabited as the moon,
but they leave no desire alone,
and all their words are occupied.

The things that I took far with me,
look rare, compared to yours—:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

The Lonely One

No: there shall be a tumble out of my heart,
and I shall stand at its edge:
where there is nothing else, pain once more
and the unspeakable once more in the world.

Another thing in the immensity,
which becomes dark and light again,
one last longing face
in the never-to-be-satisfied,

another utter face on stone,
willing to its inner weights,
that the expanses that silently destroy it,
force it to be ever happier

Translated from the German by Wally Swist

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Translation Tuesday: “Bambirambo” by Mario Schlembach

May 23, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Cristina Burack

Bambirambo is a fighter, and if you wait long enough, then it will certainly come back to life.

This Translation Tuesday, we deliver a story of coming to terms with death. Set on a farm which bears the scars of a prisoner-of-war camp, Mario Schlembach’s “Bambirambo” centers a child surrounded by decay, but only awakened to the harsh reality of decomposition when his friend, a rescued fawn, takes his last breath without warning. On translating this precise and delicate tale of reckoning, translator Cristina Burack writes: “The juxtaposition of the fawn—befriended and cared for, observed in death and decay, and never forgotten—and the buried prisoners-of-war, anonymous over decades, spur reflection on the human relationship to and remembrance of life and death, casting it in a unique light. The related tension between naivete and violence is even encapsulated in the title, ‘Bambirambo’, so wonderful in its alliteration and the associations it invokes. As a translator, I found it challenging to keep the prose as clean but specific as possible— something which German verbs do very well and very succinctly. I also had to decide how to translate verbs in a sentence where the subject wasn’t repeated. Ultimately, I decided to repeat the ‘you’ to emphasize the directness and the pull on the reader as a part of the story.“

Bambirambo

“Do you know what decomposition sounds like?” The rotating wings of the circling flies tumbling over each other. A humming and buzzing, vibrations, drawing the gaze, as if the dead creature were a place of life. You want to capture the moment, and you press the shutter button.

***

Once freed, this memory plunges you into the blood-colored afternoon. It’s early summer. You hear the noise of the old SAME tractor’s motor. The even strokes of the mower as it carves its path through the high grass around the dilapidated barracks. You, all of eight years old, go ahead to warn your father of barbed wire, rocks or ditches that are too deep. New relics grow each year out of the once scorched earth. You don’t yet know that you’re mowing over death and oblivion. It’s only much later that you’ll see photos from back then.

*

1940. Wood barracks, a seemingly unending number of them, and more than 50,000 people from all over the world, locked up like animals at a time when what was thought to be impossible had become possible. The brutalized bodies no more than display material and research objects for a perverted, deadly science.

*

The grass dries up into hay in three days. Your father rakes it into windrows and then brings the press. The machine advances tirelessly, picking up everything, as the unvarying waltz-like dance bathes your senses in its soporific rhythm, unleashing your fantasy.

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Translation Tuesday: “Summer” by Cvetka Lipuš

March 21, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Tom Priestly

the simple happiness of holidays is worn / beneath it is tanned skin

This Translation Tuesday, Cvetka Lipuš places us lovingly amidst summers speculated, imagined, and half-remembered. It’s a delicious place to be, an infinity of summers in loose procession, their light and heat restorative, the best of them able to forestall the worst horrors. Because solar heat slows time and addles the brain, Lipuš asks her questions lollingly, sun-drunk, swaddled in the season’s “simple happiness”.

How many times was the sun at its zenith
how many summers went by
who keeps count of them
ears of corn are tallied
a column of grain rising to meet the universe
are only one’s own counted or also others
am I to begin with the dog days when Achilles
sets sail for Troy in the heat
he glistens with his brass
or with those when the smell of coltsfoot in the ravine
drowns the school at the bottom of hot timelessness
shall I compile a list of my favorites
are others also included
maybe the summer when the landscape
was changed they stopped bringing fear home
the war left behind its front
maybe the summer when time comes off its hinges
the simple happiness of holidays is worn
beneath it is tanned skin

Translated from the Slovenian by Tom Priestly

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The Winter 2023 Edition Has Landed

January 19, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Helping us celebrate our milestone 12th anniversary issue are César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, Alfred Döblin, and Choi Jeongrye in our Korean Feature!

Earthquake, war, disease, unrequited love, even a man-made hell conjured through scents—what haven’t the protagonists in our Winter 2023 edition been through? Tagged #TheReturn, this issue is not only a celebration of human resilience but also of our twelve years in world literature. Helping us mark this milestone are César Aira, one of the most beloved names in the canon, and Geetanjali Shree, 2022 International Booker Prizewinner—both give us exclusive wide-ranging interviews. Amid new work from 34 countries, we also have stunning short stories from Alfred Döblin and Dalih Sembiring, powerful drama by Anna Gmeyner, a brilliant review of past contributor Johannes Göransson’s latest publication, and a Special Feature sampling the best in contemporary letters from a world literature hotspot sponsored by LTI Korea. All of this is illustrated by our talented guest artist Weims.

In Emmelie Prophète’s slow-burning fiction, “The Return” is a dramatic answering of prayers when a former Olympic athlete turns up unannounced before his mother a lifetime after his escape from Port-au-Prince. That same longed-for return is impossible for poet Fadi Azzam—“a Syrian / who had to flee his homeland / to countries that wish to flee from him.” In Juana Peñate Montejo’s poems of exile—our first work from the Mayan language of Ch’ol—on the other hand, it’s the self that requires summoning and remembering: “Bring the scent of amber, / return me to myself.” Re-membering, in the most literal sense, is foregrounded in Kim Cho Yeop’s macabre but fascinating story, one work in a sci-fi-tinged Korean Feature of startling breadth, wherein we are initiated into a community of amputees-by-choice, since “the body is hardly capacious enough to contain the human soul, which is so full of potential.” So full of potential, perhaps, that even a lover’s reincarnation on the 49th day of his death in the womb of a stranger seems possible in a transcendent story by the Mongolian writer Bayasgalan Batsuuri.

“Six months before his death in 1991, Menke Katz had a dream. In it, his long-dead mother admonished him to return to writing in his native language, Yiddish.” This dream resulted in the Oulipian poems that Jacob Romm has beautifully translated for this issue. Proving an exception to Shree’s claim that “the creative writer is instinctively drawn to her mother tongue,” Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine describes an opposite impulse in his essay: writing in French—a second language—is his deliberate choice, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, isn’t the true writer one who is “always a stranger in the language he expresses himself in”? In any case, even if the process of writing is estranging, the outcome when a piece of writing finds its intended reader can be sublime. For Lynn Xu, “the act of reading is the act of making kin . . . For example, when I read [César] Vallejo, I recognize that he is my mother . . .” By utter coincidence or divine fate, César Vallejo is also featured in these very pages, translated by another César, the intrepid César Jumpa Sánchez, who is determined to project Vallejo’s breakthrough collection, Trilce, to, in his own words, “a network of planetary outreach.”

Just as “encyclopedism has been the permanent horizon of [César Aira’s] work,“ the asymptotic impulse to realize a world literature that truly reflects the world has been our north star from the get-go. If our very existence has connected you with your kindred authors, help us get to our big 5 0 (in issues, not years!), just around the corner. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member—the New Year brings new perks and we’ll even put together a care package (rabbit theme optional) for supporters at the USD500-a-year tier and above. Thank you for being with us all these years!

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #4 Envy by Elfriede Jelinek

December 27, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee; there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash.

“The waistband of Brigitte’s pants is so tight already, I’m surprised she doesn’t have to saw herself in half to get undressed! Her blouse, not so much: everything in there went south ages ago, but then that’s the way of all flesh. Brigitte has gone from the big top to the big bottom: in the one-ring circus of life, she is a one-woman seesaw, a no-man band.”

Number 4 is a monster of a text from our Summer 2022 issue, an extract of Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek’s Envy, translated from the German by her frequent collaborator Aaron Sayne. Envy is viscerally unhappy in the finest Jelinekian tradition. Weirdness, deep pessimism, and misery are the big tonal flavors here. We are captive to a sadistic narrator who rants and raves and betrays her characters at every turn. Asymptote’s Liam Sprod puts it perfectly: this is the quintessence of “Mitteleuropa miserablism”: festering nastiness and narrative complexity and gallows humor.

Our narrator possesses total knowledge of the inner lives of the characters who litter her monologue, (a middle-aged piano teacher; the eighteen year-old boy she lusts after; his divorced mother who works all day in the bank the next town over). Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee, there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash and cannibals, and awful, awful puns; after a while it dawns on you that the mockery is not only for her benefit, but also possibly for ours. You get the sense she might be trying to make us laugh—worse, she might be trying to impress us, to curry our favor, even. There’s a pervasive meta-awareness to all the scorn and mockery—these may well be repulsive gifts laid at our feet. Is she afraid of us? Should she be? Is she insane? Read and decide for yourself. It’s powerful, polarizing stuff—a narrator so finely poised between awareness and delusion—and it rewards rereading. This may well be why it climbed so high on this list.

Envy_538

DISCOVER OUR FOURTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #10 The Loden Cape by Thomas Bernhard

December 19, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Sordid familial backstabbing from a modern master

As this year draws to a close, Asymptote invites you to look back at the most-read articles of the year. These are the ten pieces that resonated most with our far-flung readership, the texts you read, shared and returned to in the greatest numbers. 2022 was a year of sudden jolts, strange twists and great upheaval—qualities that each of these pieces speak to in their own ways. Superb translations and insightful interviews await!

Kicking off the list is Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loden Cape” excerpted and translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. In it, an old man tells his lawyer of a plot to defraud him of his business. The conspirators? His own son and daughter-in-law, who have taken over the running of the business and have forced him to move into the rooms above the shop floor, where he cannot interfere with their plans. The conspiracy is murky and the details emerge with difficulty, not least because Humer is a haphazard raconteur. Isolation and grievance have left him erratic, prone to wandering digressions and sudden bursts of invective. Humer’s words have been recorded with near stenographic fidelity by his lawyer, Herr Enderer—whose private, scathing impressions have themselves been inserted into the story by our unnamed narrator. A delightfully torturous mise en abime results, with Humer’s rants and Enderer’s marginalia crammed together into a mess of perspectives and voices. Sentences like the following are typical:

“Suddenly, says Humer, writes Enderer, I said: no, not onto the third floor, not onto the third. That’s final! Not into those inhuman quarters! I said, Humer says, writes Enderer, not into that dismal crawlspace.”

The_Loden_Cape_538

The bile fairly sloshes; this is all vintage Bernhard. In his translator’s note, Charlie H. Zaharoff mentions the author’s fondness of the “nested sentence”—a pretty term that draws attention to the intricate structural joists that keep the chaos in its frames. That it all fits together is a testament to the quality of Zaharoff’s translation and it’s a pleasure to unpick the strands. Unsurprisingly, the text was a favorite among Asymptote staff as well, making a series of best-of lists for our Summer issue. Our copy-editors took particular pleasure in its knottiness. Says Liam Sprod:

“[…] his nested sentences spiral out into evermore convoluted logics and precise obsessions, until the clauses build and build to an almost unsustainable mass. It is equally alienating and difficult, but that is where there is the perversity of enjoyment.” READ MORE…

Hate Makes Us Weak

November 19, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Vertlib

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

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All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

July 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature

You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”

The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 10, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting and Julia Sherwood

News this week from Sweden and Central Europe!

This week, we bring you news from Sweden and Central Europe! In Sweden, Eva Wissting reports on the annual Stockholm literature fair and recent acclaim for writer Merete Mazzarella, while Julia Sherwood highlights lively readings across Central Europe from the 2021 European Literature Days and Visegrad Café program. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

The annual literary fair, Stockholms Litteraturmässa, was held last weekend, for the fourth time, after having been cancelled two years in a row due to renovations two years ago and last year because of COVID restrictions. The fair, which is a single day event with no entrance fee, is meant to highlight the diversity of Swedish publishers. This year, it included an exhibit of around fifty publishers and magazines. There were also author talks and lectures on subjects ranging from democracy, climate, translation ethics, to literature about real events, as well as storytime events for the younger visitors and poetry readings. The theme of “the printed book” was meant to reflect current affairs in the publishing industry and was chosen because it can no longer be taken for granted that literature is read in its conventional printed book form.

Last week, the Swedish Academy announced that it is awarding Merete Mazzarella the 2021 Finlandspris (Finland Prize), which amounts to just over ten thousand US dollars, for her work in the Swedish-speaking cultural life of Finland. Swedish is the first language of about five percent of the Finnish population and one of the two official languages in the country. Mazzarella, who was born in 1945 in Helsinki, is a literary scholar and a writer who has published over thirty books since her debut in 1979. Her most recent book, Från höst till höst (From autumn to autumn), is an essayistic journal about living as an elderly person through the pandemic and its restrictions. Her books have been translated to Finnish, Danish, and German. Previous recipients of the award include author and journalist Kjell Westö (The Wednesday Club).

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