Place: Budapest

We Stand With Ukraine: “Let Me Cry with Your Eyes My Love Affair with Budapest” by Thanh Tâm Tuyền

March 12, 2022  |  in Translations, We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Thuy Dinh

As the war in Ukraine enters its third week, a new column to show that the world stands with Ukraine.

At Asymptote the very notions of equality and social justice are embedded within our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Past projects like 2014’s ”Say Ayotzinapa,” responding to the kidnapping of 43 Mexican students, and an entire Special Feature, in our Spring 2017 edition, spotlighting authors from countries targeted by Trump’s #MuslimBan, speak fully to this. The current devastating moment surely calls for collective action again, and so, in this new column at the blog, published henceforth every Saturday, we will be gathering new work—poetry, fiction, essays, and translations thereof—responding to the war, now in its third week. May these pieces offer hope and strength in turbulent times even as they express outrage on behalf of and support for Ukrainians. 

For our inaugural column, editor-at-large Thuy Dinh translates into English for the first time an iconic Vietnamese poem, originally written in December of 1956. Through this work, South Vietnamese poet Thanh Tâm Tuyền expresses solidarity with Hungarian revolutionaries who struggled against Soviet forces. Though published decades prior, the visceral imagery of these lines still evoke empathy for those ardently resisting the invasion of their homeland.

Let Me Cry with Your Eyes My Love Affair with Budapest

Let me cry with your eyes
My love affair with Budapest
My heart and yours each of us a heart
They fill the streets with artillery tanks.

Let me harness the anger in your breasts
As they fire steel into lipstick-shaped muzzles
At each crossroad my face becomes a barricade.

Let me howl from your throat
As the bright morning takes wing
They knock us down like bricks
Drunk in their kill-lust
The way we thirst for the future.

Let me seethe with your cheeks
While they seal off border routes
Our joined fingers flutter like breath
My body waits.

Let me trade my sleep for your
Stress-riven, bullet-grazed forehead
It’s never night for night never comes
They attack in the morning it lasts forever.

Let me die in your skin
Threaded into the tanks’ endless tracks
I will live by your breath
O the ones in your stead

Let me cry with your eyes
My love affair with Budapest.

Thanh Tâm Tuyền
December 1956

Translated from the Vietnamese by Thuy Dinh

Interested in submitting your own work to this column? Send it to the “We Stand with Ukraine” section of our Submittable portal here—fees will be waived for this particular category. We look forward to reading your responses. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 26, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Carmen Morawski, Julia Sherwood, and Maíra Mendes Galvão

Your one-stop spot for all you want to know about world literature

This week we bring you news from Spain, Slovakia, and Brazil. We will begin our journey with Editor-at-Large Carmen Morawski who captures the excitement leading up to the Madrid Book Fair. We will land next in Slovakia where Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood updates us about the buzz surrounding the country’s most prestigious literary prize, Anasoft Litera. We will finish our journey across the world in Brazil to read Maíra Mendes Galvão’s report of writers’ protests against the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. 

Carmen Morawski, Editor-at-Large from Spain, reports:

In its seventy-sixth year, the Madrid Book Fair (Feria del Libro de Madrid) has yet again marked the transition from spring to summer for Spanish book lovers. Taking place in the Buen Retiro Park in Madrid from May 26 to June 11, this year’s fair will open with a lecture by Eduardo Lourenco, the Portuguese essayist and philosopher, in the Pabellón Bankia de Actividades Culturales.

Although a detailed schedule for this year’s fair isn’t available yet, a glance through last year’s schedule should give Asymptote readers a flavor for the lectures, readings, and other events typical to the fair. Whether on the look out for children’s literature, YA or adult fiction, non-fiction reportage, essay collections, philosophy, specialty and minority literatures, visitors to the fair can browse a wide array of contemporary offerings from the Spanish publishing scene, take advantage of special discounts, and even meet a favorite author at one of the many book signing sessions. If you want to learn more about the  history of the fair and are interested in sampling previous years’ fairs, you may enjoy this brief video of the 2014 fair.

Asymptote readers interested in more historical literary fare might prefer to visit the Spanish National Library’s (Biblioteca Nacional de España) special exhibition, Scripta: Tesoros manuscritos de la Universidad de Salamanca. Intended to commemorate the 800-year anniversary of Alfonso IX’s order to create ‘Schools in Salamanca,’ that in turn led to the founding of the first universities in Europe, the exhibition showcases 23 pieces spanning the history of the manuscript in Europe, from medieval Visigoth codexes belonging from the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the sixteenth century. The exhibition is on loan from the University of Salamanca and is divided into four main sections. It includes a section devoted to Humanism and the Vulgate languages, thereby acknowledging the prominent role of romance languages derived from Latin as vehicles for literature and scientific works. The exhibition runs from May 4 to June 4.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 25, 2016  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hanna Heiskanen, Julia Sherwood, and Zsofia Paulikovics

The latest literary news from Slovakia, Hungary, and the Nordic countries.

Friday is once again upon us, dear Asymptoters! This time, our report brings you the latest literature in translation news from Europe. Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has been at the Central European Forum conference and Blog Editor Hanna Heiskanen attended the Helsinki Book Fair, while Zsofia Paulikovics has an update from Hungary. Enjoy the ride!

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has these stories from Slovakia:

On 20 October, the emerging writer Dominika Madro’s story Svätyňa [Sanctuary] won the annual short story contest Poviedka 2016. Now in its twentieth year, the competition is run by the publisher Koloman Kertész Bagala and all submissions are anonymous. This year’s runner-up was the story Šváby [Cockroaches] by novelist and Elena Ferrante’s Slovak translator and Asymptote contributor Ivana Dobrakovová.

A survey of reading habits, commissioned by the Slovak Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association, has recently published very depressing findings: 72 percent of the public don’t buy a single book in any year; 40 percent read books only once a month and 28 percent don’t read at all. Nevertheless, judging by the crowds attending a huge variety of literary events taking place across the capital, Bratislava, over the past month, the picture isn’t perhaps quite as bleak as these figures suggest.

Slovak-Swiss writer and journalist Irena Brežná, Polish novelist Grażyna Plebanek, and recent Neustadt Prize winner Dubravka Ugrešić sought antidotes for despair as part of Bratislava’s annual Central European Forum conference from 11 to 13 November (video recordings here); Dubravka Ugrešić also read from her book of essays, Europe in Sepia, which will be published soon in a Slovak translation by Tomáš Čelovský. Parallel with the conference, some 200 publishers displayed their recent publications at the Bibliotéka Book Fair, held in the somewhat drab Incheba exhibition halls and vying for space with a “World of Minerals” exhibition. At the Centre for the Information of Literature stand two young authors, Peter Balko and Peter Prokopec, along with graphic designer David Koronczi, introduced their new “anti-logy” of Slovak writing. Aimed at schools but very far from being a stuffy textbook, Literatúra bodka sk (Literature.dot.sk) aims to show that contemporary authors inhabit the same world and share the same sensibilities as young readers, and includes samples of fiction and non-fiction as well as a graphic novel, Rudo, by Daniel Majling. Rudo started life as a Facebook cartoon strip and has now been issued in book form by Czech publisher Labyrint (in a Czech translation!).

slovakiaimage_rudo_obalka

On the other side of the Danube, housed inside the Slovak National Gallery and overlooking the river, Café Berlinka is fast establishing itself as a vibrant literary venue, in association with the adjoining Ex Libris bookshop. Since September 2016, the café has been hosting Literárny kvocient [Literature quotient], a series of debates featuring leading literature scholars and critics.  Of the many book launches that took place over the past few weeks, the liveliest must have been the feminist press Aspekt’s presentation of a selection of poems by Hungarian activist poet Virág Erdős, Moja vina [My Fault].  The book was translated into Slovak by Eva Andrejčáková (a past Asymptote blog contributor) in cooperation with poet Vlado Janček, who read some of the hilariously outrageous poems to his own guitar accompaniment (you can watch Virág Erdős perform “Van egy ország”/ “There is a Country” in Hungarian with the band Rájátszás here). READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mr. Crane Takes a Wife” by Elek Benedek

June 16, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Mark Baczoni

A Hungarian fairy tale in verse, translated by Mark Baczoni

     There was and there was not, over sevenfold seven lands beyond the Sea of Far Away, there was once a great bed of reeds, and on the edges of these reeds were two little houses, one on either side. In one lived a Crane, alone, and in the other a Wild Duck, alone; alone and frightfully forlorn.

* 

One day the Crane thought and thought,

and thinking to himself of what he ought

to do, he croaked aloud:

“Oh! How sad my life! How sorrowful with strife,

for I have no one: father, mother, or a wife.

It isn’t worth a tinker’s cuss,

just to go on living thus.

Life’s so dull and never merry, that’s it!

It’s time for me to go and marry.”

 

The Crane did not delay,

but preened himself to fine array,

and gathered all his pluck

to go and see the Wild Duck.

He landed in a trice and knocked three times

– or maybe twice – upon her door.

 

“Are you home, dear Duck?”

“I am indeed, O Mr. Crane!”

“Well then, will you come and be my wife?”

“I never heard such rot in all my life!

Mr. Crane, I’ve seen you fly,

you’re not that strong;

your wing’s too short and your leg’s too long.

What crossed your mind when here you came?

If I married you, I’d die of shame!

There’s a window, there’s the door,

pray don’t pester any more!”

READ MORE…