Place: Chile

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part II

February 11, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

[M]aybe Parra is himself Hamlet, paralyzed with doubt about the truth of things and his own role in doing something about it.

Tim Benjamin continues his exposition of the collaboration between revolution and poetics in the  work of Chile’s notorious antipoet, Nicanor Parra. In Liz Werner’s witty translation of his verse in the brazenly titled Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, cynicism, humor, silences, and brutal critique manifest in turns; the deep truths are gathered and reckoned with in the spaces where they collide. Read the first part of this essay here.

Revolts have their actual front lines, of course, and in the case of Chile, these were the columns of students, artists, and veterans of the “Penguin” movements of the early 2000s advancing toward increasingly hostile, increasingly anxious walls of police and military forces employing tear gas and rubber bullets. Recently back in Santiago, after the plebiscite had already been decided, a Colombian friend of mine gave me a tour of the uprising’s hot spots, where he went each evening in solidarity with his adopted country’s awakening. He described scenes of shifting pockets of absolute chaos which had popped up here and there, before dispersing with the wafting, seemingly intentional clouds of tear gas and booms of deterrent rounds. Walking down Alameda Ave, he pointed out to me all the landmarks that were forced to close during the uprising. That afternoon, he and I attended one of the Friday protests, which have continued to this day; as we walked down an Alameda Ave closed off to traffic, I noticed the small crush of people lining the street, not doing much except being there—in conversation with friends, smoking, or staring south to where, before a small plaza, a scuffle began. It wasn’t long before the gas came in one expansive burst, and the people in front of the plaza began to disperse. We thought we were far enough away, but a breeze brought us the invisibly searing burn—and a series of Good Samaritans hopping to with spray bottles of sodium bicarbonate and lemon juice, offering temporary relief. “You get used to it,” my friend said, as we turned back toward Lastarria and its street vendors and mid-scale restaurants. “You build up a tolerance.” And for some reason, through the sandpaper-burn in our cheeks and eyelids, we laughed at this. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine getting “used to it.”

Somehow, though, the pain felt justified—the concrete consequence giving body to a concept which I was only partly cognizant of. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that gives legitimacy to criticisms of the government, whose force (normally) seeks justification even after the fact. In other words, it wasn’t a political pain, which is reserved, fair or not, for the majority who hang back from the clashes, repeating the language of revolt that the front line incarnates. After the country’s President, Sebastian Piñera, declared the country “at war” with itself, other friends I spoke with said they would work during the day and go directly to Santiago’s main square after getting off every night, and it was these rear-guard protests that increasingly took on an air of intense jubilation—veritable revolutionary parties in streets fogged in tear gas and the volleying booms of urban warfare, as if the certainty of the success of the cause was enough to start the celebrations a priori. The reaction of those in charge were typically evasive, or offensive. One government minister casually suggested that instead of revolting in the streets, people should wake up early to avoid the increase in public transportation fares; others suggested “alien agents” descending on the country to induce chaos, which social media and protest signage quickly meme-ified.

While lack of shame and self-awareness is the realized utopia of the modern politician, it seems the uprising’s jubilance shared in Parra’s strangely unpretentious counter-narrative to it. More than a few of his poems might work as semi-mystical memes; take the poem “No president’s statue escapes,” whose three verses follow from the title to form a simple, declarative meditation on history’s losing struggle with time: From those infallible pigeons / Clara Sandoval tells us. / Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing. Both the pigeons and the topless protesters straddling these same statues are definitive symbols of the “certainty” mentioned above, both moving into that rare space where parody becomes something more eternal than mockery.

READ MORE…

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part I

February 10, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Tim Benjamin

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide.

Chile and its writers are no strangers to the conjugation between revolution and poetry, having long applied the ardent and inciting potentials of well-elected words to fortify and give lyric to its people’s desires for social change. Amongst the most powerful letters of the country’s struggles, the language of Nicanor Parra possessed especially an indomitable power, with its colloquial, irreverent nature lending an imitable voice to the static nature of words. Though Parra passed in 2018, his verse continues to establish itself in the public expressions of dissent, most recently revealing their prescience in regard to the severe 2019–2020 protests. In the first part of this essay, Tim Benjamin puts the poet’s legacy in relation with the social fabric of both his time and ours. Stay with us for the second part, to be published tomorrow. 

I had already left Chile before the country’s 2019 uprising, but I was still living there when Nicanor Parra became a centenarian. The grand misanthrope of Chilean letters had conquered his personal century, and in a country known for wine, political troubles, and writers, there was considerable respect payed to the antipoet’s gesture toward immortality. TV and newspapers dedicated front-page space to a sort of celebratory pre-obituary, and on the night of, I went out for drinks with friends, who talked a little about Parra’s work but mostly about the idea that the old, disheveled fuck seemed to have made it to such a ripe old age just so he could take the piss out of death, like he’d done to poetry sixty years before. Death returned the favor a little under two years before the uprising, but as the introduction of Liz Werner’s overlooked 2004 “antitranslation” of his later work, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great makes clear, Parra took his joke further than anyone before him.

He didn’t coin the term. At least two poets—Vicente Huidobro and the Peruvian Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, who published a book titled Antipoemas in 1926—had used it before him. But the concept will forever be etched alongside his name in whatever circle of the literary pantheon he comes to occupy. Parra would pass away in 2018 at the very anti-climactic age of 103, just under two years before the country’s most significant political movement since the “NO” campaign rejected Pinochetismo in 1989. And despite—or maybe because—of his reputation as the antipoet, it seems safe to say that dying before the Revolution was the kind of providential malfeasance he would have at least tried to have some fun with. Indeed, Werner’s “How to Look Better & Feel Great,” chosen in apparently intimate collaboration with Parra, is one of those disembodied parodies that exist somewhere between a wink and a groan. But it also points the way toward the mentality of a country, which, despite the crackdowns and a global pandemic, has hung a definitive asterisk onto South America’s “economic miracle.”

Parra was born in 1914 in southern Chile to a bohemian father and a mother who shows up often in his poetry as the folksy sage “Clara Sandoval.” He was the brother of the legendary folk singer Violeta Parra, whose song, “La carta” was covered by Mon LaFerte during the uprising (The letter arrives to tell me / that in my country there’s no justice / the hungry ask for bread / the military gives them lead). He studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown, and cosmology at Oxford, which may or may not have contributed to the often sideways transgressions from formalism which defines much of his output—though Werner does emphasize Parra’s occasional use of an algebraic x and shorthand descriptions of relativity. He began publishing poetry marginally in 1938, but made his name in 1954 with the publication of Poems and Antipoems. As Werner’s introduction notes, one Chilean critic wrote that Parra’s book “Returned us . . . once again! [To the fact that] everything could be said in poetry.” Camus would make a similar point a couple of years later in The Rebel, claiming that an artist’s “rebellion against reality” affirms the same motivation as that of the revolt of the oppressed. Poems and Antipoems would go through multiple editions, and the 1967 English-language version would count among its translators Allen Ginsburg, who had joined Parra in an increasingly paranoid Havana two years earlier to give out the Casa de las Americas Prize. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Most Beautiful Statue” by Víctor Hugo Ortega

January 12, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Georgina Fooks

You have to kiss her, he insisted. Do it respectfully, but kiss her all the same.

A bystander’s unsettling memory becomes an homage to a city monument in Víctor Hugo Ortega’s “The Most Beautiful Statue,” our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Through a string of digressions that subtly parody the eyewitness voice, our narrator recounts the scene of a minor accident by fixating upon the minutiae leading up to the crash. We’re taken on a meandering sequence of explanations about football history, Channel 13 news, Chilean poets, and the chaotic beauty of Santiago. What results is an amusingly voiced vignette guiding us through a seemingly disconnected set of details and a closely connected set of events. “The Most Beautiful Statue” offers a narrative exercise redolent of Baker’s The Mezzanine or even Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” for its dizzying compression of time and recollection.

Only once in my life have I seen a car crash with my own eyes. Luckily, it was nothing very violent or bloody. As I suppose is the case for crashes all over the world, this was out of the blue. I was at the scene of the accident, thinking of what I’d seen just before, and all of a sudden came the collision.

Unfortunately, I remember it often. More than I would like. If I add things up, I think I remember it three times a month, more or less, which doesn’t please me. On the contrary, it frightens me. If you do the maths, I remember it thirty-six times a year. And that’s a lot. I’ve asked myself why. The answer is that sometimes, when I walk through the city centre, I hear a vibration underfoot that distracts me from the purpose of my journey and brings me back to the memory of that deafening sound. It’s a sound that makes me nervous, makes me think that I could be witness to another crash. It’s a very strange thing. The pavement’s vibration serves as a sign of what might come, like an alert to be prepared for a possible collision. It’s like what they say about dogs and their earthquake-predicting behaviour.

Never again have I heard a sound so loud as the one I heard that day. Nor have I smelt that smell of smouldering tar, which made my nose and head ache. But I can’t be reckless. I have to be prepared. Santiago is a noisy city, overpopulated with cars, buses, and trucks, so the risk of seeing another traffic accident recurs day after day. Luckily for me, or for the good of the streets, lately all risks have turned out only to be vibrations.

There’s no doubt, I was affected by the incident. Maybe also a little traumatised. But it is what it is, what can I do. Also, to be honest, it wasn’t just because of the accident, but because of what happened after. Let’s take it bit by bit.

The first thing I should say is that there were no casualties. This makes the memory not so terrible. I don’t even want to imagine what would have become of me if the crash had left someone dead. I was lucky. Sometimes I think that because there were no deaths, I associate what happened before with what happened after, which to me seems marvellous. Although it’s a double-edged sword, because when the bad memory of the crash comes up, so does the good memory of what happened before. And when the good memory of what happened before comes up, so does the bad. READ MORE…

Narrating State Violence in Chile and Iran: For Raúl Zurita, with Gratitude

October 21, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

Finding one’s literary lineage is strange . . . You don’t necessarily find the voices that speak to you among your own people or your own language.

Last month, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita won the prestigious Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. He is esteemed as one of the most talented Chilean poets of the twentieth century, alongside Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro. María de los Llanos Castellanos, the President of National Heritage, said that Zurita had been awarded the prize in recognition of “his work, his poetic example of overcoming pain, with verses, with words committed to life, freedom, and nature.” Having lived through Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990) and, like many other Chileans, having been arrested and tortured under Pinochet’s regime, Zurita’s work addresses the violence committed against the Chilean people. His books in English translation include Anteparadise (translated by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (translated by Anna Deeny), INRI (translated by William Rowe), and Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutsky). 

For a year now, since October 2019, Chile has been gripped in fresh political protests, sparked by a rise in subway fares. These have been the biggest protests in Chile since the end of the dictatorship and violent clashes between protestors and police have resulted in deaths, injuries, and arrests. In this essay, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Iran, Poupeh Missaghi, reflects upon Zurita’s response to state violence in his work. She draws a comparison with her native Iran, which similarly faced a US-backed coup (1953) and has recently experienced mass protests in response to economic injustice. By exploring Zurita’s ability to express the history and suffering of his country, as well as her own relationship to his body of work, Missaghi considers the importance of finding one’s literary heritage.  

The first time I saw Raúl Zurita read was in 2016 at the University of Denver. My skin felt raw, not just in the presence of his words (some of which I had read before), but also in proximity to his voice—deep and powerful yet carrying its fragility on its every note, accompanied by the trembling in his hands and torso. Trembling that wasn’t hidden or performed, but simply part of the way he carried, had to carry, his body and his voice as they carried with and in them the bodies, voices, and memories of others.

In a foreword to Purgatory, C. D. Wright says, “Instead of speaking for others, Zurita channels their voices.” There is an important difference here: the poet is not sitting on the sidelines and observing, but rather entering the purgatory himself. Whether through the intentional acts of hurting himself in his younger days (“branding his face and burning his eyes with ammonia”) or through the unasked-for Parkinson’s disease in his later years, Zurita literally embraces the pains he and his people have lived through. About his disease, Zurita notes,

I feel potent in my pains, in my curved spine, in the increasing difficulty of holding the pages when I read in public . . . I might have a bizarre sense of beauty, but my disease feels beautiful to me. It feels powerful.

Being in his presence over the years, I cannot help reading his Parkinson’s as another layer of his life-long labor of memory—his nerves being affected, being burdened, and his whole body becoming a witness who speaks even when he is not using verbal language.

***

The first work of Zurita I read was Song for His Disappeared Love, which for some reason I always remember as Song for His Disappeared Self, which is perhaps just a ghost of the same title. I read the book in a documentary poetics class taught by Eleni Sikelianos, and that was the beginning of my fascination with Zurita’s work, as well as with that of the translator Daniel Borzutzky. In Song for His Disappeared Love, Zurita narrates the pains of different countries of the Americas. Toward the end of the poem there are two drawings that resemble maps of some imaginary terrain. The niches in the first map are empty, filled with a void. The ones in the second include names of countries. Looking at them, the preceding pages of text begin to seem like another map, of partitioned city blocks or a cemetery with tombstones made of words. The last stanza of the poem before the drawings reads,

30. Is the tomb of the country’s love calling? Did you call out of pain? Out of pure pain? Was it out of pain that your love cried so hard? . . . are they calling me? Are you calling me?

This is one of the recurring themes in Zurita’s work: the psychological traces of political history on both the people and the landscape, and how one responds to being called by the voice of one’s pained country coming from the depths of darkness, long after the sources of that pain and the bodies emitting that voice are gone. This voice carried through in Zurita’s poems and the embodied, circular manner with which he approaches the topic have become, since those first encounters, a signpost on my path to addressing the pains of my own country, Iran, miles away from his. Because, of course, history repeats itself; even if this repetition is not in the details—though it can be—but more so in the psychological effects and fissures it leaves in our souls. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 24, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Daniel Persia, and José García Escobar

This week's latest news from Brazil, Hong Kong, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news of what’s happening around the world. In Brazil, a newly published collection draws together international voices discussing their experience during quarantine; in Hong Kong, tightened lockdown measures have meant book fairs and events moving online; and in Central America, the Autores en cuarentena event series is taking place online, whilst Carlos Wyld Espina’s essential political essay El Autócrata has been reissued. 

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has no doubt weighed heavily on writers, altering not only their physical workspaces and subject matter, but also their orientation to the art itself. In Brazil, the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) has invited 126 individuals and collectives to reflect on their experiences during quarantine, featuring multimedia work from writers, visual artists, and musicians, among others. Meanwhile, reflections have gone global with Para além da quarentena: reflexões sobre crise e pandemia, which showcases critical discussions from Brazil, Italy, France, Portugal, the United States, and Uruguay. The collection, released in June, is available in free pdf and e-book formats through mórula editorial.

Another new release, Pandemônio: nove narrativas entre São Paulo—Berlim [Pandemonium: Nine Narratives Bridging São Paulo—Berlin], takes a more in-depth look from two of the world’s major literary hubs: São Paulo and Berlin. Organized by Cristina Judar and Fred Di Giacomo, Pandemônio touches on the pandemic, the ongoing economic crisis, and the advance of authoritarianism, highlighting similarities and differences between São Paulo and Berlin. Featured authors include Aline Bei, Cristina Judar, Jorge Ialanji Filholini and Raimundo Neto (representing São Paulo) and Carola Saavedra, Fred Di Giacomo, Alexandre Ribeiro, Karin Hueck, and Carsten Regel (representing Berlin). Pandemônio illustrates the strength of collective testimony, highlighting how stories have the power to bridge experiences from distant corners of the globe. The book is available for free online at www.pandemonioantologia.com, and through Amazon. A full English translation will be released in August. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 17, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, Eva Wissting, Poupeh Missaghi, and Sarah Moore

Bringing you the latest in literary news from Sweden, Iran, the UK, and Spain!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Sweden, Iran, and the UK. In Sweden, a new translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague is on its way, and the annual children’s book award ALMA has announced Baek Heena as its winner; in Iran, sales of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree have surged after its nomination for The International Man Booker Prize, and readers have welcomed a Persian translation of Italian writer Paolo Giordano’s new non-fiction work about contagion; in the UK, authors and publishers are proving resourceful after the cancellation of key literary festivals; finally, people around the world have been mourning the death of best-selling Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who sadly passed away this week in Spain.  

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

Easter in Sweden is usually a time when people have a few days off and either go skiing or open up the country cottage after the winter. This year, however, like in a lot of other places around the world, people have had to alter their plans as traveling was discouraged, even within the country. Unlike most of its neighboring countries, Sweden still allows bookstores as well as most other stores to remain open. Nevertheless, changed habits in a time of social and economic uncertainty has led to a decrease in sales of physical books by 35%. Although sales of e-books have increased by over 10%, bookstores have started plans to lay off employees and renegotiate rent costs, in order to manage a possible prolonged decline in book sales.

One book that nonetheless sells like never before in Sweden at this time, is French Algerian author Albert Camus’s The Plague from 1947. Swedish readers have the book today in a translation by Elsa Thulin from 1948, but a new translation is on the way, by Jan Stolpe, and will be available in stores by the end of April. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Winter 2020 issue!

Asymptote celebrates its ninth anniversary with the Winter 2020 issue, featuring new work from thirty-one countries and twenty-two languages (including three new ones: Kurmanci, Old Scots, and Serbo-Croatian)! To help you navigate through such an abundance, our blog editors reveal their favorite pieces below:

Each issue of Asymptote brings with it a utopian vision—that many nations (thirty-one, in this case) may share a page, with each literature distinct but gathered in communion, resulting in a chorus that somehow does not subjugate any single voice. As always, I am astounded by the way one is allowed to travel along the cartography of these collected texts, and how vividly they summon the worlds available in their language.

For a while now I’ve been entertaining the thought that the first step to harnessing language (if there is such a thing) is to distrust it, and so was stopped short by the first line of Eduardo Lalo’s “Unbelieve/Unwrite”:

Unbelieve. Unbelieving the world means questioning the structures that sustain it.

And a couple lines on:

Unbelieving so that writing will wash ashore, like a gift.

These writings are the result of a great loss that causes one to take solace in nothingness, and seems particularly resonant today in the age in which traditional anchors—nationality, religion, family, certainty in our survival as a species—are quickly being drained of their staying power. Arriving in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s devastation, Lalo seeks to dismantle our reliance on infrastructures both physical and psychological, while simultaneously being brilliantly aware of life’s unassailable fullness. Lalo continuously returns to the art of writing as a source of stability and control, and in doing so affirms the act of writing as a way of approaching the world, absolving the art of its mystery but instilling it with conviction. It is bleak and somehow victorious. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 10, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hodna Nuernberg, Jacqueline Leung, and Scott Weintraub

Our first weekly roundup of 2020 from across the globe!

Asymptote‘s Weekly Roundup is back for 2020 and this week our editors bring you news of theater adaptations and book fairs in Hong Kong, the continued struggle against freedom of expression in Morocco, and a novel examining Chile’s political activism amidst ongoing protests. Read on to find out more!  

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Hong Kong is stepping into the New Year with a theatrical performance based on a short story by the late Yesi, or Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013), on January 11 and 12. Yesi was one of Hong Kong’s most renowned writers and essayists; as a literary translator, he brought works from Latin America—notably the poetry of Pablo Neruda—and Eastern Europe into the Chinese language, and was known for translating his own works into English.

“The Banquet at elBulli” hails from Yesi’s short story anthology Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart (2012), featuring an intersecting cast of characters pondering on commonplace matters of love and food. Conceived as a semi-staged Cantonese cantata, The Banquet at elBulli is presented by Hong Kong Voices, the city’s resident chamber choir, in collaboration with theater practitioner Clement Lee and composer Daniel Lo. elBulli is named after El Bulli, a Michelin 3-star molecular gastronomy once run by chefs Ferran Adrià and Albert Adrià. Through the metamorphosis of molecular gastronomy, the characters reflect on life’s flavors and the essence of art.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 15, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, José García Escobar, and Scott Weintraub

This week's literary news comes from Chile, Guatemala, and the UK.

This week our writers report on a timely translation of a Chilean novel, a new translation of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s classic, The Little Prince, into Kaqchikel, literary prizes in Guatemala, and grime rapper Stormzy’s pop-up publishing event in London. Read on to find out more!

Scott Weintraub, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Santiago

In a recent op-ed in the Chilean newspaper La Tercera (October 19, 2019; trans. Natasha Wimmer published in The Paris Review), writer Nona Fernández speculates as to the nature of the “big joke” responsible for the massive protests against President Sebastián Piñera’s neoliberal policies, among other social and political issues:

The fare hike? The minister of the economy’s advice to take advantage of cheaper early morning fares and get up at 6 A.M.? The pizza that President Piñera is eating right now at an upscale Santiago restaurant, deaf to the voice of the city? The pathetic pensions of our retirees? The depressing state of our public education? Our public health? The water that doesn’t belong to us? The militarization of Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people? The incidents apparently staged by soldiers to incriminate Mapuches? The shameful treatment of our immigrants? The hobbling of our timid abortion law, due to government approval of conscientious objection for conservative doctors? The ridiculous concentration of privileges in the hands of a small minority? Persistent tax evasion by that same minority? The corruption and embezzlement scandals within the armed forces and the national police? The media monopoly of the big conglomerates, owners of television channels, newspapers, and radio stations? The constitution written under the dictatorship that still governs us to this day? Our mayors, representatives, and senators who once worked for Pinochet? Our pseudodemocracy?

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

hrabal_all_my_cats_jacket

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 21, 2019  |  in News  |  by Andrea Blatz, Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Another issue, another record broken: Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue features work from an unprecedented thirty-six countries. Looking for a point of entry? Consider our blog editors your guides. Their selections here, which range from Korean poetry to Russian drama, will set you off on the right foot. 

“Why do I think October is beautiful? / It is not, is not beautiful.” So goes a poem by the late Bill Berkson. It is not—as we know when the grey settles and looks to stay—a particularly delightful month, but if all the poems featuring October attests to something, it is that this time, its late and sedate arrival, is one that enamors poets. So it is that a vein of poetics runs through our Fall 2019 issue, and the poetry section itself is one of tremendous artistry and vitality. From the stoic and enduring lines of Osip Mandelstam to a brilliant translation of Sun Tzu-Ping’s strikingly visual language, Asymptote has once again gathered the great poets from far reaches. 

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2019

July 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Alexander Dickow, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sarah Timmer Harvey, and Victoria Livingstone

Standout pieces from the Summer 2019 issue of Asymptote, as selected by section editors!

Another issue of Asymptote means another dazzling array of voices, languages, and genres in translation. If you’re not sure where to begin, look no further than these recommendations from the editors who compiled this spectacular issue. 

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Editor:

This issue’s Fiction section is memorable for being the first fiction lineup in an Asymptote issue (and there are now 34 of them!) that does not include a single European author. Naguib Mahfouz and Bernardo Esquinca have already been singled out by the blog editors last week, so I’ll touch briefly on works by Bijan Najdi and Siham Benchekroun—two ambitious short stories that are remarkable in different ways. Showcasing the acclaimed narrative technique for which he was known, Najdi’s heartbreaking story “A Rainy Tuesday” (translated beautifully by Michelle Quay) unravels the thin seam between memory and reality, leading us on a nonlinear journey through grief. Benchekroun’s “Living Words,” on the other hand, is also a personal essay that exults in the very richness of language. Kudos to translator Hannah Embleton-Smith who masterfully tackled a text that leans so heavily on French phonetics to make synaptic leaps—and gave us something in English that preserves the delight of the original French. My personal favorites from the Poetry section this issue are the new translations of The Iliad by James Wilcox, which inject vigor into an ancient classic, and Tim Benjamin’s introduction of Leonardo Sanhueza, 2012 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for career achievement. Benjamin’s evocative translations bring into English for the first time an extraordinary poetic voice that deserves to reach a wider audience.

From Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Section Editor:

“Personal Jesus” by Fausto Alzati Fernández is a visceral study of the self that drugs make. Ably translated by Will Stockton, the prose slows down time, as we wait on the side of the highway, hoping for a fix, and then, finally, time stops, in the infinite space of the hit. Fernández explores an enchanted world, in which of all the dumb sad morass of the human animal is given the possibility of transcendence, and yet—cruelties of cruelties—it is this very transcendence that produces the animals living half-lives that stumble around his dealer’s living room. “Personal Jesus” is a love letter, written to a cleansing balm that leaves us only more pitiful than before.

READ MORE…

The Summer 2019 Issue Is Here!

July 18, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Dive into new work from 30 countries!

Wake up where the clouds are far with Asymptote’s Summer 2019 edition—“Dreams and Reality” brings you stunning vistas from 30 countries, including new fiction from Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, an exclusive interview with Edith Grossman, translator of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and never-before-published translations of Nicole Brossard, recent winner of Canada’s Lifetime Griffin Trust Award for Poetry. In our Special Feature on Yiddish writing, published with the generous support from the Yiddish Book Center, you’ll find everything from Isaac Berliner’s dreams of ancient South America to Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s modern-day America.

In Leonardo Sanhueza’s retelling of intimate life before, during, and after Chile’s Civil War, each poem an unforgettable portrait of a colonist, dreams are harbingers of death. In “A Rainy Tuesday,” Bijan Najdi’s nonlinear journey of grief, on the other hand,  dreams are bulwarks against the almost certain demise of missing loved ones. When the veil breaks, the real returns. Internationally acclaimed Korean poet Kim Hyesoon tackles the reality of violence head-on in her latest collection, reviewed by Matt Reeck. For artist Jorge Wellesley, the emptiness of slogans lies exposed in images of rotting, blurred, or blank billboards. In a candid essay, Fausto Alzati Fernández confesses to the rituals of drug addiction, some of which attempt “to grab hold of reality and strip it.”

READ MORE…

Meet the Publisher: Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press

June 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moses

It’s a well-known fact that I am often drawn to books that tear your heart out and stomp on it.

Coffee House Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and essays. Since 2014, with the publication of Faces in the Crowd and Sidewalks by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney), the press has sought out authors from Latin America and farther abroad. Coffee House Press is also a nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists on Books in Action projects that expand the relationship between reader and writer. Over email, Chris Fischbach, CHP’s publisher, and Sarah Moses, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, discussed the press’s interdisciplinary collaborations, how they discover books by Latin American authors, and some of the titles in translation readers can check out.

Sarah Moses (SM): How did Coffee House Press come to be?

Chris Fischbach (CF): We were founded by Allan Kornblum in the early 1970s in Iowa, and we were purely a letterpress venture back then, publishing poets from both Iowa and from the New York School, where Allan had moved from. In the early 1980s, Allan moved the press to Minneapolis, where it became the first press-in-residence at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. A couple years later, we incorporated as a nonprofit, became Coffee House Press, moved down the street, and started publishing trade editions (fiction and poetry) as well as continuing our letterpress work. I joined the press as a letterpress intern in December of 1994 and was hired as an editorial assistant in August of 1995. I became publisher in 2011.

READ MORE…