Place: India

Elementalia: Chapter I Fire

February 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Fire blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.

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Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”

The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१

agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01

– The Ṛgveda

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Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.

Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.

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Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

February 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Carissa Coane, Daniel Yadin, Devi Sastry, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sayani Sarkar

Dive into our new issue with these choice recommendations from our amazing intercontinental team!

Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.

I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.

Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”

When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.

Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”

—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor READ MORE…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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A Paradoxical Man of Letters: In Conversation with Kiriti Sengupta

January 20, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

I . . . aimed to break free from being overly symbolic . . . perhaps I sought to reach out to readers who wished to interpret my poems quickly. 

When I first met Kiriti Sengupta in 2015, I was unaware of his literary efforts. He contacted me on social media as a publisher in the United States, after which I had the honor of naming a few of his books while he inspired two of my most notable poetry collections, including Salt and Sorrow. Our friendship led me to learn more about the history, culture, and literary traditions of India, a country for which I have a special fondness.

Sengupta’s literary corpus include writing, editing, translating, and publishing writers across the globe to bridge the communities. He was awarded the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the inaugural Nilim Kumar National Honour (2024). I have since read all of his books and published him twice with Reflections on Salvation (2016) and Oneness (2024) under the imprint Transcendent Zero Press. He is a paradoxical man of letters, and his efforts sustain a bridge between the United States and India through literature. His poetry is fresh and cryptic, sometimes leaving the reader frustrated for meaning, but it is also ripe with cultural references and idioms that astound me. Finding his work intriguing, I sat down for a thoughtful conversation to better understand this literary figure.

Dustin Pickering (DP): Kiriti, you have authored numerous poetry collections and are established as a translator. Your translation of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous has received exceptional praise worldwide. You are also a publisher with Hawakal in India (New Delhi and Kolkata). Surely, these roles must clash at times! I am curious about why you believed you should translate Chowdhury in particular.

Kiriti Sengupta (KS): My roles clash all the time, Dustin. And they create a clamor when they jostle with each other. (Laugh) So, when I write, I indite my own thoughts. When I translate, I slip into another’s shoes. When I work as a publisher, I think of the readers who would buy the product and whether it would be worth their funds. Money is precious. All these roles influence my psyche in multiple ways, and the Kiriti Sengupta you are talking with will invariably lead to all these attributes rolled into one. So, when someone calls me multi-faceted, I flash a broad smile, thinking I have no choice but to surrender helplessly to my creative instincts to sport several hats.

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Revathi And The Dismantling Of Neoliberal Respectability

January 15, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by mk zariel

This book has never been more necessary, offering a framework for trans reclamation and negation of the nonprofit industrial complex.

Revathi: A Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi, translated from the Tamil by Nandini Murali, Tilted Axis Press, 2024

In November 2024, Tilted Axis Press published Revathi: A Life In Trans Activism, the story of transfeminine writer, actress, and community organizer A. Revathi’s experience at the intersection of the radical hijra community and the more traditional non-governmental bureaucracy. This memoir, originally written in Tamil, spread profound awareness of the transfeminine community in India when it was released in 2011; now, it is accessible to the English-speaking audience via Nandini Murali’s translation. A. Revathi, no stranger to a less than trans-friendly political climate, first wrote this text to critique the nonprofit industrial complex—a system in which state-sanctioned institutions prop up hierarchies of power and control—and share her experiences in making her NGO more inclusive and liberatory. In the United States especially, where even explicitly gay and lesbian nonprofits are prone to neoliberalism and transphobia while centralized government can border on the fascistic, this book has never been a more necessary read.

As an organizer at the nonprofit Sangama, Revathi wasn’t expecting to feel the same sense of belonging that she did in her hijra community, a subculture of transfeminine organizers who were assigned male at birth, which had helped her realize her own gender identity. But when she worked with trans men for the first time, she discovered the kinship she felt with others across the gender spectrum. Saying that she “literally lived their lives” after conducting interviews about their needs surrounding resource access, she found herself questioning the concept of binary gender as a whole. While lamenting that she would never be seen as a participant in an idealized binary, she eventually declared that “we need to go beyond male/female distinctions and learn to look at people as humans,” a sentiment that was less than popular with the binary and even transmedicalist establishment in the nonprofit world. READ MORE…

The Dance of the Torn Skin: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on the Indian Anglophone Essay and Prākrit in Translation

December 9, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight.

As an essayist, literary historian, and critic, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has been identified as one of the writers who wrestle with ‘what it means to connect the ideal of personal authenticity with wider forms of cultural identity’ by The Oxford History of Life-Writing (2022). As a poet, Modern Indian Poetry in English (2001) defines him as an experimentalist ‘who . . . has formed a poetic from local material, parody, and the conscious manipulation of chance’. In the late 60s, as a student at the University of Allahabad, Mehrotra started the avant-garde literary magazine damn you: a magazine of the arts, and later in Bombay, he founded ezra (1966-1969) and fakir (1966). In 1976, together with Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, and Gieve Patel, he started Clearing House, a small press. Along with Eunice de Souza, they’ve come to be known as the Bombay Poets. Today, he is a renowned figure in contemporary Indian literature, with a voluminous bibliography spanning poetry, literary criticism, history, translation, and essays.

In this interview, I conversed with Mehrotra on The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Permanent Black/Black Kite, 2020), an anthology he edited, its earliest essays appearing in periodicals that were, as Henry Derozio described them, ‘short-lived as bugs, and not so infrequent as angel-visits’; his translations of the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir; and of  love poems translated from the ancient Indo-Aryan language, Prākrit. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Let’s talk about your selection process for The Book of Indian Essays: Two Hundred Years of English Prose (Black Kite, 2020). In an interview with Saikat Majumdar for Ashoka University, you commented that you had wanted to include V. S. Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri, but had to ‘narrow the field’.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (AKM): The suggestion to do an anthology of Indian essays came from Rukun Advani, the publisher of Permanent Black/Black Kite. We discussed a few names—perhaps also some essays to possibly include—but at the time nothing came of the idea. Then, in 2019, under a pile of brown paper envelopes, I came across one marked ‘Black Kite essays’. I’d recently finished reading the proofs of Translating the Indian Past and had been wondering what to do next. In that envelope was the answer: a bunch of photocopies, the beginnings of what became The Book of Indian Essays.

It was decided early on—more for practical reasons than parochial ones—to exclude writers who had spent most, if not all, of their lives outside India. The exceptions were Santha Rama Rau and Victor Anant, forgotten writers who I felt should be brought back into the conversation—not that any conversation was taking place. By leaving out Naipaul, Lahiri, and a few others, I was also able to bring in people like Gautam Bhatia, who is an architect, and the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Since the essay is more pliable than poetry or fiction, it has been wielded with considerable style and effect by writers who might be widely known for their work in their professional fields—as Bhatia and Subrahmanyam are—but are less visible as essayists in English. I’ve always been slightly more interested in the less visible than I am in those who are always in the limelight. The latter can look after themselves and are doing it very well. There will, however, come a time when present limelight will fade into the harsh glow of oblivion, and they too will be forgotten—which is why we need literary histories and anthologies. READ MORE…

Life is Like a Box of Golgappas: On Transcultural Translations

November 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Bowden

“Universality,” for interpretations of US products around the world, may also mean “unavoidable.”

Translators tend to like puzzles. Problem solving between languages is the definition of the trade, but what of the deeper, more invisible quandaries of culture and context? In this essay, Sam Bowden takes a look at two works that seem inextricable from the cultures of their origin—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton and Rober Zemeckis’s 1994 dramedy, Forrest Gump—as well as their respective international adaptations into German and Hindi, to investigate the various methodologies and techniques utilized in fitting these quintessentially US productions for new audiences.

One of the translator’s greatest challenges lies at a level deeper than language: instead, it is rooted in the countless cultural and historical contexts which consciously and unconsciously inform a given work. Since language is inextricable from the culture and history within which it is made, translational processes often prove more complex than simply replacing words, rhymes, characters, and themes. Source-cultural conditions and consciousnesses can shape a text in structurally embedded ways that go far beyond its linguistic surface.

Speaking from the United States, I am well aware of the extent to which my country’s culture and history—one could even call it mythology—have deeply shaped the literary narratives it produces and exports on a massive scale. When American stories circulate through the world-system, the result can be curious to study: these are narratives visibly shaped by a suddenly-invisible context. How do translators maneuver around this? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 8, 2024  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kathryn Raver and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from France and India!

This week, our editors report on literary prizes around the world — from an intergenerational family saga to a new approach to the trope of the madwoman in literature, get ready to add some exciting titles to your to-be-read list!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

A few weeks back, I wrote an update for Asymptote about France’s Prix Goncourt shortlist, which at the time had just been announced—and this week, the results are in! On Monday, from among a shortlist of seven other authors, the Academie Goncourt awarded the prize to Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s Houris. Daoud’s novel follows a young Algerian woman as she navigates her country in the aftermath of the civil war of the 1990s and is Daoud’s second Goncourt success—the first being his novel Meursault, contre-enquête, which won the Prix du premier roman in 2015. I’m on a mission to read all of this year’s shortlist and only just started Houris– but from what I’ve read so far, it certainly deserves the accolades it’s received.

The Prix Femina—another of France’s coveted literary prizes—also named its winner this week. Franco-Venezuelan author Miguel Bonnefoy took home the award for his most recent novel, Le rêve du Jaguar—an intergenerational story that explores the bonds of family amid the turbulent political climate of 20th century Venezuela. The novel was also awarded the Prix du Roman de l’Academie Française last month. READ MORE…

“alchemic / exchange / we fade bruises here”: Rajiv Mohabir on Editing I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals

October 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I offer these translations as a door that opens to a field of ancestral knowledge, with a threshold that is familiar while moving into a new space.

The cover of I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations & Chutney Fractals features “Ties That Bind,” a mixed media piece on archival paper by Renluka Maharaj. In the pixelated color photo of an Indo-Caribbean wedding, the groom is about to fall asleep, the bride looks demure—perhaps trying to hide her laughter, carefree children chat in the corner, two fierce-looking women look daringly into the camera, and an elder female relative holds a moneybag. Following the ingenuity and the personality of the anthology’s cover—with sequins that imbue historical reality with fantasy—the contents of the text, divided into an introduction and five sections, are even more astonishing. I Will Not Go contains two translations, two fractals, and various lyrical essays about the translation/ writing process of seventeen Indo-Caribbean writers: Krystal Ramroop, Aliyah Khan, Divya Persaud, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Nadia Misit, Alex Bacchus, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Andre Bagoo, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Anu Lakhan, Will Depoo, Natasha Ramoutar, Nicholas Peters, Anita Baksh, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Elizabeth Jaikaran, Suzanne Persard, Chandanie Somwaru, and Ryan Persadie. Like Maharaj, each of the featured translators are descendants of indentured South Asian peoples or part of the Coolie diaspora in the Caribbean.

In Mohabir’s foreword, “Like Chutney Masala,” he describes the music that fuels these writings and translations: “Chutney music as cultural production is poetry: oral and performed. There is flexibility in the writing down of these words, the singing of them, the performance of them.” In terms of its sound, it “blends Afro-Caribbean beats with Indo-Caribbean experience and music.” Beginning with the base of two chutney songs, the translators reimagine the music and lyrics, adding their own inflections and personality that is oftentimes “smoothed out” as incorrect in the Western publishing process. As this multivocal and imaginative collection seeks to reveal, chutney music forces its listeners to hear in its lyrics and melodies the gender violence, sexism, and expectations of marriage within the Indo-Caribbean community—“an open secret.”

Tiffany Troy (TT): In your foreword to I Will Not Go, “Like Chutney Masala,” you wrote of how this collection is “. . . a kind of Caribbean, diasporic response to [Eliot Weinberger’s] 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. . .” How does I Will Not Go draw inspiration from and go beyond 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in its conceptualization of chutney music?

Rajiv Mohabir (RM): For me, this book extends into a kind of spiritual realm whereby the translators all are descendants of indenture, and as such, they hold the particularities of our diaspora’s nuances in particular regard. What I mean is that this is not just an academic experiment; this work blends our own familial histories, our embodiments of music and rhythm, and writing skill. While 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei uses the editors’ essays to discuss what each translation does, the translators in I Will Not Go respond to their translational acts.

This brings me into another element that differs from I Will Not Go from Weinberger’s text: the translators add their original poetry that responds to their individual vision of chutney music’s afterlives. That we are haunted by our language loss is no secret—this is how colonization worked for many of us; we take in the colonizer’s messages about ourselves, and they go on to dwell in the deepest parts of our psyches. This anthology plumbs that depth, reaching into ourselves to see where chutney music (if it does at all) lives and loves inside of us. It’s personal and intimate, wrapped up in identity and ancestral trauma and joy. 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.

READ MORE…

Domestic Escapisms: The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt

August 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Domestic bliss is clearly not as it seems, as there is still room for dissatisfaction and silent rebellions against complacency. . .

The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay by Devangi Bhatt, translated from the Gujarati by Mudra Joshi, Niyogi Books, 2024

In The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay, Devangi Bhatt’s novel of fantastic realism, the extraordinary is prefaced by a scenario of extreme normalcy. In Kolkata, Pauloma Chattopadhyay lives out her days as an ordinary middle-aged housewife. Her husband, Nikhil babu, is a civil servant and a man of a few words, set in his routine. Sharing their house are two sons and their families; there is a daughter too, but she is married and hence resides elsewhere. Theirs is a standard joint family and Pauloma is unquestionably the matriarch of the household, but it would be hard to say that she has any power to go along with that position—and even if she did, she is not one to exercise it. All things go about in harmony in house no. 11 with the well-practised dailiness of domesticity, and from the beginning, Bhatt makes it clear that her movements are not curtailed, and nor does she live in a state of unhappiness:

Pauloma is a vivacious woman with an abundant love for life. She likes gossiping with the neighbours, bargaining with the saree seller, watching Bengali plays with her daughters-in-law, and feeding her grandkids sondesh. Though Nikhil babu and Pauloma are very different, it can be safely said that their world provides a sense of stability. Everything has been well for a long time, and there have been no problems.

Stability, however, tends to get stale after a point in time, and even more so for a housewife whose life mostly takes place within four walls. While Pauloma is not exactly crushed by the mundanity, she nevertheless recognises it: “But… but sometimes a strange thought crosses Pauloma’s mind as she sits by the window, rubbing oil on her scalp. . . . As she turns the shell bangle on her wrist, she thinks that life shouldn’t be like a straight line without any exciting deviations.” These short moments are akin to revelation, brief ripples on a still body of water, and it is this feeling of the past slipping through her fingers, of the transience of her life, that sends her to the storeroom in search for her late mother-in-law’s large storage vessels—which have been gathering dust and are set to be sold. On a whim, she climbs into one of them, only to be immediately pulled inwards and magically transported. READ MORE…

Discrete Acts of Love and Protest: On Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous

August 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

In Roy Chowdhury’s writing, one finds many mysteries and thoughtful riddles.

Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions by Bibhas Roy Chowdhury, translated from Bengali by Kiriti Sengupta, Hawakal Publishers, 2024

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes: “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” According to Bloom’s theory, the authentic poet stands in relation to poets of the past, and this relationship to tradition is a creative force, which Bloom calls “misprision.” In the instance of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions, the traditional poet is Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. 

Both Roy Chowdhury and Tagore suffered from the Partition of Bengal by the British; in 1905, Tagore used Raksha Bandhan to unite Hindus and Muslims against the Partition, whereas Roy Chowdhury’s family lost their wealth, and upon the later division of Bangladesh in 1947, became refugees and common laborers. Throughout many of these poems, translated by Kiriti Sengupta, Roy Chowdhury laments this predicament, coalescing the historic developments with his father’s death. “True and False for My Father” reads:

I’ll say
(if I’m honest):
after my father’s demise
I found myself duty-bound
in the crematorium—
not from being his eldest son,
like an event manager, rather.

I didn’t perform his last rites.
I followed no ritual
nor did I take part in the funeral.

Someone remarked:
You are indeed
an ideal communist.

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Serpentine

June 24, 2024  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…