Place: Indonesia

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 6, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary news from Southeast Asia, Bulgaria, and Chile!

In this week of world literature, our editors cover the influence of censorship and propaganda on literature, and look back on Southeast Asian literature released this year.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia

What a year in Southeast Asian literature! The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand took center stage in Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA)’s catalogues, with a range of texts published throughout the year. First off in March was Bleeding Sun by playwright-novelist Rogelio R. Sicat, translated by one of Sicat’s children, the translator and editor Ma. Aurora L. Sicat, from the original Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, which was serialised beginning 1965. Sicat, who came of age in the aftermath of the American Occupation, wrote novels which further revealed his belief in land reform and love for Tagalog as a literary language, veering away from his contemporaries who were influenced by Euro-American conventions.

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From the Tale of Crafting a God: Afrizal Malna on the Afrizalian in Indonesian Poetry and Drama

July 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

In writing poetry, I experience this body-that-writes as a mutant in language; I feel a different person is present in myself.

In contemporary Indonesian literature, the writer Afrizal Malna has earned his own movement. Coined by Universitas Gadjah Mada professor Faruk HT, the Afrizalian has come to mean “seemingly disjointed images and ideas wrapped inside deceivingly simple phrases,” according to University of Auckland’s Zita Reyninta Sari, who goes on to elaborate the ways that it puts “everyday objects, especially those which in a glance are the most mundane … in the spotlight.” In his foreword to Afrizal’s Anxiety Myths, translator Andy Fuller also contributes to the definition: “An Afrizalian aesthetic is an engagement with the physicality of the city. How the body collides and rubs up against the textures of the city; of the varying intense urban spaces of everyday life.”

A SEA Write award-winning writer and artist sketched as “one of Indonesia’s best contemporary poets,” Afrizal’s works have been translated from their original Indonesian into languages such as Dutch, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and English, and have received accolades from literary award-giving bodies in Indonesia and beyond. To name one, Daniel Owen’s translation of Afrizal’s poems was the winner of Asymptote’s 2019 Close Approximations Prize.

 In this interview, I spoke with Afrizal—currently in Sidoarjo in East Java—with the help of Owen’s translation. Our discussion covers the Afrizalian literary movement within contemporary Indonesian poetry and drama; the terrains of linguistic hierarchies and reader reception; and his latest poetry collection Document Shredding Museum, originally published as Museum Penghancur Dokumen in 2013.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your latest collection, Document Shredding Museum, is now out from World Poetry Books. Could you tell us about the collection’s journey?

Afrizal Malna (AM): This edition of Document Shredding Museum is actually a revised, second edition of the book; the first edition was published by the Australia-based publisher Reading Sideways Press in 2019. In Indonesia, it was published a decade ago. The answer I’m giving you to this question now is probably quite different from how I would have responded back then.

This book was written between 2009 and 2013, over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime and the 1998 Reformasi. This regime ruled from 1966 to 1998 as a result of the 1965 tragedy—the massacre of members of the Indonesia Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) and those accused of being Communists, alongside the overthrow of the prior president Soekarno—which is still full of question marks even now. 2009 to 2013 was a time when the Indonesian people began questioning: what resulted from the 1998 Reformasi? Has there really been a fundamental change? We wondered if the powerful in Indonesia will always be prone to nepotism and its corollary effects—such as legal, ethical, and human rights violations, as well as corruption.

It was also during this time that I lived in Yogyakarta, in a Javanese cultural environment, occupying the boundary between village and city as a blurred space in Nitiprayan, Bantul (still a part of Yogyakarta). This became the moment for me to start from zero, and to allow my activities to mimic the wind, moving to find empty spaces and lowlands. This blank slate could shift the past—which was filled with hope for political change, as well as hope for literature and art to respond the 1998 Reformasi.

Global society at that time was facing social upheaval and natural disasters. When the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra happened, I was living in a house that I had rented from a family of farmers—an old, fragile Javanese house (rumah limasan) made of wood. The earthquake made the house convulse, and it was as if the house were dancing along to the earthquake’s rhythm in order to avoid collapse. When the earthquake stopped, not a single part was damaged, but many of the houses made of stone or cement had cracked or collapsed. It felt as if the wind had vanished. Leaves were stiff like in a painting, and the feeling of solitude, of quiet, was stifling.

That natural disaster, among many others, reflected the awareness that our bodies and our technology were paralyzed, powerless. Our ancestors, who had a long history of facing disasters, may have known how to read the portents of an upcoming disaster as an ancient form of mitigation, but this knowledge was not passed down to us. READ MORE…

Translating Indonesia’s On-the-Ground Realities: An Interview with John McGlynn

April 11, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Gear

[I]f Indonesia were to ever gain a foothold on the international literary stage, something had to change.

The Lontar Foundation was launched in 1987 to raise the profile of Indonesian literature worldwide, initially intending to translate Indonesian fiction into English for publishers. Largely through necessity, however, the foundation has since become a publisher in its own right. Founded by John McGlynn and Indonesian authors Sapardi Djoko Damono, Goenawan Mohamad, Subagio Sastrowardoyo, and Umar Kayam, Lontar has since, to date, published works from over six hundred and fifty Indonesian authors in English, providing vital contributions that trace the country’s complex cultural and literary developments. In this interview, McGlynn speaks on his interest in Indonesia, the importance of Lontar’s work, and the challenges faced by Indonesian literature both at home and abroad.

Sarah Gear (SG): How did you first become interested in Indonesian literature?

John McGlynn (JM): It all began with wayang—Javanese shadow puppets. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from 1970 to 1972, I was a combined art-design-theatre major and had begun to create shadow puppets depicting characters from Western literary texts. I was participating in protests against the Vietnam War and my characters told the struggle of a small nation against a powerful aggressor. The problem was that while I was able to craft these new shadow puppets, I had no idea how to operate them. After a summer course at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I studied shadow puppetry technique with a Javanese dalang (shadow master), I transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the centers for Indonesian Studies in the United States. In the span of the next two years, I took an array of other courses relating to Indonesia, including a mentorship in Indonesian literature.

I then left for Indonesia in May 1976, on a three-month scholarship to study advanced Indonesian. That trip, which ended up lasting until December 1978, was an intensive cultural immersion process, during which my primary language was Indonesian. I traveled extensively in Sumatra and Java, studied language and literature at the University of Indonesia, served as an assistant to renowned linguist and translation theoretician Ian Catford, and worked as a translator for a number of Indonesian institutions.

I was spending most of my free nights at the Jakarta Arts Center, or Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), as a spectator to plays, poetry readings, and cultural discussions. At TIM, I came to know numerous prominent Indonesian authors, a number of whom then asked me to translate their work. I was collecting and reading all the literary texts I could get a hold of and had begun to translate numerous Indonesian short stories, and several novels as well; all this led me to pursue a Master’s degree in Indonesian literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, which I did from January 1979 to May 1981. READ MORE…

An Ocean of Myth and Lotus: Robert Wood on Portside Review and Writings from the Indian Ocean

January 17, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The journal is a simply a simple example of peace in our time for people who wish to see it, in all their diversity, opinion, reflection.

Since 2021, Portside Review has published contemporary writings from the Indian Ocean that transcend beyond J.M.G. Le Clézio, Amitav Ghosh, Lindsey Collen, Monique Agénor, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert. Celebrating the coastlines, hinterlands, sea routes and port cities from Cape Town to Bangkok, from Bombay to Northbridge, this quarterly digital literary journal is funded by the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Creative Australia, and the Centre for Stories. “[W]e are not a journal of critique and review, nor of scholarship and journalism, nor of doctrinaire reference,” wrote managing editor Robert Wood in the journal’s latest issue.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Wood on the impetus behind Portside Review, new writings from the Indian Ocean, and running a digital literary journal.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): What’s the story behind Portside Review? Why is there a need, now more than ever, for an online literary journal on writings from the Indian Ocean?

Robert Wood (RW): Founded in February 2021, Portside Review is a quarterly online literary journal that publishes short stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and activism in written, audio and visual form. Based in Perth in Western Australia, we have had editors in Melbourne, Singapore, Bali, Penang, Mumbai, Cape Town, Myanmar, and elsewhere. We started it as a project through our parent organisation, the Centre for Stories, which teaches the craft of storytelling for social impact.

There is a need, as always, for the proliferation for artistic excellence that supports an ongoing peace, all with a sense of ecological attention, material place and geographic location. Our vision has been to see the Indian Ocean as a home of many languages, many interests, many sovereignties, and to reflect that through a journal focused on the English language without centering it. It is a project that allows us to connect laterally rather than vertically, that re-routes where and when we have come to be in the ports we call our own. READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

I Carved A Girl Of Stone: Nuzhat Abbas on Feminist, Decolonial, and Anti-Imperialist Translation

October 23, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

What drives my work at trace is perhaps a desire to destabilize the spaces I was made to enter and reside in . . .

Since its inception in 2019, Tkaronto/Toronto-based trace press has published “literature that illuminates, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour, and resistance.” Re-emerging after a brief hiatus during the pandemic, their first anthology River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023) assembles emergent and experienced feminist translators, scholars, and writers from Palestine to Uganda, from Indonesia to Kashmir—spotlighted by, among others, Khairani Barokka, Suneela Mubayi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Yasmine Haj. In the foreword, the decolonialist historian Françoise Vergès describes the vestiges of imperialism, the dominance of the languages of Euro-American colonisers, the myths of globalisation, and the “hegemony of national languages” inflicted by neocolonial nation-states. Having read and reviewed the anthology myself, I think of it as a complex re-mapping of literary hemispheres “twisting through the atrocities of literary empires and post-colonial capitalism.”

In this interview, I asked trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born writer and critic of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, about the literary publishing house she has founded; how independent presses can stay true to a transnational, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist ethos; and writings from her archipelagic birthplace in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Having founded trace press, in what ways do the values of decoloniality, anti-imperialism, feminism, and anti-racism occur as concrete practices in translation and in publishing? And what is the opposite of that?

Nuzhat Abbas (NA): I prefer to pose such questions to my writers and translators—to inquire how they, in their practice, think through such challenges, especially in relation to localized tensions and displacements, both historic and geographical. For example, trace is located on a forcibly white-settled and renamed space where Indigenous and Black resistance and creativity continues to resist and respond to histories of profound violence and displacement. As racialized im/migrant-settlers working with non-European literatures and languages, how do we ‘translate’ and write toward Black and Indigenous readers in the Americas, and toward each other, as people from the global majority, scattered around the globe, displacing each of our certainties? This is a question for me, a beginning question, one that can only be answered in practice—and differently—by each of the books we make and the conversations that emerge. Building space for these kinds of ‘after-publication’ conversations is very much part of what I want to create with trace. 

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Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

October 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

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Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

August 7, 2023  |  in News  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Heather Green, José García Escobar, Matilde Ribeiro, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Rankin

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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The Summer 2023 Issue Is Here!

July 20, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Amyr Klink, Enrico Remmert, Diana Garzas Islas, and Rio Johan in our Indonesian Special Feature

Wedged between sky and sea is the thin line we all know as the horizon, ever-present in Brazilian explorer Amyr Klink’s nail-biting account of survival in shark-infested waters—just one of many new works from this Rubik’s Cube-like Summer edition. Though this particular horizon is “defined” against a clear sky on the day of Klink’s wondrous salvation, the same line is also “dun-colored” in Ecuadorian author Solange Rodríguez Pappe’s profound fiction; “lacerated” in frequent contributor Habib Tengour’s Homer-inspired sequences; mottled with “dung heaps” in Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez’s poetry; or simply a vortex toward which the ocean ebbs in award-winning short story writer Nukila Amal’s description of the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Within the same Indonesian Feature, organized in partnership with the Lontar Foundation, Rio Johan’s brilliantly inventive “Fruit Maps”—about a drunk bioengineer!—finds a thoughtful echo in Nicole Wong’s Brave New World Literature entry invoking terroir and fruit to further problematize the mediating role of translation in world literature beyond mere tropes of “domestication” or “foreignization.” In Romanian playwright Tatiana Niculescu’s laugh-out-loud drama, on the other hand, it’s one particular foreigner with a very specific request who gives a museum guide grief; the museum is also the setting for Chapman Caddell’s thrilling review of Argentinian novelist César Aira’s latest “flight-forward” creation. All of this is illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Eunice Oh, whose stunning photography graces our cover.

July-20_blog

Since the ongoing support of cultural institutions—or, in Asymptote’s case, lack thereof—makes a huge difference in what translator David Williams has wryly compared to the Olympics for being essentially a pay-for-play arena, we return to an interview series initiated two years ago and hear from four more fearless advocates who “work more backstage than onstage” to catalyze the transmission of their national literatures: Susanne Bergström Larsson from the Swedish Arts Council, Wenona Byrne from Creative Australia, Marieke Roels from Flanders Literature, and Shun Inoue from the Japan Foundation, the last sharing the same enthusiasm for manga as our Visual section’s Alexa Frank. “Because literature is such a powerful medium with which to explore the human condition and connect with one another,” Inoue says, “we must continue to look outward, not inward.” Hear, hear.

While we take some time off our issues to regroup and plan for a double milestone in January 2024 (the edition after this will mark both our 50th issue and 13th anniversary!), we hope you’ll join us in looking outward: apart from subscribing to our newsletter and international Book Club, following us in our daily blog, on Facebook, Twitter, our two Instagram feeds, and our newly launched Threads account, we invite you to come on board behind the scenes (apply by Aug 1st) or submit your own translations—who knows? you might share the same fate as contributor Anton Hur, double 2022 International Booker Prize longlistee and, as of eleven days ago, translator of BTS! Finally, if the work we do has similarly changed your life for the better, please consider advertising on our platforms, partnering with us on a Special Feature, or signing up as a sustaining or masthead member.

A toast to horizons in all their myriad forms—especially those that broaden perpetually!

READ THE ISSUE NOW

Translation Tuesday: “sailing to batavia” by Zen Hae

July 18, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by George A. Fowler

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand.

This Translation Tuesday, to coincide with our Summer Issue and its standout Indonesian Special Feature, the spotlight is on the subtle, elegant prose of Zen Hae. A colonial administrator longs for the comforts of his nyai —his Indonesian concubine—and the febrile sensations of the land he has subjugated, plundered, and since departed. He has sucked hard on its every pleasure, and the taste has brought everything into question.

may you my nyai be always under the lord’s protection—who allows interest on loans and subjugation of new worlds. be well in your acceptance of all things.

if this lowly one sails to batavia, nyai, wear a blouse and the best batik cloth. and betel nut…chew it gaily—use gambier from barus and quicklime from banten to perfect its redness. there’s no need for a parasol. that’s because we’ve missed the batavia sun from the very start. that’s the eye that kisses our ancestors on the fourth day. under it they supposed the swampland was a future heaven and the bare-chested men were sheep with no shepherd. someday that is where our kingdom shall be made real.

related thereto, wait for this lowly one in jacatra’s bay. welcome him at the mouth of the ciliwung with a three-blossom smile.

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand. we have swallowed months of curses at sea, and have crawled across almost the entire earth, with a map more wondrous than a dream. we have sojourned at the cape of hope, at goa, coromandel, columbo, malacca, also cities wiped out before dawn. a third of us are dead, another third sick and will die the moment we arrive, and one or two now gone mad. we, though, the strongest men, remain.

we smelled the scent of liquor in the brick houses in the south. that one was he who subdued the mountain wind and boiled our blood into adulthood. we have dreamed for you nyais to pour it into cups when we are tired of building this city and would like to know what will happen ten seconds before doomsday. if this unworthy one grows old, oh lord, even if he shuts his eyes, let it not be at the end of the sword or muzzle of a cannon, nor even from malaria or dysentery, let it be only in your embrace alone, amongst the fragrance and warmth of spices.

if this unworthy one steps foot in batavia, nyai, receive us, your children too: our blood has been tainted and given birth to across the ocean.

Translated from the Indonesian by George A. Fowler

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Winter 2023: Highlights from the Team

February 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Caridad Svich, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Georgina Fooks, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, and Thuy Dinh

Dip your toe into our milestone Winter 2023 issue with these recommendations from our global team!

I found, as I sat down to read this issue, that what I was hungry for was urgency, vitality, wit and I found pieces that gave me what I was looking for. “There’s No Cure for the Dead” by Nazli Karabiyikoglu (tr. Ralph Hubbell) weaves a breathtakingly complex tapestry, rife with competing rhythms and energies. Selim Özdoğan’s “Seven Difficulties and One Ever-Narrowing Path” (tr. Katy Derbyshire) brought exactly the acerbic, incisive voice I needed. The Alfred Döblin story “The Woman Who Walked In Her Sleep” (tr. Joachim Redner) was filled with great verbs, gestures, colors, sounds, taking the reader on a dizzying trajectory, a plummet, really, from the character swanning about Berlin, showing off his colorful fashion ensemble, to a murderous rag doll come to life. Menke Katz’s poems with their structural challenges around diminishing or growing numbers of syllables and the love of Yiddish had me re-reading them and admiring the translation. And Aco Šopov’s deep, painful poems (tr. Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer) after the devastation of the 1963 Skopje earthquake show how despair communicates across decades and has much to say to us about loss and survival now, sixty years later.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

This issue I was particularly blown away by the quality of the interviews published. The César Aira interview conducted by Michal Zechariah is truthfully hilarious, and the line of questioning really allows his trademark wit and absurdism to shine through. I found Geetanjali Shree’s interview with Rose Bialer to be incredibly generous and thoughtful, fascinating and sharp. In both cases, I thought a really strong sense of their writing came through thanks to the interviewers. The visual section brought together two incredible artists—I’m researching the interplay of poetic text and space at the moment, so Lynn Xu’s thinking (teased out by Laura Copelin) really spoke to me, and I appreciated the climate focus of Bahia Shehab’s work, and her interview with Heather Green. Last but certainly not least, I loved Jared Joseph’s review of Johannes Göransson’s Summer. As a researcher, Göransson’s thinking on poetry translation has been incredibly insightful, and I enjoyed the same insights applied to his work, really engaging in depth with poetry as a genre and mode of being. As a bonus, I thought the criticism section was pleasantly varied in terms of geographies and genres!

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

All the fiction pieces in this issue are truly marvelous, as if they’re in conversation with one another! For example, Kim Cho Yeop’s “Laura” (tr. Sukyoung Sukie Kim) and Dalih Sembiring’s “Floccinaucinihilipilificatius” (tr. Avram Maurits) can be seen as companion pieces, as both stories deal with corporeal limitations and spiritual transcendence. Laura’s sci-fi context, on various conditions related to body dysmorphia, eloquently evokes the plight of non-binary and transgender groups, while Floccinaucinihilipilificatius represents a metaphorical lotus—its trajectory from pain and putrefaction toward the light of maternal love. There’s a sense of metaphysical wonder to both stories—even though one is inspired by science and the other by magical realism. READ MORE…

Di Antara Akses dan Penolakan / In Between Access and Refusal: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka

January 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the more people are made to forget the names of our relatives who are flora, fauna, sea, earth, and sky.

Much has been said about Khairani Barokka’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary body of work, spanning literature—spoken word poetry, dystopian fiction, scholarly texts—and media—textual, visual, performance. In the journal Research in Drama Education, she is an academic exploring “the limits of access and the framing of disabled performers from non-Western backgrounds in Western contexts.” According to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, however, she is a poet of “ecocritical agenda advancing environment justice against deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, pollution, further revaluing indigeneity to the more-than-human.” 

In this interview, I asked Barokka about Modern Poetry in Translation, the London-based magazine where she serves as editor; her movement between genres; and translating from the languages of her homeland, Indonesia—including BISINDO or Indonesian Sign Language. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In your Catapult essay “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words,” you made a case for maintaining an “active ethos of not italicizing supposedly foreign words,” with the hope that those in the publishing industry would follow suit. Can you speak more on how publications in the North Atlantic, and even Anglophone ones within the Global South, perpetuate a myth of “cultural purity” through linguistic gatekeeping? 

Khairani Barokka (KB): It’s been really heartening to receive the kind responses people and publications have had to that article over the past two years, and it even caused Massachusetts Review to change their house style, which was very encouraging. It’s the best feeling when colleagues say that they’ve changed the minds of editors by sending them the piece, which I hope has saved the significant amount of time we writers can spend arguing these points. 

I think the perception of certain words or names as ‘foreign’ does have to do with some publications’ regulations of house style, in which the word ‘foreign’ is not put in quotation marks, i.e., ‘Be careful with foreign words.’ And there have been some people who respond positively to my article, but still don’t put ‘foreign’ in quotation marks, when those quotation marks say a lot about gatekeeping. The ‘Other’ is fixed in many imaginations, which is interesting when you work in a country like the United Kingdom—where names and words come from so many corners of the globe, yet foreignising them is still de rigueur in many minds. Someone can be part of British society, and their name can still be regarded as ‘foreign,’ even if they’re a British citizen or born here (and of course, we can get into the hierarchies of bureaucracy and migration status!).

This has much to do with a certain ‘mythical English reader,’ which is usually assumed to be white, middle class, and monoglot; colleagues like Anton Hur have really been pushing back against this. Why can’t we, as supposed outsiders, be the idealised English reader for translations? Why isn’t the responsibility of a translation tied back to the linguistic communities it’s translated from, many members of which shouldn’t be forced to make literature ‘understandable’ to a very narrow demographic? The more we recognise these dynamics, the more we can unpack and minimise colonial tendencies in the literary arts. God knows it was assumed we as Indonesian children knew all the references in translated Enid Blyton books, for instance. It’s about cultural dominance, and the assumptions that go with that. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Pangkon” by Dalih Sembiring

December 6, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Nana

But how different the taste and aroma of milk mixed in coffee ground with green beans, she thought.

This Translation Tuesday, our story takes place in a makeshift warung pangkon—a lap café—where the young Mita waitresses for her male customers in Kalibata, Jakarta. Dalih Sembiring, while better known for his translation of Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan’s Man Tiger, proves himself a beguiling storyteller in Nana’s mesmerising translation. First published in the 2010 queer anthology Orang Macam Kita (People Like Us), “Pangkon” is a moving story of work and the affinities between women. 

She was nine years old, then. She brought home a packet of sweet condensed milk freely supplied by the school, which she mixed with a glass of warm water and later added a small spoon of coffee. No one else was at home, but she was cautious. Bapak could suddenly appear and scold her. Bapak said, coffee is for older people—for adults.

But how different the taste and aroma of milk mixed in coffee ground with green beans, she thought. She was nine years old, then. Yet to understand why some things are okay to do, and others not. It was not in her nature to question for reason. It was enough that she knew what was pleasurable was pleasurable, and what was not remained to be rejected. That is why she gets confused, now, at how blurry the lines that divide the right, the wrong, and the plain disgusting are.

“Where’s my bloody coffee, Cak!” shouts Bang Uwi to Cak Par, who is busy juggling his jars of coffee and sugar.

“Wait, one second!” Cak Pardi’s voice booms. “Who will it be tonight?”

“Mita will do, Cak. She’s like a drug.”

Bang Uwi’s words automatically invite laughter from all the men here.

The sound of rain on the roofs seems to compete with the increasingly loud chattering and cackling, and the loudspeakers drone a D’lloyd song from the VCD player. The rhythm of steel tires upon train tracks can sometimes be heard from outside. The chilly air coaxes the women on laps to press closer upon the bodies of their customers. Kretek smoke congregates thickly in the room as a sign: the night is still young. READ MORE…