Experience the world anew through non-human eyes in “Vivarium,” our Spring 2023 issue! From macaques to marmots, muntjacs to mosshoppers and microscopic prokaryotes, a superabundance of literary life overflows from 30 different countries. In this thriving biosphere, you’ll find work from Estonia and Oman flowering in the same soil as Alaa Abu Asad’s Wild Plants and our first entry from Bolivia via Pulitzer Prizewinner Forrest Gander. The same Pangaean ecosystem sustains our animal-themed special feature headlined by Yolanda González, recipient of the 2001 Premio Café Gijón Prize, and 2018 Booker International longlistee Wu Ming-Yi. Alongside these, there are the always thought-provoking words of Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, which bloom in both the Interview and Poetry section—the latter also shelters Fernando Pessoa, whose brilliant co-translators Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari have rendered him in one of his most mordant heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos.
Place: Italy
Our Spring 2023 Edition Is Here!
Featuring Fernando Pessoa, Franca Mancinelli, Wu Ming-Yi, and Yolanda González in our animal-themed special feature
Translation Tuesday: [Not the truth] by Riccardo Benzina
I never told you. / Now I let the trap speak / for me.
For Translation Tuesday, Italian poet Riccardo Benzina shows us the psychic toll of lies upon the liar in this haggard confessional. His lines, slowed nearly to a slurring by ragged breaks and repetitions, and translated with care by Marco Malena, evoke the sort of exhaustion that only prolonged deception can cause. “Worn out is the idea,” indeed.
Not the truth. That’s why I’m telling you
I’d like to rest.
Worn out is the idea.
Yes I’d like to, I’d like to
if I can because
later on the doldrums will turn into a giant strut, almost
an entire world and I will be
entirely taken, you will be
entirely taken, we will be taken.
I’d like to rest my self as well, my self
you leave in the closet every time
burning a merciless cross
on the wall of your chest. The distance
unsewn, a desperate kiss on the windows.
I never told you.
Now I let the trap speak
for me. You’ll see
that I’ve read and not replied, that you don’t receive, you haven’t
received anything. READ MORE…
Words Like Gunpowder: An Interview with Najwa Bin Shatwan
What you consider unreasonable, logically fallic, or absurd is our ordinary reality. . .
Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist—or so you will find written across the pages of many journals’ and publishers’ websites, alongside her stories in Arabic and their English translations. But she is so much more, as anyone who has had the pleasure of reading her works can attest to. Born in a land continually reeling with political unrest, she has been denied the privilege of free learning—such as of foreign languages—and suppressed and prosecuted for shedding light on the suffering of people past and present. Still, she weaves magic with words, painting vivid scenes with surreal imagery, and draws you into dialogue and contemplation by first making you smile.
The imagery used in her pieces is enchanting, which is perhaps not a surprise given how images drive her. Her novel The Slave Yards, which made her the first Libyan writer to be shortlisted for the International Award for Arab Fiction, was catalyzed from an incident wherein she saw a photograph of Benghazi at a friend’s place; the photograph compelled her to show the reality and horrors of the slave trade in Libya. While there have been attempts to shut her down—which have succeeded in making her emigrate to Italy—her oppressors have failed to silence a voice that incorporates the many people, dialects, values, and thoughts she embodies.
Her latest publication, Catalogue of a Private Life, is a collection of short stories translated form Arabic by Sawad Hussain, and it is a tapestry that incorporates many dualities of a people and their identity: their quirks and rigidity, their ready acceptance of bizarre circumstances and tunnel vision in regular circumstances, their warm humour and the dread of their situations. It won the 2019 English PEN Translates award, and I had the pleasure to talk to her about her life as well as the stories in this collection.
Chinmay Rastogi (CR): Your work has been a guiding light towards the suffering of people in Libya, but it also unveils the atrocities conducted by people of the region in the past, as in The Slave Yards. How difficult is it to stand on middle ground, to give both accounts through your writing?
Najwa Bin Shatwan (NBS): Writing in culturally thorny areas such as the Arab region is not easy, especially if the writer dismantles topics of social or political sensitivity—whether from the past or the present. It is easy for a book’s subject to incite conflict or escalate into a declaration of hostility. Our writing, which focuses on real matters, creates enemies, and such antagonism does not stop at a point of view that differs from what the writer’s. Rather, it may escalate into bloodshed or physical assault, simply because the writer presents a proposal that is different from the society’s vision, and is not in line with the prevailing ideology.
I felt the ferocity of this difference in my writing in terms of its social and political orientation, and with the spread of freedom of expression—which reached a chaotic peak with the emergence of social media—it became possible for those who disagree with a writer to inflame or incite public opinion against them.
Words are like gunpowder—they can ignite at any moment, and the type of writing that touches open wounds is not welcome; people prefer to proceed with their lives in denial, and believe that adopting a false mental attitude regarding many issues is better than getting into trouble.
As a writer, I work honestly and impartially, without complacency, and I feel the danger to my life, to my chances and fortunes in general. READ MORE…
Political Mythmaking: On Barricade by Utpal Dutt
...in his attempt at creating a political myth, Dutt does not lose sight of his characters’ humanity.
Barricade by Utpal Dutt, translated from the Bengali by Ananda Lal, Seagull Books, 2022
The Indian playwright Utpal Dutt wrote that myth is one of the most crucial forms of political storytelling because of its ability to transcend time and space, becoming relevant over and over again in new contexts. In Towards A Revolutionary Theatre, which is simultaneously a memoir of staging radical plays amidst the tense politics of his native Indian state of West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s, and a manifesto about the necessity of leftist theatre, he cites William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as an example of a literary work that has “freed itself of the trappings of its own age and has become a gigantic myth,” continually reinventing itself for new political circumstances. This is seen in productions set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which form a critique of the tyranny, demagoguery, and mob rule that make such regimes possible.
Dutt’s play Barricade, which has been translated from the Bengali original by Indian theatre critic Ananda Lal and published by Seagull Books, is an attempt at such mythmaking. Set in the period just before the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany, the text is ostensibly about the party’s attempts to scapegoat their Communist rivals for the murder of an elderly political leader, but Dutt suggests throughout that the actual subject is the turbulent political situation then prevailing in West Bengal; the play was written in 1972, when the Congress-ruled government in Bengal was actively suppressing all forms of direct dissent.
However, as Lal said in a recent interview, “The fact that he set Barricade in 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, didn’t make his viewers think that it was remote from their lives. On the contrary, they connected with it viscerally, sympathised and cheered at the right moments.” This speaks to Barricade’s power as political myth, one which is increasingly relevant in the contemporary Indian context exactly fifty years after it was written, especially for its narration of how various democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, and the media are slowly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling party.
Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team
Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!
Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.
I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.
Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.
—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)
Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.
I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.
—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor
Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.
I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”
The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.
—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!
Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages
Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.
On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.
No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!
Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up
Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.
Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.
Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”
Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…
The World in Transformation, The Poem in Translation
A guide to translated poetry through our archives!
If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if not—consider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.
We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.
In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”
Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”
So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts. READ MORE…
Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature
The latest in world literature from Italy, the Philippines, and Croatia!
This week, our editors on the ground are bringing you news of summer literary festivities, publishers fighting back against silence, gatherings of award-winning writers, translation exhibitions, and more!
Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor, reporting from Italy
Italians are known for their ability to delight in la dolce vita, and this exuberance is never more evident than in the summer season, when the entire country throws itself into festivities. The Italian literary world is no exception: from June 9 to June 12, indie publisher festival Una marina di libri held its thirteenth edition in the massive open-air courtyard of Palermo’s Villa Filipina. Along with an indie book fair—which included publishers such as Edizioni E/O (Elena Ferrante’s Italian publisher), Iperborea (an Italian publisher specialised in translations of Northern European literature), La Nuova Frontiera (a Rome-based publisher focusing on Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language translations), and famed Palermitan publisher Sellerio—festival-goers were treated to poetry readings, music, wine, pizza, and magazine launches—such as that of Arabpop, a beguiling Italian magazine on its second issue, which is devoted to Arab art and literature. This year’s festival was dedicated to both Pier Paolo Pasolini and the thirty-year anniversary of the Capaci massacre (in which one of Palermo’s famed and beloved anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone, was murdered by Cosa Nostra, along with his wife and three police escorts). One such event featured theatre and music students from Teatro Biondo and Palermo’s Conservatory giving music-accompanied dramatic readings of pieces by Pasolini, Giuliana Saladino, and Leonardo Sciascia at various times and locations around the festival. Others featured educational talks for young people about famous anti-mafia figures including Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (Falcone’s friend and fellow beloved magistrate, murdered with five police escorts by Cosa Nostra less than two months after Falcone), and the presentation of Pietro Grasso and Alessio Pasquini’s new book Il mio amico Giovanni, in which the former spoke about his friendship with Falcone.
In other news, the shortlist for Italy’s most prestigious prize for book-length fiction, the Strega Prize, was announced on June 8. Among the nominees are Marco Amerighi, for his second novel Randagi (Strays); Fabio Bacà for his second novel Nova; Alessandra Carati for her first novel E poi saremo salvi (And then we’ll be safe); prior Strega nominee Mario Desiati for Spatriati (Patriates); Veronica Galletta for her second novel Nina sull’argine (Nina on the riverbank); Claudio Piersanti for Quel maledetto Vronskij (That damn Vronkskij); and Veronica Raimo for Niente di vero (Nothing true). I found the nominees list to be exciting, with many up-and-coming writers unearthed, along with more established writers that have yet to be appreciated in the Anglophone world. With the exception of Desiati, Piersanti, and Raimo, most are relative newcomers on their first or second book, and—with the exception of the latter two—have yet to be translated into English. READ MORE…
What’s New with the Crew? (May 2022)
Despite a quarter marked by global upheaval, our team members continued to publish and organize literary events
Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently co-organized—jointly with Isabelle Gribomont—an international week-long event on Literature and Computation which he capped off with an intermedia computational performance titled Code Is Poetry.
Blog Editor Darren Huang reviewed Diana Abu-Jaber’s “Fencing with the King” for the Los Angeles Review of Books on April 1.
In March, Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac was asked by the ALTA board to come back as interim president, after Anne Fisher resigned as president following the invasion of Ukraine. Elias-Bursac will serve in this capacity until November 2023.
Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood’s joint translation (with Peter Sherwood) of her mother’s memoirs My Seven Lives: Jana Juráňová in Conversation with Agneša Kalinová, published by Purdue University Press last October, was launched at an event in London on April 27.
Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new braided essay out in The Rupture and a short story in The Baltimore Review.
Assistant Managing Editor Marina Dora Martino’s poem “Death with Three Left Feet” was published in POETRY’s April issue, Exophony, featuring poets who write in English as an additional language.
Assistant Managing Editor Michal Zechariah published a review of Maayan Eitan’s Love (tr. by the author) at 3:am magazine and a review of Elizabeth Clark’s Boy Parts at The Rumpus. READ MORE…
In this month of new releases from literatures around the world, we present a poignant and transcendental collection of poems from Palestinian writer Maya Abun Al-Hayyat, a mesmerizing journey through Latin American from Croatian author Marko Pogačar, and a stunning psychological novel of detachment from Erica Mou, in her Anglophone debut. Read on to find out more!
You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah, Milkweed Editions, 2022
Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor
To raise one’s pen is a political act. As I write these words, it’s been less than forty-eight hours since journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot in Jenin. Having acted politically, having written politically, her death is now being used for political means. Words within and about war function as powerful political weapons, bandages, sirens, and songs, all in one. This is what Maya Abu Al-Hayyat shares with us through her incisive verse, as translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.
Lovers Swap Language
the way enemies exchanges stabs:
he takes a word from her lexicon
and she takes one from his book.
That’s how poems are made
and also bigoted speechesAnd when lovers and enemies sleep,
the ether carries a hot hum
the universe digests
unaffected.
Words weaponize, the world marches on, but Abu Al-Hayyat rests between breaths, demonstrating through a brilliant puzzle of verbal turns the ways in which trauma has distorted our time. This collection, You Can Be the Last Leaf, brings together verses from multiple times and tomes, holding them in conversation, exchanging the writer’s lexicons and books through the years, and digesting the whole in the face of an indifferent universe.
In his brilliant introduction, Joudah describes Abu Al-Hayyat’s place both as an individual soul but also as someone writing to the collective trauma of the Palestinian people. “The multifarious Palestinian voice lives on in Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s words, ordinary as grief and daily as laughter.” In the vein of the kitchen table, many of her poems do indeed touch on the quotidian, the life of motherhood and of aging, of love and family. “Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night,” for example, opens “Joint pain, high sugar, / rheumatic ailments, / a boy who missed school because of a cold”. Quickly, however, the shade of the larger region—of that political conflict—ghosts over the next lines. “mothers feel sadness for mysterious reasons, / like sadness over other mothers / who stand in public streets / holding photos of their sons’ / well-groomed faces / with sideburns and mustaches, / waiting for the camera to capture them / and their chapped hands.” Like Abu Akleh’s reporting, Abu Al-Hayyat’s verse is a camera, and what it captures, what it turns toward, is not only the violence but also the aftermath, the void left by time cut short.
In “Mahmoud,” for example, Abu Al-Hayyat imagines a different future for herself and her lover, who was killed by a bullet from Israeli forces on the first day of the second intifada, as Joudah tells us in his introduction. The poem opens in the hypothetical. “Mahmoud could have been our son. / I’d have objected to the name / and, for family reasons, you’d have insisted on it.” Midway through the poem though, other temporal modes wriggle in. “You’d have forgiven him, / you’re kind like that. He’d only smoked in secret. / But the first rock he’d have thrown / at soldiers at the checkpoint, / to raise his heroic stock in Mana’s eyes, / would have declared war in our house / biting followed by flying slippers.” Mahmoud is forgiven in another timeline, but the lover is kind even now. Mahmoud smoked, but he only hypothetically threw the rock. The poem ends with a slap, the same slap which never landed on Mahmoud’s cheek. READ MORE…
Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team
Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!
I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.
—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant
I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.
—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor
Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?
—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor
Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!
Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.
On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:
The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.
March feels like a month of renewal, and our selections of translated literatures this week presents a wondrous and wide-ranging array of original thinking, ideations, philosophies, and poetics. From a revelatory collection of Chinese science fiction, to art critic María Gainza’s novel of forgery and authenticity, to Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays on writing, and a debut collection of poetry from Iranian-Swedish poet Iman Mohammed—there is no shortage of discovery amidst these texts. Read on to find out more!
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, Tordotcom Publishing, 2022
Review by Ah-reum Han
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a trailblazing new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, created by and featuring the works of an all-female and nonbinary team of writers, editors, and translators. As a lifelong fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre but new to contemporary Chinese literary scene, I found this collection a true gift—warm and generous to the novice like myself, for whom Chinese literature has only ever been accessible through translation. Under the meticulous curatorial vision of Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, the stories and essays within celebrate decorated and emerging voices alike, indicating at an exciting future of sci-fi and fantasy for digital natives in our culturally porous world.
As you enter the collection, leave everything at the door and hold on tight. This book will whisk you away from one uncanny valley to the next—from a world where children raise baby stars as pets, to a near future where parenting is turned into a computer game, to a fisherman’s village where they practice the art of dragonslaying, to a woman on the road mysteriously burdened with a corpse, and much more. The title story, “The Way Spring Arrives” by Wang Nuonuo (trans. Rebecca F. Kuang), situates itself amidst the babbling creeks where giant fish carry the rhythm of the seasons on its back, delivering spring from year to year. In “A Brief History of Beinakan Disaster as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu (trans. Ru-Ping Chen), we are caught in a post-apocalyptic world, where people live under the threat of devastating heat currents and history pervades as literal memory capsules passed down by a select few. Despite the imaginative heights these stories reach, each creates enough space in its strangeness for us to reexamine our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Often, folklore and fantasy crosses into sci-fi and allegory, and readers are left feeling unsettled in even the most familiar landscapes.
Between these stories, you’ll find essays on genre, gender, and translation that enrich the surrounding fictions; these intelligent texts help orient readers in socio-political, historical, and global contexts, while looking to the future of this young genre. In “Net Novels and the She Era,” Xueting Christine Ni discusses the role the internet has played in disrupting gender norms within publishing—particularly in the case of the popular online sci-fi serials. In Jing Tsu’s essay on the collection at hand, she points out: “This volume shows that there is also a difference between science fiction about women and other marginalized genders and the ones written by them.” We also hear from translators, such as Rebecca F. Kuang, who writes about the symbiotic relationship between writer, translator, and reader—the choices implicit in the things left unsaid. “What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia is a playful de-reconstruction of the famous English pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—as both story and essay, illuminating the act of translation in a modern world of search engines, artificial intelligence, translation software, and media. As the author notes: “intersexuality is the dominant mode to create as well as to read most of the works in our time: quotation, collage, tribute, deconstruction, parody.” This collection pioneers its own conversation around its stories. We are paused at intervals to consider: who are we really, and where do we go from here? READ MORE…