Place: Italy

Strangeness, Discovery, and Adventure: An Interview with Enchanted Lion’s Claudia Bedrick

The publisher brings world literature to Anglophone children. Plus, three recommended titles.

Before 2020 became the annus horribilis, fans of Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari had awaited it with excitement, as it marked the one hundredth anniversary of Rodari’s birth. Countless events and celebration had been planned, many of which still took place virtually, but perhaps even more interestingly, new editions and translations of and about Rodari’s work were issued. Among these is the first complete English translation of Favole al telefono (Telephone Tales), translated by Antony Shugaar and illustrated by Valerio Vidali for the independent children’s press Enchanted Lion Books.

Although Rodari is arguably the greatest Italian children’s author and his fame extends well beyond Italy’s borders, especially in the former Soviet Union, Rodari was never read much in the United States and Anglophone world in general, partly because of his ties with the Communist Party. Intrigued by their choice to publish Telephone Tales now, I had a Zoom conversation with Claudia Bedrick, the publisher, editor, and art director at Enchanted Lion. We began by discussing Rodari and ended up talking about children’s literature in translation more generally.

Anna Aresi: How and why did you decide to publish Telephone Tales now? Of course there was the anniversary, but Rodari was never famous in the United States. Do you think readers are more receptive now? The book has been a great success!

Claudia Bedrick: Yes, maybe. In fact, it was only coincidentally that it was published for the anniversary. We thought it would be published a lot sooner. The translator and I started talking about Telephone Tales seven years ago, but there were delays and it just happened that it was published last year (in 2020). My interest in Rodari stems from The Grammar of Fantasy, which exists in English, translated by Jack Zipes. That’s a book that I’ve known for a long time, a book that I’ve read and relied upon in the formation of Enchanted Lion. So when the translator contacted me about Rodari and Telephone Tales, I was already familiar with him, and I think this was a major difference between me as an editor and other editors he had spoken with. Like you said, a lot of people in the English-speaking world have no idea who Rodari is, even though he is arguably the greatest children’s writer of Italian culture, or one of them in any case.

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Meeting in Positano: The Late Modernist Fiction of Goliarda Sapienza

The novel is easy to read, but it is not an easy read.

Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore, Other Press, 2021

Meeting in Positano was the very last novel that Goliarda Sapienza wrote before she fell to her death in 1996 at her home in Gaeta. Frustrated by many failed attempts to publish her writing throughout her life, Sapienza’s ultimate book was fraught with the existentialist neuroses of modernism as she searched for ways through and out of its sprawling, vicious embrace. Between its fragile subjectivity and ambivalent subject, Meeting in Positano traces the psychology of its protagonist, caught between film production in the Italian capital and the pacifying lure of the titular out-of-the-way town—wherein a fading daughter of the old aristocracy has also come to shed her qualms with the pace, pressure, and emptiness of materialism, money, and men.

The daughter of Sicilian socialists—who, among many plaudits, published Antonio Gramsci—Sapienza lived along that drift in which sensitive artists become hardened intellectuals before succumbing to outright revolution. Despite the environment of ardent intellectualism, the wayward, postwar Sapienza children were afloat in an Italy which resembled a rudderless raft in the Mediterranean—a country that had gone slack in its attempted confrontation of the country’s unresolved tendencies to fascism. In its quest for spiritual emigration, the literary work of Goliarda Sapienza details the inner lives of her fellow Italians, challenged by the trials of collective renewal following years of unspeakable despair during and after the years of World War II—even if the traces of those years are only seen, or merely felt, after the fact.

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2021)

From getting shortlisted for (or winning!) prestigious prizes to publications and performances, we were busy making waves this quarter!

Contributing editor Adrian Nathan West’s translation of Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi’s Italian translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova won the 2020 All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature & The Institute for Literary Translation’s “Writers of the Silver Age about War” translation contest.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki was awarded a Graduate Nonfiction Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for two essays, one of which is forthcoming in Wordgathering. The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, will be giving on June 11 for the third year in a row a computational performance titled #GraphPoem at the world’s most important digital humanities event, DHSI 2021.

Editor-at-Large for Japan David Boyd’s new co-translation with Sam Bett of Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven will be published later this month on May 25.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short story in Arts & Letters and a short craft essay on Tobias Wolff in Fiction Writers Review.

Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer‘s translation from the German of an extract of We Have Lived Here Since We Were Born by Andreas Moster appeared in the anthology Elemental, published in March by Two Lines Press.

Interested in joining the team? Watch this page next week for a very important announcement!

The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “a wicked king” by Lucia Marchetti

With Italy in lockdown again as it battles a third wave of COVID-19, Lucia Marchetti urges hope in the following response to the pandemic.

For two and a half months last year, we curated the series: In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak, featuring writers from Argentina to Portugal to Hong Kong. One year on, with Italy in lockdown again as it battles a third wave of COVID-19, we present another piece responding to the pandemic, tinged with hope, by Italian poet Lucia Marchetti in the endangered language of al djalètt pramzàn, spoken in the province of Parma in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. This poem was published as a voice recording by local newspaper La Gazzetta di Parma at the pandemic’s outbreak last year. Co-translator Julia Pelosi-Thorpe writes: “In it, Marchetti describes COVID as the crown (wordplay with ‘corona,’ ‘crown’ in Italian) on the head of a wicked king. This poem is co-translated by me and my mother, Ligia Pelosi. She grew up near Parma, and migrated with my nonni to Naarm (now known as Melbourne), where I was born, as a young teenager. After I produced a first full draft, my mother and I listened together, capturing any missed or misheard words. I then revised the piece into a final draft.” 

 

a wicked king

reviews a not-too-distant world

a bad king 👑corona👑 on his head

sowed death

among humans

swelling like a moonlit tide and all

the population were divided friends

and kin watching one another from a distance

here a situation very grey yet king

with his 👑corona👑 still advancing

advancing bringing grief and ruin

and bit by bit the people were dismayed

then when they really understood

their lesson all was suddenly recalled

so many seaside trips recalled lovely trips

up and down the mountains and their unrest

to find a place to live a cornucopia

they realised happiness had

been close in so many moments

wishing to go back

from the bottom of their hearts feeling the burst again

wishing to tell all they love them

to embrace the first person found along the street as if a cousin

to celebrate a life renewed

 

Translated from al djalètt pramzàn by Ligia Pelosi and Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe

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Ernesto Calzavara: Between Dialects and Words

Calzavara had left Italian behind, a language “in which he could never raise his voice.”

In 1966 the poet Ernesto Calzavara, born in Treviso in the northeast of Italy, published e. Parole mate, Parole pòvare (And. Mad words, Poor words). This collection of poems written in the trevisàn dialect became the emblem of Calzavara’s rebellion against the disappearance of local idioms in favour of the Italian language, but it was also his first step breaking away from the Neodialettali poets and the rural themes and settings of traditional vernacular poetry. The puns and wordplay in this collection are irretrievable in the Italian languagethey are part of Treviso as the landscape is, or the weatherbut Calzavara believed that dialects had an inherent linguistic power, and only by tapping into that power could they break free from their condition of dying languages. In this essay, Assistant Editor Marina Dora Martino, looks at Calzavara’s poetry in the context of Italian local languages in danger of fading away forever, and considers what it means to remember and forget a language, a place, and a way of life.

Growing up, I absorbed the notion that speaking in dialect was vulgar and inadequate, especially at school. I am not sure where or when my first encounter with the local dialect even occurred—my family (originally from Naples) didn’t speak it, the schools didn’t use it, and most of my friends practiced it only with their grandparents, if at all. Treviso, my hometown, is an ancient city in the northeastern plains of Italy, whose local variation of the Veneto dialect is known as trevisàn—the Veneto dialect being a sort of regional language understood everywhere in the Veneto region, from the mountains to the sea. Excluded from school and spoken rarely among friends, Veneto lingered somewhere at the edge of my life for a long time. It was only by chance, picking up a secondhand book at the town market, that I found out about the existence of local poets, and an entirely new literary world opened to me. This is how I met Ernesto Calzavara’s poetry and realised that I had to rethink everything I knew about the dialects of my country.

It is widely known that Italy has many regional dialects, but not everybody knows that they are more than a bit of an accent and the occasional slang word. Far from being only a distortion of standard Italian, dialects are complex and ancient ways of speaking—in some cases languages in their own right—and they have been around since long before standard Italian even existed. They were known as “volgari,” from vulgo (a.k.a. not Latin but the languages that most common people spoke in their daily life) and they had started emerging from Latin itself as early as the eighth century, transformed by virtue of contact with pre-roman local languages (Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Messapic, and the like) but also, throughout the years, by the influence (or invasion) of tongues from other lands, such as Gaulish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. The volgari were generally considered inadequate for the high expressions of the mind, so it was normal praxis for intellectuals to write and discuss their work in Latin. This was until Dante and Petrarch came around, bringing their Tuscan dialect to the forefront of poetic innovation and proving once and for all that volgari could take on the most exalted topics (the Sicilian school of poets had prepared the ground in this sense) as well as the lowest. Indeed, in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante went even further and made the argument (in Latin, so that it couldn’t be ignored by the intellectuals) that the mother tongue was more noble because it was learnt from infancy, and non-mediated by grammar. Which makes it all the more ironic that his fourteenth-century Tuscan (and Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s) would later be picked by sixteenth-century intellectuals as the basis for standard Italian, as the result of an educated debate on which of the peninsula’s many languages should become its lingua franca; in reality, a debate of intellectuals for intellectuals that had little or nothing to do with the life of the vulgo. In 1861, the year of Italian unification, 78% of Italians were illiterate, and most of them spoke only their regional language. The unionist phrase “we made Italy, now we must make Italians” shows the uneasiness of a young country whose people couldn’t communicate with each other from region to region, which led to standard Italian being made the language of education, politics, administration, and entertainment in the attempt to “italianise” Italy. Despite this, by the 1950s and ’60s the gap between the official role of Italian and its place in the life of people, particularly in rural areas, was still shockingly wide. With the arrival of television the nation found its most powerful tool for counteracting illiteracy: TV programs like Telescuola and Non è mai troppo tardi (it is never too late) are believed to have taught half a million Italians how to read and write.

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What’s New with the Crew? (February 2021)

From writing columns to publishing translations, we’ve been keeping busy!

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Andreea Scridon will have a poetry pamphlet published in 2022 with Broken Sleep Books; in addition, she will be featured in Art and Letters’ anthology 14 International Younger Poets‚ forthcoming this summer.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi has begun writing a monthly column on children’s literature in translation for Italian kid lit blog Scaffale Basso.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki published a poem in Counterlock Journal.

Chamini Kulathunga, Editor-at-Large for Sri Lanka, published her interview with Liyanage Amarakeerthi on Hopscotch Translation on February 9, 2021.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, has joined Cicada, a new literary magazine featuring nuanced and inclusive writing; it also welcomes translations.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, has initiated an internationally funded project on digital literacy, DigiLiBeRo, spearheaded together with Ana Iolanda Voda and Roxana Patras.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from The Melee by Valentina Maini

The morning is a badly drawn sunrise, there are clumps of light to the left of the scene, the canvas is lacerated in several points.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman loses her hold on reality in the aftermath of her family’s personal and political turmoil in this excerpt from Valentina Maini’s critically-acclaimed 2020 novel, The Melee. Translator Sean McDonagh introduces us to the novel’s protagonists: “Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five-year-old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents.” In the following passage, we see Gorane’s dreamlike world through a powerfully-voiced omniscient narration. Childhood memories careen into present-day hallucinations as we veer further into first person—and deeper into the world of an unstable and unreliable narrator. This meandering stream of consciousness takes life through Maini’s virtuosic prose and masterful ability to warp perspective across numerous narrative threads. A lyrically stunning debut novel from an award-winning poet.

from The Melee

They say they don’t need medicine, they keep repeating that they’re healed. They look at her as if they were thirsty, but as soon as Gorane offers them a glass of water, they shake their heads and say: take us home. It’s impossible to make them stop. She signs some sort of verification form with her typically illegible handwriting. The nurse is called Robledo, she has blonde hair gathered in a bun and white latex gloves. Robledo is an open and frivolous surname that weighs a lot less than hers. It’s the surname of someone who cures. The border between Robledo and Moraza is that between Spain and her home planted in the land they call Euskadi. She moves closer to the first bed, her mother’s. As soon as Gorane comes to a halt, her mother raises herself into a seated position. The strain of that elementary motion moves her face, it seems to detach from the neck, distancing itself and fluctuating in the ether like a fish with no eyes. Gorane follows it with her gaze, she almost doesn’t speak, the fish doesn’t see but continues to swim in the air as if it knew by heart every angle of the hospital bedroom, as if its instinct was enough to give it faith, to not lose itself. This is her mother, this blind fish. Then she sees her father curled up on his side, she sees his incredibly lean and broad back and she thinks of the Oma Forest. In her poor repertoire of metaphors, her father was always a tree trunk, an oak. Gorane is a slender and dry branch that won’t break off. Gorane has spent her life fearing the foot that will break the equilibrium, split the frond; the blood of the branch that will sully the earth like an ancient tear. Her blood is now stone because of a sadistic sprite that has tested its pointless powers on her. She touches the cold shoulder of her father who wears a white t-shirt with red hand-drawn writing. The writing proclaims revolutionary words that she knows off by heart and no longer wants to hear. There’s a twisted snake that wraps itself around a badly drawn axe. They will spare her yet another political tirade, the identity that must form itself and grow through the political, which is nothing without a slogan on its backside. Eyes that shine for other people’s words in which to recognise themselves forever. To learn by heart: shout in unison, and keep the rhythm by clapping your hands. Finished sentences, in protest if possible. Without this you are nothing and you can never articulate the revival of your people towards liberty. But this time, her parents don’t attack with the usual slogans because they are tired, because the exertions don’t help to obstruct the path to a swollen body. It’s a kind of struggle that they don’t know, the one against the body that rots. She goes into the bathroom and washes her hands. The first time for Mum who, blind, slams against the furniture of the hospital bedroom, smiling still, saying everything is fine. A second splash for the back of Dad, his wooden head hidden within his jet black hair. The water will wash away all of the sins, if the job is done meticulously, if Gorane will commit herself to scrub at length, to not leave anything to chance and to the stupid belief that a handful of prayers will be enough to receive pardon. She returns to the room where her parents watch each other, smiling, continuing to talk quietly, or to sing. Gorane would like to tell them that the only reasonable option is rest, to close their eyes and await what passes, what heals, but she says it in silence, to herself, before her mother and her father disappear, engulfed by the first, then by the second swollen eyelid.

They walk side by side along the hospital corridor, Gorane keeps her right hand in her father’s left, her left hand in her mother’s right. The beaten bodies are theirs, but it is Gorane who staggers. Strength is applied to the legs, she squeezes her parent’s fingers, which barely reciprocate. The patrons, the relatives of the sick, the patients, watch only her at the centre of that human line that proceeds like an army in an on-the-ground conflict.

“We’ll need to take public transport, you shouldn’t put yourselves under too much strain.”

Gorane pronounces the words in slow motion, expanding each syllable, she makes every consonant snap as if to stamp it in the air, indelible. She continues to look in front of her, the panorama changes, the people enlarge, her body is as weak as theirs.

“We want to walk” they say in unison. “We need to walk.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2021

The latest in literature from South Korea, Italy, and The Netherlands!

Amidst the uncertainty of what the new year will bring, one surety is that wonderful literature remains to be discovered. In our first selections of new translations for 2021, there is a masterclass in historical fiction about a chess champion whose awe-inspiring trajectory was regrettably tainted with prevailing prejudice; a Dutch memoir that reconciles public and private definitions of sexuality, personhood, and recognition; and a Korean novel that beautifully illustrates that median pain between a love of life and an acknowledgement of its ephemerality. Read on to uncover their discrete and distinct gifts!

kim

My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-young Kim, Forge Books, 2021

 Review by Ah-reum Han, WoW Editor

Meet Areum Han, the sixteen-year-old boy with a rapid-aging genetic disorder that is at the palpitating heart of Kim Ae-ran’s bestselling novel, My Brilliant Life, translated by Chi-young Kim. “This is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child,” writes young Areum, in the prologue to his own story. Readers learn some simple truths about Areum from the get-go: he has an uncanny way with words, he loves his parents deeply, and he doesn’t have much time left. But don’t be fooled; this story is not about the sick, nor is it about overcoming suffering. This quirky, bighearted book crackles with life on every page.

My Brilliant Life is a bildungsroman in fast-forward. We enter Areum’s life on the cusp of his final act—and, incidentally, at the age that his own young parents had him. What ensues is a tale that is tender and funny, startling and sad. He writes about his condition:

People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too; not very many people in my situation have lived past their sixteenth birthdays. But I believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary, in the living of an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age. To me the miracles are my parents, my aunts and uncles, our next-door neighbors, the middle of summer and the middle of winter. I’m no miracle.

We become familiar with this enviable “ordinary” through Areum’s watchful eyes, meeting his father, Daesu, who is equal parts foolhardy and brash but with a boyish charm, and Mira, his proud, sharp-tongued, and fiercely protective mother. We see how they each grieve privately and publicly; how they fight, curse, and joke; how they keep secrets to be kind. We watch their simple moments of ordinary miracles: eating shaved ice together, or laying on the living room floor with face masks on.

With Areum’s growing medical expenses, Daesu and Mira struggle to make ends meet, and reluctantly agree to let Areum go on a television show. Through this national exposure, Areum has new encounters with the ordinary. For one, he meets Seoha, a seeming kindred spirit and young girl who reaches out to him after seeing him on the show. Their email exchanges soon bloom into something more—the thrill of first love, tempered with the gravity of impending loss. As Areum’s circumstances quickly unravel, we ache for him to be a teenager with teenage-sized problems. We wish him the mistakes and failures, the freedom to pout and sulk.

In all this, Daesu and Mira do what they can to give Areum a normal life, and Areum knows it. This stereo vision—Areum’s awareness of his parents’ struggles and their lives both before and beyond his own—shows us how Daesu and Mira were also unceremoniously thrust into adulthood. My Brilliant Life is a coming of age tale, not just for Areum, but also for his parents, whose stories bookend his. This is a story that is very aware of its own symmetry: the two unlikely seventeen-year-olds who became parents; their child destined never to outlive them; and the stirrings of a newborn as their first slips away. The story folds into neat patterns that amplify life’s indifferent poetry. READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

Dissipatio H.G. is . . . an opportunity to unspool our own reaction to the loss of mankind—and perhaps find in it an unexpected sympathy.

Quietly, almost as if afraid to disturb, a new year has made its way into the world. The recession of 2020 into the distance of the past presents an opportunity to not only evaluate the changed world, but also to contemplate our responsibilities in readjusting, amending, and moving on. In a fitting selection, our last Book Club title of 2020 is Guido Morselli’s acclaimed novel, Dissipatio H.G., a text that reconciles the stark realities of mourning with poignant examinations of presence in and amidst so much absence. It is a rare feeling that has somehow, incredibly, become common: What is one to do upon waking up to an unrecognizable world? 

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall, New York Review Books Classics, 2020

Near the outset of Guido Morselli’s short and surreal 1977 novel, Dissipatio H.G., the unnamed narrator sits in a cave at the edge of a steep drop into an underground lake, getting up the nerve to end it all. Meanwhile, down in the valley, in the invented, industrious city of Chrysopolis, the economy booms, not unlike the growth Morselli observed in post-war Italy. Leery of society’s so-called progress, the narrator has retreated to an isolated property in the mountains—but even that is threatened; he’s pushed to the lip of nonexistence when he finds a cluster of numbered stakes in the ground “a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat.” After a fever and a frantic investigation, he uncovers that a company plans to build a highway there, complete with entrance ramps, a cloverleaf, and a motel. “As Durkheim might say,” the narrator reflects, “there’s your trigger.”

In the end, he abandons his plan after contemplating the quality of the Spanish brandy he’s brought along for liquid courage. His body’s physical matter simply refuses to accede to his will; he bangs his head on the way out of the cave, just as a powerful groan of thunder rolls through the valley. “The truth is,” he thinks, “a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost.”

But when he returns from the cave, the narrator discovers an entirely unexpected third possibility: while he has chosen to live, the human race has vanished. He inspects the newsroom where he once worked as a journalist, placing calls across Europe and across the Atlantic to determine that for all functional purposes, he is the last man alive. “I’m now Mankind,” he says. “I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S).” He is, he says, “Incarnation of the epilogue.” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

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

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

What it Takes to Come Home Again: Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts in Review

Terranova [. . .] foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism.

Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Seven Stories, 2020

Nadia Terranova’s sophomore novel—her first to be published in English—is a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma on a woman’s sentimental education. Originally published in 2018, Farewell, Ghosts tells the story of Ida, a thirty-six-year-old woman who lives in Rome and makes a living by writing stories for the radio. One morning in September, she receives a call from her mother, asking her to come home to Messina—a city that Ida has ceased to think of as hers—to help prepare their house for sale. In sorting through the objects of her childhood, Ida will be forced to revisit the trauma that defined her life: the sudden departure of her father when she was thirteen.

Although we are told that Ida’s father, Sebastiano, suffered from severe depression, his disappearance is never explained, nor is it clear if he is still alive. His fate, however, is of little consequence to the novel, which instead lingers with the living—those left behind in the wake of abandonment. Years after the event, Ida’s emotional growth has been stunted by the failure to come to terms with her pain, a failure exacerbated by the lack of a body to mourn, or even the certainty of death. As a result, Ida has grown into a woman who meticulously and egregiously avoids emotion, preferring to reroute her suffering via the “fake true stories” that she writes. She carries herself—and her relationships—with a composure that betrays a tumultuous undercurrent of repressed feelings, acquired through years of conscious disassociation.

There is, for instance, her marriage—described as a “lame creature”—to the dependable-if-too-bland Pietro, perfectly named for his rock-like reliability and immutability. As Ida remarks at some point, “our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.” Progressively, the novel reveals that this extreme reserve comes from Ida’s adolescent years, in which her mother entrusted her with the care of her father while she went—or, as Ida saw it, escaped—to work. The pain of these years and the culminating abandonment drove a wedge between the two women. “If there was an art in which my mother and I had become expert during my adolescence,” Ida says, “that art was silence.” Even decades later, their relationship is entirely modulated by her father’s absence, governed more by the things left unsaid than those they are able to utter.

It is to Terranova’s great merit that she is able to capture trauma’s potential to stop time in such a limpid manner. Among the novel’s many metaphorical figures (the house and its crumbling foundations, for one) is the alarm clock that belonged to Ida’s father, frozen at 6:16 a.m. on the day he left. “The alarm clock said six-sixteen,” Ida muses, “[and] would say six-sixteen forever.” Victorianists and fans of Dickens will sense a reference to Great Expectations, specifically to the morbidity of Satis House, where all the clocks had been stopped at twenty to nine, the exact time when Miss Havisham realized she’d been abandoned by her lover. Conjuring the specter of Miss Havisham makes abundantly clear just how high the stakes are for Ida, and the extent to which she risks being trapped in the prison of trauma. And while Dickens’s depiction of a woman ravaged by abandonment was inflected by his extraordinary gift for the grotesque, Terranova makes a similar claim about the dangers of remaining stuck in the circuity of grief, even if she foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Friend Daniele’s Flight” by Ernesto Franco

His hands were so clenched on the wheel that the knuckles stood out white from the force and concentration.

A flying lesson allegorizes the lifework of Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice in “My Friend Daniele’s Flight,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In this philosophical essay, writer and editor Ernesto Franco recounts Del Giudice’s views on the writer’s vocation, a discipline defined by the responsibilities of precise language and careful attention to the world. Del Giudice gives Franco the controls of his plane—upon which we are guided through Del Giudice’s philosophies on writing, friendship, and ways of knowing the world. Franco turns to three key words to describe Del Giudice’s enterprise: Sentire, the feeling that relies upon lived knowledge and experience to avoid sentimentality; Mania, the obsessive energy that demands precision and allows one to know the world; and Phantasia, a creative contrast to shallow, mimetic ways of writing. Franco’s memoir comes to a tragic revelation, but the allegory nonetheless has Del Giudice safely returning us from our flight, illustrating what his philosophies can teach us outside of literature.

“Here, now you take it,” Daniele tells me, continuing to look straight ahead while at the same time taking both hands off the controls. It is a cold, sunny autumn morning toward the end of the nineties. We have just taken off from Nicelli Airport in Venice-Lido aboard a single-engine touring plane, whose model I don’t remember, and which Daniele has stabilized to maintain altitude. I had just experienced the words that I have not forgotten and that I won’t ever forget: “The run-up to take-off is a metamorphosis; here is a pile of metal transforming itself into an aeroplane by the power of the air itself, each take-off is the birth of an aircraft, this time like all the others you had had the same experience, the same wonder at each metamorphosis.” The precise, imaginative words of Staccando l’ombra da terra for something I had never experienced before, because taking off on the grass aboard a small airplane, a small “machine” as Daniele would say, sitting beside the pilot, is something completely different from taking off on a normal airliner. Among other things, with the title Staccando l’ombra da terra he formulated for all of us non-pilots an action and an emotion that did not exist before, and did so with the paradoxical effect (how can a shadow take off from the ground?) of the precision of the words concurrent with the added “shadow” of meaning which they alluded to. I actually felt as if wings had sprouted from my shoulders, but I didn’t dare move. “Go on . . .” Daniele says with a knowing smile. And I place two hands on the control wheel, remaining stock-still amidst the roar of the “machine.” Who knows why, but I feel like I have to be ready to make a move and resist with a decisive, forceful action. Perhaps, simply, my body is thinking about the powerful, rotational thrust of the rudder of a sailboat, with which I am much more familiar. But that’s not the case. The flight control is very light. You can practically move it just by thinking of moving it, but doing so moves the entire world in which we find ourselves. Steering on the edge of a subtle, brand new sense of equilibrium. That’s the sensation that I will have the whole time spent inside Daniele’s mania.

When I think of Daniele, of his books, his writing, his idea of literature, his way of thinking and understanding, even when I think of our friendship, the feeling I had at that moment comes back to me. I think about it even now, when I arrive in Venice and instead of San Polo or the hangar, I head for Giudecca, make my way through the maze of calle to the residence where he is housed, and speak my name into the intercom. Everyone here is very kind, the grounds, which overlook the lagoon and the Lido, are beautiful, but of no use to Daniele now, whom I always find in his room. A room that I could not distinguish from the outside, a room that is his, so to speak, in a neutral way: containing him, but without any trace of him. It seems strange only to me. His traces can be found, however, not only in his books, but in some universal words that speak of Daniele Del Giudice better than any other utterance. I will choose three. Sentire, to feel, to experience, has been one of “his” words since Lo stadio di Wimbledon and Atlante occidentale in fact. He applies it, I’ve always thought, not so much as an antidote to sentiment, but to sentimentality employed as an element, as recourse, rhetoric, to compensate for the aphasia of a lack, or absence, of experience. Sentire, on the other hand, is like improvisation in jazz: you can’t do it if you don’t know all the music, but you can’t do it if you don’t venture to the edge of the music you know, and from there love and know in one sound, in one action. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

From Misty poetry to texts both visual and conceptual, our latest issue is bright with offerings.

As testament both to our times and to Asymptote’s ongoing commitment to accentuating the richness and value of global literature, our Summer 2020 issue is replete with texts that vary in their gifts but are unified in their resonance. To help you navigate this selection, our section editors are here with their top picks.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and “Vignettes” Special Feature Editor:

Less diverse than a typical Asymptote lineup, I’m nevertheless proud of the five pieces I curated for the regular Fiction section: Each one wrestles with despair—even if it’s a different timber of dread than the one we’re currently in. In Italian author Christian Raimo’s “No More Cult of the Dead for Twentieth-Century Italy,” two men, haunted by dreams of dead bodies, set out to find and bury one. It’s an exhilarating tale of redemption set against the backdrop of a financial crisis—rendered in Brian Robert Moore’s tonally perfect translation. Don’t miss Czech novelist Daniela Hodrová’s Puppets (Living Pictures); cotranslators Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny took home a 2020 PEN Translates Award for their masterful work. In the hypnotic excerpt that we were lucky to present, the reader is whisked across time via a jump-rope. Featuring translations from the Arabic, Chinese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, and Telugu, our more diverse wildcard Special Feature shines a spotlight on the humble vignette. From conventional shorts to metafictional haikus, there’s truly something for everyone. My favorite is perhaps Marianna Geide’s People and Other Beings. Via translator (and past contributor) Fiona Bell, Geide conjures up bizarre creatures—insects shaped like bird droppings, predators shaped like human ears, uselessly decorative bugs, mushroom people—and examines each of her specimens with the precision of a jeweler.

From Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor:

“Dead Sea” by Yang Lian feels about as close as a piece of writing can get to its subject. Even more impressive is that he does this in two hundred and seventy words, and that the subject is a country gripped by a modern plague. It’s a vision of hell illustrated with “a dense tessellation of images, often hard for the translator to disentangle, which build and build to powerfully symphonic effect,” in the words of translator Brian Holton. Despite the obscurity, however, it’s oddly tangible and even familiar at times, probably because this same hell has become global.

dead fishies drift with the tide     with no high hopes of escaping underwater
there is no underwater in your world

From Sam Carter, Criticism Editor:

In a review of Dmitri Prigov‘s Soviet Texts, Dan Shurley makes the Russian conceptualist writer’s work come alive by grounding an analysis of his work in broader trends both inside and outside the former Soviet Union. Prigov was, as Shurley explains, “a shape-shifter and a master of appropriating the lofty rhetoric of Soviet authority in whatever form it took,” and Shurley carefully guides us through the many offerings and intricacies of the collection that was published by Ugly Duckling Presse and translated by Simon Schuchat with Ainsley Morse.

Another collection, this time of work from multiple writers, is discussed in Ysabelle Cheung‘s review of That We May Live, which contains seven stories of Chinese speculative fiction that delve into alternate realities not entirely separate from our own. Cheung walks us through examinations of particular concerns that, taken together, allow this anthology to “reference global philosophical quandaries and anxieties.” READ MORE…