Place: Venezuela

What’s New in Translation: October 2023

October 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, George Newton, and Iona Tait

Discover new work from Venezuela, Poland and India!

In this month’s round-up, we present three works in singular styles. From Venezuela, Maria Pérez-Talavera gives us non-linear journal entries composed from a mental hospital. From Poland, modernist master Witold Gombrowicz puts his own spin on the Gothic tale, painting a psychologically sensitive portrait of a shifting society. And from India, some of the bold, experimental short stories of Rajkamal Chaudhary are gathered in a sharp and comic collection of unconventional plotlines and characters. Read on to find out more!

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The Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo, 2023

Review by Iona Tait, Executive Assistant

A haunted castle, a mad prince, a pair of doubles, and a clairvoyant who saves the day—Witold Gombrowicz’s The Possessed has all the quintessential trappings of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originally released as a serial in the summer of 1939, The Possessed merges its classic motifs with mystery and a comedy of manners, offering a remarkably profound reflection on authenticity at a time when older Polish divisions of social classes were being transformed.

Neighboring the Gothic castle—that relic of “antiquity breathing its last” where a deranged prince and his cunning secretary reside—lies a manor-turned-boarding house. Mrs. Ocholowska, the landowner and member of a downwardly mobile minor nobility, receives guests across all social classes: the petit-bourgeois Councilor Szymczyk, nosy and bickering middle-class women, a curious academic known as Skolinski, and a working-class tennis coach and parvenu named Marian Leszczuk. The latter proves to be a formidable rival to the tennis superstar and spritely daughter of the landowner, Maja Ocholowska, who is at the novel’s outset engaged to the secretary.

Lesczuk and Maja, however, are not only an equal match on the court; they also exhibit an uncanny similarity in their gestures and ways of speaking. Simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by this similarity, the pair undergo a process of self-discovery together, journeying between the manor and the haunted castle, with intermittent getaways to Warsaw. READ MORE…

Sculpting Words: An Interview with Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and Paul Filev

August 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions.

In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.  

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?

Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.

I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”

And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”

And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.” READ MORE…

Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles

July 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]he past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience.

In The Lisbon Syndrome, Venezuelan writer Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles movingly navigates the intricate conflux of tragedies both far away and close to home. Juxtapositioning the cities of Lisbon and Caracas as each is underlined by its own catastrophe, Rugeles positions a human perspective amidst events far beyond a single individual’s control, offering a glimpse at singular agency and narrative power behind greater systems of repression.

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, translated from the Spanish by Paul Filev, Turtle Point Press, 2022

If a comet were to wipe away a major city, leading to the economic and political collapse of an entire continent, would it radically change how we live? It seems impossible to imagine a disaster of such proportions leaving us unaffected, but it depends on where you’re standing. After all, the apocalypse can take many forms; it’s not always as swift and ferocious as a comet. In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’s The Lisbon Syndrome, the eponymous catastrophe happens off-stage. The central locus of the story is Caracas, set in an alternative 2017 where the knowledge of Lisbon’s disappearance is scarcel the only wisps of information are those that manage to escape media and internet channels tightly controlled by the government. These crumbs, as well as a dark cloud enshrouding the sky over the Caribbean, are the only sure signs of a catastrophe big enough to arguably recalibrate how we think about human life and the universe. But if “discontent, hunger, and humiliation” is already part of the daily agenda in a world always at the brink of complete destruction, how can an apocalypse an ocean away be more pressing that that which is outside your door?

Nevertheless, the past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience. The novel centers around Fernando, a high school teacher, and his benefactor Moreira, an elusive Portuguese immigrant. Alongside Moreira and his students’ involvement, Fernando has established a ramshackle theater company where—at the former’s explicit request—they perform only classics like Shakespeare and Brecht. The company sells tickets at a loss, and students, as they are disappeared one by one, replace each other in key roles. Fernando also brings his love for theater to the classroom, pushing his students to new, ever more daring heights—even when a particularly unorthodox take on Dante’s Divine Comedy (already dripping in political significance) lands them all in hot water with the government, setting the stage for future tragedies.

Both the preparation of performances and the theater space where they rehearse and dream (called La Sibila) come to be a sacred slice of space and time that anchors Fernando and his students against the rising tide of violence and repression sweeping Venezuela. As a literal war between the Venezuelan government and its citizens unfurls outside the walls of La Sibilia, inside the conversations are far more tender. Amid rehearsals, students drink and dream of becoming reggaeton superstars or classic ballerinas, but the discussion of dreams—a rehearsal in its own way—extends the students into a future so uncertain that Ferando feels guilty for even encouraging the possibility of such fantasies turning to reality. READ MORE…

On the Verge: Keila Vall de la Ville and Robin Myers Discuss The Animal Days

August 26, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

What gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s debut novel The Animal Days is a thriller—but not in the traditional sense. Protagonist Julia, a climber, chases mountain highs as she tightropes between life and death, joy and grief, adolescence and adulthood. She also chases a boy bent on destruction. Julia narrates this time in her life—the animal days—in a powerful, fluid vernacular that plunges readers into her precipitous milieu. We’re proud to feature this cliffhanging novel as our Book Club pick for July and to share this conversation between Vall de la Ville and translator Robin Myers, which was held live for members. The collaborators discuss the delicacies of portraying gender violence, the climbers’ patois, and the way contemporary Latin American literature plays with time and tense.

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only interviews with the author or the translator of each title!

Allison Braden (AB): There’s so much going on in this book, even though it takes place over a relatively short time span. Keila, how do you describe what the book is about?

Keila Vall de la Ville (KV): I think of the book as the story of the process of becoming, in which travel, spatial movement, has to do with the inner journey as well. That might seem a little general in the sense that many talk about displacement and movement, geographical movement, as a way to travel inwards.

What makes the book different and what gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme—not only because the characters are climbers but also because of their own particular intimate relationship. Julia’s actually transitioning from one state and one moment to the next. So, it’s all about extremes.

Gender violence pervades the whole story, and it’s very important to me. It took me a while to figure out how to talk about it. We all know how terrible it is, but at the same time, it has so many nuances, and so many colors, and so many ways of manifesting. I believe it’s important to show that it’s not only about physical violence or even psychological violence. There are many, many ways to feel violent, especially in an environment that is mostly masculine.

AB: Robin, how did you encounter this book? What attracted you to the story?

Robin Myers (RM): I came into contact with this wonderful book after coming into contact with Keila herself. We’ve actually been working together for so long that I can’t even remember which came first, Poetics on Beauty or this novel, but we’ve been in touch for a number of years about different projects of Keila’s. Shortly before we started writing to each other, this book had won the Latino Book Award, so Keila was interested in having it translated into English.

I read it and was instantly fascinated. I was riveted by the story and by the force of the narrator’s presence—she has a very subtle narrative voice. But in terms of the language itself, which is always what does it for me or doesn’t as a translator and reader, I was so interested in the intensity and the directness of the narrative voice, which is very beautiful but also very blunt. It has this almost spoken quality, which I was really interested in. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville

July 29, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Allison Braden

Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction—and the first to be translated into English—invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s The Animal Days explores young adulthood at high altitude. The narrator pursues a passion for rock climbing as she struggles to navigate a similarly perilous life at home. But the world of climbing and her escape from civilization come with their own dangers, which close in as the narrative hurtles toward a suspenseful finale.

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Katakana Editores, 2021

Rock climbing invites glib metaphors. Inspirational posters—prolific in offices where the only vertical challenge is conquered at the touch of an elevator button—often use summits to symbolize widely held values like perseverance and determination, but the experience of serious climbers is anything but universal. Their insular world trades on levels of pain, risk, and anticipation foreign to the average individual. Enough time in that world can warp perceptions of the other world—the one where the rest of us live. “Thanks to the mountain, you’re able to make out the mechanisms that dictate daily life, life on land. You come back different,” explains Julia, the young narrator of The Animal Days. “Now that your battery has been recharged, now that you’ve obtained this ultraviolet vision, you carry on until you need to plug back into the mountain again. Until everything starts to lose its luster.”

The Animal Days, Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction and the first to be translated into English, invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu. Julia’s journey is a world tour of precipices, as she balances her obligations to her dying mother against an escapism inherited from her absent father. Estranged from her everyday surroundings, she finds intimacy among her climbing friends, who provide a respite from her internalized abandonment, and who alone can understand the peaks and falls of a life on ropes. They shirk steady jobs and spend their time chasing both chemical and literal highs.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 26, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

The brand-new Summer 2021 edition of Asymptote is barely ten days old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from thirty-five countries gathered therein. Last week, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Allison Braden, and Shawn Hoo shared their favorites. Today, section editors Lee Yew Leong, Bassam Sidiki, and Caridad Svich distill their highlights for us:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

Why do so few men read fiction by women? lamented MA Sieghart as recently as seventeen days ago in The Guardian. With female authors taking five out of six slots, the Summer fiction lineup, published just in time for #WomeninTranslation month, offers parochial-minded readers a taste of what they are missing out on. These stories are also deeply centered on the female experience: Gabriel Payares and Maša Kolanović deliver unsettling takes on pregnancy and new motherhood, while the aging protagonists of Kathrin Schmidt’s and Can Xue’s stories go on mushroom-fueled head trips that seem to set the universe right again. A third set explores the corrosive effects of work on identity (in particular, Joanna Chen’s superb translation of mechanical engineer Tehila Hakimi’s Company recalled for me Amelie Nothomb’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling).

When you don’t go by a Judeo-Christian name, the constant bracing against mispronunciation can result in estrangement from your own identity, as Xiao Yue Shan explored in her recent essay on linguistic exile. I can relate. That’s why I found the ending of Abdushukur Muhammet’s “My Name” deeply moving. Translator Munawwar Abdulla not only does an excellent job nailing Muhammet’s melancholic voice, but also provides much needed contextualization in her translator’s note that imbues the poem with a sharp political layer. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 19, 2021  |  in News  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favourite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

As Asymptote celebrates the first issue of our second decade in world literature, we bring to you new work from thirty-five countries and twenty-four languages in our Summer 2021 issue! Drawing from the theme of our Special Feature, “Age of Division,” these varied writings speak to a moment of mounting borders, fractious politics, and heightened suspicion towards the other—but so too do they hint at the possibility of unexpected solidarities, strange encounters, and new geographies of affinity. Not sure where to begin with this bountiful issue? Let our blog editors take you through some of their favourite pieces to reveal a world that is, in the words of Lêdo Ivo, “sweet, full, pungent, and luminous.” 

In the spring of 2004, an intifada singer in Ramallah said to his interviewer, “What I do on stage and what martyrs do on the streets are one and the same, just with different instruments.” Were resistance embodied in genre, the shape would undoubtedly be that of music. The art which “all art constantly aspires towards” for its certain coherence of form and content, this singular quality also speaks to its ability to move people passionately, crucially, to action. For music is a verb; it must be performed and enacted. It embodies, within its very idea, its eventual actualisation.  

In the excerpt from Olivia Elias’s forthcoming poetry collection Your Name, Palestine, she makes a graceful address: “Musicians, a few minutes more.” Moving on to materialise the scene in sensual, wondering lines, she makes gentle work of speaking the terrible wreckage done to the country where she was born. Born in Haifa and living now in France, she is said to occupy a privileged space within the Palestinian diaspora as one of the few poets in French. In these poems, translated masterfully by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Robert, she creates in her adopted language the continuation of the Palestinian nation, transcending geographical realities to rhyme with the poetics of Palestinian agency, with both singing and the witness of singing.

Musicians, I am speaking to you of a country
engulfed in a fault of history
of a people chosen to pay the price
of another sacrifice
of a story more than a hundred years old
full of sound and fury and blood

Intended for voices set to instruments, Elias’s work speaks to the intifada singers, the debke performances that conceptualise art from the violences of occupation, and the traditional melodies evoking the dignity of liberation. But without violence and ideology, the measured cadences of her lines are patient with painterly instinct. These poems draw their necessity from their stoic dreams of clarity. Palestine, untorn, in concert, singing.

In Mulugeta Alebachew’s “Heaven Without Prickly Pears,” writing similarly seeks physical qualities—the savoury texture of the language, the kinetic scan of the eye as it seeks and takes in. The topography of the Ethiopian town, Geneté, is overlaid with the infinite dimensions of the mind. Familiarities, kinships, intimacies run through in capillaries of psychogeography, drawing further on its composite, ramified history: “her mosaicked gum-tattoos of more than a dozen languages and myriad cultures.” With co-translator Bethlehem Attfield, Alebachew has done a wonderful job of rendering the original Amharic text, lush with dialect, into a fluent poetry that nevertheless beholds the precision of references outside of the English language.

This town bears my fondest memories, life vividly lived, and lessons well learned . . . my yesterdays, todays, and predictable tomorrows lay on its streets. . . My home includes the highway. My home does not exclude the other homes. 

In this beautiful passage which eclipses the cautious private/public boundary, Alebachew speaks to the growing of the world. Just as in the acts of reading and writing, the dialectic division of outside and inside loses its binds, and one bleeds into the other. By bringing us into his Geneté, the subtle resentment of possessive being is defied; we are given interior knowing without it being our interior. In this world there is no space indifferent or vacant. It is all compounded in an infinite geometry of living; to inhabit a text that so generously navigates a place, it is an astonishing gift. 

—Xiao Yue Shan

READ MORE…

Physical Politics: On Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s The Last Days of El Comandante

April 8, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

One is left wondering about the inherent value of innocence in a world where the smallest act can have grave, lifelong consequences.

The Last Days of El Comandante by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer, University of Texas Press, 2020

Can a single person hold a country together? Are the mundane pleasantries we all agree to participate in the only things that keep society from devolving into complete chaos? How much control do we really have over even the smallest details of our lives? Written by Hugo Chávez’s biographer Alberto Barrera Tyszka, The Last Days of El Comandante takes the reader back to the final few months of the Venezuelan strongman’s life, a time when Venezuela “was always on the point of exploding but it never did. Or worse: it was exploding in slow motion, little by little, without anyone actually realizing.” These reflections by one of the novel’s main protagonists, Miguel Sanabria (retired doctor turned chair of his apartment building’s residents’ association), introduce the reader to the overwhelming uncertainty that began to engulf the country with Chávez’s mysterious 2011 operation in Havana, Cuba. It merits stating that between ongoing food shortages, contested presidential elections, and accusations of U.S. interference in Venezuelan politics, the instability permeating the novel has an all-too-real corollary in the Venezuela of reality.

With Chávez’s impending demise as a backdrop, the novel thrusts us into the unraveling lives of a number of interconnected characters, despite its relatively short two hundred and forty-eight pages. The variant cast includes: Sanabria and his wife Beatriz, who don’t agree on politics, and his nephew, Vladimir, with whom he is very close; Tatiana, a freelance designer, and her common-law husband Fredy, who receive word that the woman who owns their apartment not only plans on returning to Caracas from Miami, but that she needs them to move out at a time when affordable, secure housing in the city is at a premium well beyond their means; María, a young student, spars with her justifiably fearful single mother, who pulls her out of school and confines her to the apartment because of ongoing violence in the streets; and lastly, U.S. journalist Madeleine Butler who, entranced by Chávez’s larger-than-life persona, flies to Venezuela to write a personal profile on the ailing strongman. Chávez himself, of course, serves as the human event that binds all of these people and their troubles together, even as the country’s decline mirrors the slow deterioration of his own physical state. As things grow worse, the characters spin in and out of each other’s orbit as their daily lives and relationships become harder and harder to maintain. Sanabria gets sucked into the conflict between Tatiana, Fredy, and their landlady, while María, locked in her apartment, begins an online relationship with the couple’s young son over the internet. Every chapter is punctuated with official updates about Chávez’s health, as well as different characters’ responses to those updates, an almost point-counterpoint format that underscores people’s increasing lack of faith in their government and in the world around them. When Miguel Sanabria first informs his wife of Chávez’s illness, for example, she responds by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all lies . . . Something the Cubans made up to distract us.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Forbidden to pass by and stay” by Oriette D’Angelo

March 19, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Lupita Eyde-Tucker

I allied with your former lovers / emerged victorious / in the midst of the void

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, we are witnesses to a protest pulled forth from the body by outrage, sorrow, and an inherited music. Oriette D’Angelo’s poem is set to a revolutionary thrum of defiance against injustice. As we move with its lines, we arrive at a place that is not quite as simple as solace, but a space that resounds with the necessity for love. 

Forbidden to pass by and stay

My country is a protest march
a cry of rage
with thunder and dance music

You couldn’t handle the birds sleeping on my forehead
you fractured the entire structure of my deformed breasts
squeezed the throat to silence my body
so it wouldn’t scream:                    I don’t like what you say!

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Inventory for After the War” by Raquel Rivas Rojas

May 1, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Catherine Boyle and Raquel Rivas Rojas

"One day the treasures will be exchanged for food."

Our showcase this week is a short story by Raquel Rivas Rojas, a writer who masterfully stretches the limits of language to catalogue what is left of life in the aftermath of an atrocity. 

“Inventory for After the War” by Raquel Rivas Rojas

For Gina Saraceni

To fight against death in the open air, in the midst of the ruins of a war that has just ended or that continues somewhere else.

The noises of the far-off war that advances or that retreats.

The animals that surround us. Birds of prey, wild dogs, rats, winged insects. Caymans in the rivers. Venomous snakes under the stones and the sticks.

Rags. Old cloths are used on top of one another. The oldest cloths disintegrate and fall apart by themselves, into pieces. The loose strips are lifted at times in the breeze.

The smell of burning. Always and everything smells of burning. Until it rains. Then it smells of soaked ashes and running blood.

The earth roads. Dusty or muddy. Walking on them is always torture. They don’t seem to lead anywhere. And yet, sometimes, a ruin is crossed by on the way.

Bare feet. Nobody has shoes any more. There are some thick rags left that are tied with other rags. And then, always and without fail, bare feet.

The absence of desire beside the surprising and sudden shock of desire.

Hunger. Guts filled with air. The air that circulates round the empty guts producing an uprooted pain. A pain that starts in the gums and ends in the anus. A pain that is prolonged outside as you urinate three drops and expel droppings as hard as stone.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2017

April 24, 2017  |  in Dispatches  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Henry Ace Knight, and Joshua Craze

Insights from the experts on the Spring 2017 Issue of Asymptote

Looking for new entry points into the latest issue of the journal? The section editors of this behemoth cash of international literature, out just last week, are here to guide you!  

In this spring issue, the drama section features two complementary pieces—one from Catalonia and the other from Poland. Both portray hellish, nightmarish worlds in a distinct, unique theatrical manner. Grzegorz Wroblewski’s The New Colony in translation by Agnieska Pokojska depicts a claustrophobic asylum where patients/citizens live out their days in a state of restless, mocking unease. Wroblewski’s text is typical of what has been deemed “post-dramatic” theatre (in Hans Lehmann’s terms). It is an open text which offers its audience an intentionally disorientating roadmap to a contemporary world that is fractured and broken, where individuals seek wholeness despite all signs that such a search is hopeless.

Written as a proto-feminist cabaret, Beth Escudé i Gallès’s Diabolic Cabaret in translation by Phyllis Zatlin, looks at an elemental Eve, channeling visions of historical female icons throughout history. Is guilt a woman? To whom will society place its blame in times of war? Helen of Troy? Other alluring, bewitching sirens up to no good? Escudé i Gallès teases and cajoles her audience in a piece that through anarchic humor questions the roles we all play to claim concepts of territory, identity, and ownership. Both Wroblewski and Escudé I Gallès are from the same generation, even though they represent different cultures and sensibilities as dramatists. It’s fascinating to see two skilled and provocative playwrights, in fine translations, address states of fear and anxiety all too prevalent in the modern world.

—Drama Editor Caridad Svich

Among three exceptional essays—including one that introduces readers to the brilliant but tortured Swiss writer, Hermann Burger, and another that briefly loiters at the fork in Iran’s contemporary literary scene—I found myself particularly drawn to Noh Anothai‘s generous and intimate reflections on a world turned akimbo, seen through the eyes of Thai poet, Saksiri Meesomsueb. As we follow Anothai through the pages of Meesomsueb’s award-winning collection, That Hand is White, and from north Bangkok to Chicago and back, I’m reminded once more of literature’s gift in transgressing borders, its necessary lucidity, kindness, and prescience; and consequently, its call for response. Only with clean hands can we clean the world, Meesomsueb tells us. Dear Reader, what will you do next?

—Writers on Writers Editor Ah-reum Han

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Patria o Muerte by Alberto Barrera Tyszka

March 31, 2016  |  in Essays  |  by Dana Khromov

“Everything is fiction, even reality"

A striking meditation on the power of affective marketing to infiltrate and manipulate the national and individual psyche delivered in a gripping, suspenseful narrative web, Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s Patria o Muerte, winner of last year’s Tusquets Prize, is among the many novels that are garnering praise among Spanish language readers but have not yet reached American readers. Offering an intimate glimpse into a climactic moment in Venezuela’s sociopolitical trajectory, it resonates eerily with the media’s current stronghold in American politics.

The novel’s intertwined narratives unravel between 2011 and 2013, amidst the secrecy and suspense surrounding Chávez’s cancer diagnosis, treatment in Cuba and eventual death, during a propaganda campaign that sustained his political grip in a country plagued by mass unemployment, a housing crisis, extreme media censorship, unprecedented violence and an astounding fifty-two deaths a day. Chávez’s physical absence through most of the novel paradoxically strengthens his cult of personality and his power over the Venezuelan citizenry as uncertainty about the future imbues the character’s lives with constant, palpable paranoia, insecurity, and fear of the menace of violence. After his diagnosis, catastrophic collapse appears imminent but its approach is excruciatingly slow.

The action centers on Miguel Sanabria, a melancholic retired oncologist suffering from insomnia, who lives in Caracas with his wife, Beatriz, a fervent antichavista, in a building he manages. He attributes his psychic unease to his advancing age until it dawns on him that its real source is Venezuela’s state of suspense—a symptom of the national psyche in the vacuum of information about Chávez health.

At various points throughout the novel, Miguel and his brother Antonio, a fervent Bolivarian, argue about the legitimacy of Chávez’s revolution—the viability of the transition from capitalism to socialism—as the country dissolves into poverty and violence. As Chávez undergoes chemotherapy in Cuba, Vladimir, Antonio’s son and one of the president’s trusted officials, fearing the president’s mounting paranoia, asks Sanabria to keep a cell phone with compromising recordings of the gravely ill Chávez from the operating table, entangling Sanabria, who had always willfully abstained from involvement in politics, in the president’s fiction of immortality.

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Making Narrative Witness: A Caracas-Sarajevo Collaboration

July 27, 2015  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Stacy Mattingly

A revolutionary collaboration spanning countries, languages, and memories

THE SCENE

The scene is an online video meeting. (Does that qualify as a scene?) In it are several Venezuelan writers and photographers gathered in a classroom in Caracas (all men but one, though not everyone is present) and their counterparts in and around Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, gathered mostly in twos and threes at laptops in apartments (all women but two; everyone is present).

A couple of Caracas photographers also tune in from what appear to be their flats. One Bosnian is in the town of Bihać. A Croatian writer from the Sarajevo group joins from Spain.

The Venezuelans in the classroom are having technical difficulties with their audio, and people move close to the room’s single computer to be heard. We make introductions. A few jokes. We lay out our plans. At least one Sarajevan, a redhead perched on a sofa, enjoys a cigarette.

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