Translation Tuesday: “Vultures” by Carla Bessa

October 15, 2024 | in Translations | by Elton Uliana

It is astonishing the perfect imperfection of a human body.

This Translation Tuesday, we are thrilled to bring you a grotesquely disturbing yet distinctly lyrical short story from the pen of past contributor Carla Bessa, translated by her longtime advocate Elton Uliana. If vultures appear in popular imagination as the ultimate symbol of death, the reader of this tale will have other distinct associations to make. Surely the first such act of ventriloquism (although we have also featured whale narrators) in our pages, the gifted Brazilian author channels a group of vultures circling an unusual find on a deserted beach: an abandoned foetus. Within its darkly illuminating labyrinth of language, this powerful vignette reinscribes vultures as recycling agents in these urgent times of decay.

But we never deprive ourselves of the pleasures of gliding in giant circles, making the most of the rising currents of hot air, and the wind blowing on our wrinkled, hairless faces, flying without haste, despite the hunger. The prey down below no longer defends itself, devotion is in its nature, it is in the end: a carcass. We spend the days soaring, patiently waiting, confident in our luck, unafraid of not finding a single morsel. Here, remains are never in short supply, the entire city is a wasteland. Down there, however, on the beach, by the shore, we stare, what is it?, unrecognizable-inconceivable, neither person nor animal, neither end nor beginning.

The foetus was only a tiny dot, a mollusc, a soft invertebrate body, muscular head and foot, but without shell. Blossoming and putrefying at the same time. The skin, was it skin?, a very thin, very tender membrane already disintegrating, it would be easy to pierce with the beak. What was once a face, is now facing down, being brushed by the sand as the waves come and go, polished by innumerable shells, sand grains and pebbles.

We land with caution. One, two, seven, many of us, skittering around, still not in a hurry, and we approach the prey. As predicted, the skin gives way to the slightest touch, it rips and tears like paper. We open cracks, holes from which we pull guts, nerves, a small heart?, tearing and lacerating the exceptionally soft and sea-tempered little body.

Domestication: Where Love and Ownership Meet

September 6, 2023 | in Essays | by Charlie Ng

When companion species are left alone to live an equal life with species commonly considered “wild”, is it truly a fair and desirable situation?

In the final essay of this series taking an in-depth look at select pieces of our Spring 2023 Animal Feature, Charlie Ng discusses Marcelo Cohen’s unsettling satire, “Ruby and the Dancing Lake”, and its depiction of a world in which animals are truly free from human possession—or so it seems. By acknowledging our reality, in which “natural” alignments between wildness and domesticity no longer fit easily on a moral axis, Cohen’s story probes at the role of love in our relationships with animals, as well as the uncertain ideal of their freedom.

Can we love animals without knowing their real needs?

In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer compares the “tyranny of human over nonhuman animals” to that of racial dominance, stating that the plights of animals caused by human superiority is a moral issue no less significant than the injustice of racial discrimination. Animal vulnerability is one of the primary subjects that underlie bioethics, compelling us to respect nonhuman animals as individual beings who have an embodied existence, susceptible to suffering equal to that of human beings. While this suffering cannot be ended overnight, can literature take on the active role of imagining a world where animals live free from captivity and exploitation?

With its exploration of imagined possibilities and alternative realities, speculative fiction can be a meaningful genre that challenges readers to think more thoroughly about animal welfare and to re-examine ways of bettering human-animal relationships. “Ruby and the Dancing Lake” by Argentine novelist Marcelo Cohen, presented in Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, is one such example. With its strangeness and playfulness, the short story can be read as a thought experiment of animal liberation, taking place in a parallel universe where any ownership of animals is banned. However, in this realm, both animal cruelty and labour have only become more clandestine, while compassionate humans are left bereft, longing for the happiness brought by animals and their companionship. With its satirical representation, the story is not only critical of animal exploitation, but also recognises the inhumanity of attempting to sever all human-animal bonds, which may not entirely foster any deep awareness for cherishing animal lives. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Charlie Ng

Language:

Spanish

Place:

Argentina

Writer:

Marcelo Cohen

Tags:

Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech

May 18, 2023 | in Essays | by Charlie Ng

The light created by human beings symbolises reason and civilization . . . yet at the same time, we are living under a shadow of our own making.

A role of literature has always been to draw a voice out of the unspoken; in our Spring 2023 issue, we acted on this mandate to collect a variety of texts that place the non-human at their centre. This consideration of our planetary cohabitants is not only a powerful expression of imagination, but also an exercise of ethical care, exemplified by these chosen writers as a way to not only instill wonder, but also to facilitate deeper consideration of our role in protecting and honouring these lifeforms. To further elucidate the educational power of this ecologically-oriented literature, we present a three-part series in which Charlie Ng, co-editor of the feature, discuss in depth the context and the activism innate in these texts.

“Song of the Whale-road”, one of the pieces in the animal-themed feature of Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, consists of excerpts taken from Yolanda González’s recent novel Oceánica. Mesmerising in its lyrical tone, the text reveals the primordial unity of the human and nature, which has eventually dissociated as mankind developed their own civilization, and life and death—originally stages of a natural cycle—came to be laden with anthropogenic threats and massacres. The novel opens with an epigraph that consists of three quotations: from the Genesis book of the Bible, Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia, and Raúl Zurita’s poem “Las cataratas del Pacifico”, revealing the novel’s environmentalism immediately to the reader.

As was written in Genesis, God’s command of procreation and the passing over of Earth’s dominion to Man reminds us of our stewardship of nature—but the irony is that the multiplication of mankind has brought catastrophe to the other lifeforms sharing the planet with us. The whale, often regarded as an environmental symbol, embodies the image of endangered animals and the importance of protecting keystone species for the purposes of biodiversity and combating climate change. They also appeal to our imagination for both their massive size and their biological significance as mammals living in the depths of the ocean, making them all at once mysterious, fearful, and attractive. In Western culture, whales are sometimes known as “leviathans”, sea monsters mentioned in the Bible that represent the uncontrollable power of nature. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is arguably the most well-known work of oceanic literature that makes use of such a profound, epic, human-whale relationship, while in contemporary literature, cetacean narratives such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller play a crucial role in offering localised perspectives that contrast mainstream Western environmentalism.

Our Spring 2023 Edition Is Here!

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

Featuring Fernando Pessoa, Franca Mancinelli, Wu Ming-Yi, and Yolanda González in our animal-themed special feature

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.