Posts filed under 'biography'

A Literary Cocktail of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Autofiction: On After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová

October 3, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Platzová options a radical methodology of writing that reveals the unanswerable questions composing our present. . .

Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, Bellevue Literary Press, 2024

Collage is perhaps the best term to describe Czech author Magdaléna Platzová’s Life after Kafka (Život po Kafkovi), recently translated into English by Alex Zucker. The cover of the book distinguishes the text as a novel, yet its two hundred and fifty pages are in effect an intricate labyrinth of letters, diaries, interviews, fictions, and the author’s own descriptions of working on the book, all blurring the boundary between fact and imagination. Bringing these myriad fragments together is a common thread: the life of Felice Bauer, one of Kafka’s many women. To Platzová, she remains a mystery: “Who really was Felice Bauer? Who was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture, and precisely set watches? . . . Little is known of her life after Kafka. She got married, had two children, and immigrated to America. Did she leave any traces behind?”

This erasure in the numerous works of Kafkology inspired Platzová to spend ten years writing about Bauer, and the resulting text finally appeared in Czech in 2022 (with the English edition coincidentally being published this year, the one hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death). Kafka’s life—a short one of forty years—was shared by at least six very different women, mostly Jewish, verging from Austrian, Czech, German, to Polish: Hedwig Weiler, Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenská (the only non-Jewish exception), and Dora Diamant. Academia and popular culture have mostly retained Jesenská—herself a prolific journalist and writer—and Diamant as the main feminine figures in Kafka’s life, but Bauer, who hailed from Berlin, was Kafka’s first fiancée. They first met in Prague in 1912, and maintained a relationship until 1917, when Kafka broke their engagement for the second time. Grete Bloch, who was a friend of Bauer’s, met Kafka in 1913 and ended up playing a major role between the two. Kafka also wrote letters to Bloch, and she later intervened in the relationship between him and Bauer, at a time when the couple was drifting apart. Platzová centers her narrative around these two female figures, telling the story of how their lives intersected in the shared link to Kafka, and how his letters became a focal point of their complicated existences in exile, haunting them to their last days. READ MORE…

A Trace of Justice: On At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Azher Jirjees

June 17, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Bridget Peak

Azher Jirjees does not alleviate suffering nor balance injustice to write a palatable tale of redemption or closure.

At Rest in the Cherry Orchard by Azher Jirjees, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright, Banipal Books, 2024.

In 2005, Journalist Azher Jirjees published Terrorism. . . Earthly Hell, an irreverent study of terrorist militias in Iraq, against the backdrop of an expectant country. That same year, elections were held, and a constitution drafted. Subsequently, Jirjees was the target of an assassination attempt and escaped Iraq, first to Syria, then to Morocco, before settling in Norway. What might have been remains unrealized, and violence, unrelenting, pervades Iraq for years. This mix of fear and promise, all too real, sets the tone of At Rest in the Cherry Orchard, the fictional autobiography of Saeed Jensen.

The original النوم في حقل الكرز was the sardonic writer’s debut novel, and had earned Jirjees a place on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlist in 2020. Now, Jirjees’ rendering of an Oslo postman haunted by apparitions of his dead father, abused until nearly unrecognizable, has been sensitively translated from the Arabic by journalist and translator Jonathan Wright.

In essence, this novel is a retelling, a measured unburdening of the sequence of events that lead the protagonist Saeed Jensen to return to Iraq after his exile to Norway. Our narrator is plagued by nightmares, sleeping and waking, of his faceless father, fourteen years after his forced departure from Iraq. His daily life is repetitive, monotonous to the utmost degree, the rhythm of his comings and goings etched into the snow that reconstitutes itself each night. He works as a postman, following the same route, delivering to the same houses, tracing the same motions each day in bitter cold. He lives alone, a solitary life punctuated by appearances of his father’s ghost. An email requesting his immediate presence in Iraq sparks our narrator’s return, as he remembers his life before and since leaving. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 24, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Miranda Mazariegos, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Latin America, and the Philippines!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to book fairs, awards ceremonies, and book launches. From celebrated poets and dearly departed essayists to up-and-coming novelists and prize-winning translators, read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The recent publication of The Long Coming of the Fire, a collection of poems by Aco Šopov, translated from the Macedonian by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, was met with interest and celebration from Macedonian literary critics, journalists, and laymen alike. The book features a total of seventy-four poems, selected by Jasmina Šopova—daughter of the poet and established connoisseur of his work. A selection of Šopov’s poems in Kramer and Grau’s translation was featured in the Winter 2023 issue of Asymptote Journal.

Aco Šopov’s literary output is significant beyond its stylistic excellence and thematic range—it also marks the beginning of the modernist period in Macedonian culture. “His work,” writes N.M. for Nova Makedonija (New Macedonia), “is essential to a poetic movement that freed poetry from the grasp of both the folk oral tradition and the short-lived socialist-realist style, thus directing the [still] tenuous poetic tradition of authors writing in the newly minted Macedonian language towards the expansive spaces of modern European songmaking.” This swift evolution, propelled onwards by the “long strides” of Šopov’s visionary lyric, was the reason Macedonian literature managed to catch up with the still-relevant themes and styles of its European counterpart.

Now, 100 years after Šopov’s birth, the public at large can experience his unforgettable voice through The Long Coming of the Fire, a bilingual Macedonian-English edition published by Deep Vellum Press. In an unusual but successful move, the edition was translated via the synergy of three translators. In an interview organized by the Macedonian Academy of Sciences & Arts, Kramer explains that this translation resulted from the synergy of three unique approaches and skillsets: “Rawley [Grau], who translates poetry very well but doesn’t know Macedonian, me, who knows the Macedonian language very well but not how to translate poetry, and Jasmina, who weaved the threads together in a way that resulted in the creation of a team of translators.” Although, being a linguist, she would’ve “been more comfortable discussing Šopov’s use of nouns and verbs than his poetics”, Kramer notes that his images, recurrent within his poems, “subtly bind” the author’s inner workings to the outside world, creating poetry that is “simultaneously personal and universally human”. READ MORE…

A Self Remaindered: On Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat

September 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Mersal reveals that writing can embody the rougher textures of real life in its enmeshment with troubled, even buried, pasts.

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, And Other Stories, 2023

Since the ninth century, Cairo’s City of the Dead has served as the final resting place for Egypt’s caliphs, saints, poets and heroes. Their reprieve was disturbed a few months ago, however, when the Egyptian government began razing tombs in the necropolis to build a new highway. It’s a familiar trope: the uprooting of entire genealogies, the clearing away of accreting dust, all in the name of an ever-accelerated infrastructural modernity. Yet it isn’t only the dead who will be uprooted; many impoverished communities, working as morticians or caretakers, have built lives amid the deceased. Perhaps the cruellest irony is that the living, too, will be displaced in one fell swoop, sacrificed to what one writer has called “asphalt fever”.

She might not have known it then, but Iman Mersal’s perambulations through the City of the Dead in 2015, recorded in her sublimely digressive and moving Traces of Enayat, now read like premonitions of its disappearance. Primarily known for her poetry (her collection The Threshold was published in English translation by Robyn Creswell last year), Mersal is associated with Cairo’s nineties generation—a literary movement loosely characterised by a mistrust of totalising ideologies and an attentiveness to fractures in personal identity. One of her enduring themes have been to examine how exactly, if at all, the individual can be conjugated with the collective—the untraversable chasms that divide a self from another. It would not be too far a leap to connect Mersal’s quest to excavate hidden lives to Cairo’s penchant for hiding away—and obliterating—everything it deems trivial enough to forget.

Traces of Enayat resembles a biography, but is more so a catalogue of absence, a profound meditation on the limits and contingencies of the archive. Just as “there are no signs to mark boundaries in the City of the Dead”, Mersal’s hybrid work refuses the rigidity of genre. Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, it approximates the baggy shape of what she herself terms “jins jaami, a catch-all for every literary form and approach”. Julian Barnes’s famous comparison of biography to a “trawling net” is here overturned: rather than the thrashing fish hauled on shore, Mersal cares more about what has slipped away through the crevices—wanting, in fact, to document the constitution of the net itself as a “collection of holes tied together with string”. The result is a text in which theory, memoir, fiction, urban legend, and photography jostle against interleaved histories of psychiatric hospitals, marital law, golden-age cinema, orientalist Egyptology, and contested literary legacies.

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Leave From or Arrive There: A Conversation with Rima Rantisi

December 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Form offers freedom, but also creativity, another layer through which to see, and ultimately create.

Biography, The University of Hawaii Press’s quarterly academic journal, surveys the contemporary landscape of Lebanese and Arab women’s memoirs. In this, they have named Rima Rantisi as among the champions of “highly intimate personal narratives,” whose work portray their own “constructions of home.” As an essayist, Rantisi inhabits interiorities, taking time in its own tracts, but also incites reexaminations of how we think of (and therefore, how we read and write) the external—places we dwell in all our lives and have always felt ourselves to know. As an editor, she is a nonbeliever of geographic boundaries, welcoming works of art and literature from the ‘Arab-adjacent’ regions. How does she write about home, something ideally stable, when it happens to be a city that is ever-changing and fluid, a mere construct?

In this interview, I asked Rantisi about Rusted Radishes, the Beirut-based multilingual and interdisciplinary journal of art and literature she co-founded; framing the memoir as a genre within place-based writing; and contemporary Arabic and Anglophone literatures written from Lebanon and its diaspora.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is a point in your essay “Waiting” where you write about O’Hare Airport: “Each time I leave from or arrive there, I am away—from people I love, from other homes. I am reaching, always.” Can you speak more about this metaphorical always being away, always on the move? 

Rima Rantisi (RR): Home is one of those subjects that Lebanese writers and artists are intimately familiar with, and sometimes in ways they prefer not to be. But because of the country’s modern history of war and migration, complex conceptions of home are inevitable. For me, I was raised by Lebanese immigrants in the United States, in the small town of Peoria, Illinois. Later, I made a new home where I went to college in Chicago. And then I moved across the world to Beirut. The move to Beirut is when the ever-present awareness of place began to take form. Not only because it was so different from where I had come from, but also Lebanon now became a new lens to see the world through—including my parents, world politics, my past and future. One place that brings these places together is O’Hare Airport. It had always been exciting for me to travel from there as a Midwesterner, but now it gives me a deeper sense of distance between who I was in the United States, and who I am now in Lebanon. In this sense, “I am away” both physically and metaphorically. One thing we don’t talk about as much is how place changes us; not only does it affect us emotionally, but it changes our perception of the world, and the language we use to communicate it. 

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“Now You Fly and Sing”: Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter in Review

October 14, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Paalen Rahon embodied the far-ranging imaginations of surrealist pursuit: a shapeshifter.

Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, New York Review Books, 2021

Surrealism has left an indelible mark on our cultural imagination, a defining umbrella term for the experimental and the dreamlike, from poetry to imagery. Though a litany of artists come to mind when we think of surrealism—from its founder figures André Breton and Philippe Soupault to visual exponents such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, or René Magritte—the legacy, albeit impressive, remains overwhelmingly, and perhaps erroneously, masculine.

Some work has been done in recent years to revise that history—such as through new translations and a number of exhibitions for British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington. Now, translator and professor Mary Ann Caws has curated and translated the works of poet and painter Alice Paalen Rahon to further our reach towards the women of surrealism, in the volume Shapeshifter.

The visual arts have long dominated the conversation around surrealism, despite its origins as a literary term—coined first by poet and theorist Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, then used in two manifestos in 1924, of which Breton’s has stood the longest and is now seen as definitive. Breton described Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Though first staked in terms of the “written word,” the paintings of Dalí or Magritte may now serve, for many, as the first introduction to Surrealism. This domination of visuality in Surrealism has also affected Paalen Rahon’s legacy. Her artwork has long been appreciated in her adopted home of Mexico, celebrated with a large retrospective in 2009 at the country’s Museum of Modern Art. However, with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.

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The Art of Anguish

September 1, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Will Firth

The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical.

Tatjana Gromača’s contemporary novel Divine Child centers on the narrator’s relationship with her mother, whose bipolar disorder diagnosis coincides with a startling descent into Croatian nationalism. The book earned the Croatian Ministry of Culture’s 2012 Vladimir Nazor Prize of the for t­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­he best work of prose and Jutarnji list’s Novel of the Year prize in 2013. Yugoslav émigré writer Bora Ćosić called Divine Child “a small masterpiece” and stated that the author stands out for her “precious crudity”—a reference to its often stark, earthy descriptions despite the prevailing poetic and philosophical vein. Divine Child will be released in North America by Sandorf Passage in October 2021. Here, translator Will Firth describes challenges he encountered along the way.

In 2020, I was commissioned by Zagreb publisher Sandorf to translate three books of contemporary fiction by Croatian writers with funding from the EU’s Creative Europe program. One of them was the short novel Divine Child (Božanska dječica) by Tatjana Gromača. I had not read anything substantial of hers before.

I immediately related to Divine Child. It’s a diarylike biography of the author’s mother, which focuses on her slide into bipolar disorder, when she is cold-shouldered and denigrated by society. It makes an important link between socioeconomic crises—the collapse of former Yugoslavia, accompanied by virulent nationalisms—and the individual. The mother’s Croatian-ethnic neighbors label her an undesirable minority, in this case an ethnic Serb, although she has spent all her life in Croatia and shows few, if any, signs of otherness. But this was a time when having the “wrong” name could cause you problems throughout the region, and arguably still can. The exclusion triggers the mother’s illness.

The poignant novel is imbued with anguish rather than heated rage—both emotionally charged and deeply analytical. As a review in Publishers Weekly noted, it “takes on the hatred that was manufactured, mythologized, and manipulated to feed, justify, and rationalize violence.”

The title—Divine Child—is a dual reference: to the mother’s turn to religion in later life, and to the formative influence of her disciplinarian father, a military man, whose expectations she always strove to fulfill, even after his death, thus making her something of an “eternal child.” Typical of literature from the region, character development is sparse, even with the central character of the mother, and we have to piece together her appearance, occupation, and family history from a range of allusions and asides. Setting her in a historical and social context is more important for the author and omniscient narrator, and the reader is free to decide whether this sparseness is an exquisite literary pleasure or unnecessarily tantalizing suspense.

The editor of the English edition, Buzz Poole, was not convinced by the looseness of the narration in combination with its poetic style and philosophical ambit, so he made a major structural intervention: the novel in translation begins with an event central to the story—a visit to Mother at the hospital. This directs the flow and helps transport the author’s delicate voice. As translator, I was a go-between in negotiating this significant change.

Inconsistencies in the original also put me in the role of editor, and I collaborated with Gromača to tighten the language in translation. I like to correspond with authors to check my understanding of the text, even when I’m pretty sure how I’m going to render a particular term or phrase. With Divine Child, Gromača and I exchanged quite a few emails. We got on well and were on the verge of meeting up in the fall of 2020, when I was at a residency in Zagreb, but the worsening pandemic foiled our plans. In any case, our good working relationship was important for facing the challenge of translating this novel.

The main difficulties in translating Divine Child were to do with its startling imagery and metaphors. Here are several examples:

Frigid Sphinxes

Gromača describes packs of stray dogs in her hometown that “roamed the streets (…) and floated in abandoned fishing boats like frigid sphinxes with piercing, hypnotic eyes.” The original conveys this image as “poput pomodrjelih sfingi,” i.e., like sphinxes that have turned blue. I wasn’t sure in what sense the author meant “blue”—I thought it could refer to the bluish light by the river and the silhouettes of dogs in the twilight. In fact, she meant that the dogs have literally turned blue from the damp cold on the riverbanks and also from their lowly thoughts and those of the surrounding human society. “Frigid” conveys that physical and spiritual cold. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 4, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, MK Harb, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest from Japan, Taiwan, and Lebanon!

As certain places are heating up with a flurry of events, others are remaining cautious and mindful. Still, the good thing about the page is that it remains steadfast, and our work remains something that we can always turn to, celebrate, and share in. This week, our editors are once again bringing you the latest in world literature news, with a new Japanese literary translation workshop centering on heritage speakers and people of colour, a newly virtual Taipei Literature Festival, and a new winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award. 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Poet and academic Iman Mersal has won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award! Her creative non-fiction work, In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat, is part journalistic excellence, part poetic elegy, all while maintaining the sensibility of writing in the life of a complex character. It traces chronicles the late Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayat, her struggles with mental illness, and her tragic death in the 1960s.

What’s new in Arabic literature? Banipal Magazine’s Spring issue is out, and it’s dedicated to Jerusalem and the acclaimed Palestinian auteur, Mahmoud Shukair, who has penned over forty-five books and six television series. This comes at a time when the Arab literary scene has overwhelmingly expressed its solidarity with the Palestinian people. Also on the subject of Palestine—this spring, I interviewed Palestinian-French writer and researcher, Karim Kattan, over here at Asymptote where we discussed belonging, the craft of writing, and other curious things. Also, Palestinian-Chilean writer Lina Meruane has a new novel out; Nervous System, translated into English by Megan McDowell, deals with the daunting specter of writer’s block. Read a review of the acclaimed work right here on the Asymptote blog!

How about some Arab cabaret? Well-read academic and translator Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring 20’s is an engrossing retelling of vagabonds, feminists, and performers as they defied gender norms, transgressed class lines, and created iconic productions. Another beautiful and timely publication by Saqi Books is We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. Edited by British-Palestinian writer, Selma Dabbagh, the anthology celebrates and examines the tradition of erotic writing in Arabic literature and its many women pioneers. Lastly, yours truly has a short story out with The Bombay Review, dealing with censorship and artificial intelligence. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 13, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore, Shawn Hoo, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In Singapore, the Singapore Writers’ Festival hosted international writers, such as Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds, whilst the Cordite Poetry Review published a special feature on Singapore poetry; in Taiwan, Kishu An Forest of Literature centre has held a discussion about a new translation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and in the UK, Carcanet Press has launched Eavan Boland’s final collection, The Historians, whilst new books about renowned poets Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have been released. Read on to find out more! 

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore:

The beginning of November sees a deluge of new writing coming from a host of literary journals. Joshua Ip and Alvin Pang have guest edited a special feature on Singapore poetry in Cordite Poetry Review that gives us the rare pleasure of rethinking Singapore poetry through the art of transcreation. The editors commissioned thirty young poets (who write primarily in English) for the challenge of transcreating verse, not just from the official languages of Malay, Tamil, and Chinese, but also ‘minor’ languages such as Kristang, Bengali, and Tagalog that make up Singapore’s linguistic soundscape. Additionally, Mahogany Journal, a new online periodical on the scene for anglophone South Asian writers in Singapore, has just released their second issue, which is themed ‘Retellings.’ Finally, one of our longest-running online journals, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, has launched its October issue. Lovers of Singapore literature have a huge array of choice.

Meanwhile, this year’s virtual Singapore Writers’ Festival (mentioned in my October dispatch) concluded last weekend. While festivalgoers did not experience the familiar ritual of queuing and squeezing into a room packed with fellow writers and readers, the online format delivered its own peculiarities. Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds were some of the international stars joining us from different time zones across our devices. Margaret Atwood, whose message to novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal was a hopeful “we will get through,” had many viewers sending questions through a live chat box asking the author of The Handmaid’s Tale what it means to write in these dystopian times. Instead of browsing the festival bookstore in between panels, I scrolled through the webstore run by Closetful of Books. Nifty videos were added to lure me to new book releases, booksellers curated a list of recommended reads, while readers craving connection left love notes to nobody in particular. The copy of Intimations I ordered arrived with a sweet touch: it came with a bookplate signed by Zadie Smith. With access to video on demand, rather than rushing from room to room, I found myself toggling between panels on Southeast Asian historical fiction and Korean horror without so much as lifting a finger. If I find myself unable to concentrate (as Zadie Smith said of our social media age: “I feel very bullied at the speed I am told to think daily”), I tune in to Poetry Bites to hear Marc Nair engage in ten-minute intimate chats with ten poets. Kudos to festival director Pooja Nansi and her team for this massively successful event. We are all already looking forward to what the next year’s edition of the festival brings. READ MORE…

Voices From Uber: An Interview with Maria Anna Mariani

March 23, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Maya Nguyen

I think that all confessions are driven by some common engine . . . but the time-space of Uber is particularly intimate and sealed.

Uber was once the most valued startup in the world and is used in over 700 cities. In Voci da Uber: Confessioni a motore (Voices From Uber: Motor Confessions), Mucchi Editore, 2019, Maria Anna Mariani performs the experiment of steering conversations with Uber drivers toward revealing intimate details of their lives—toward confession. These confessions are then written into a narrative. Her writing articulates the nuances of communication in the way that only the best of dramas can otherwise capture. This is perhaps the by-product of the oscillation between small talk and confession, where the positions of speaker and listener change so fast one only has time to recalibrate after the fact. I was drawn to the subtle tensions and evasions that contour the openings of contact, empathy, and understanding in such a dynamic terrain of communication. Here, Maria Anna Mariani talks about the process of writing the book and the unique space of Uber that allows for confession.

                                                                                                —Maya Nguen, March 2020

What is a repetition: JOHN 

Route: Streeterville-home
Time: 38 minutes
Traffic: tricky
Car: gray Hyundai Elantra
Average rating: 4.95

Select the material with an eye to variety and alternating themes, discard if there’s already a similar story and cut any nationality that appears twice. This is what I’d decided on when I began writing these pages. Structural constraint number one: avoid repetition. But now I have something to ask you: is a murdered brother a repetition? Which story about a murdered brother should I cut to avoid repeating myself? The one about Aisha or the one about John? Telling someone else’s story without permission, the story of a still breathing someone, is the supreme form of violence: we frequently debate the ethics of exploiting biography, and rightly so. But an even more treacherous problem, it seems to me now, is what to leave out: what I abandon to the unsaid as flawed—flawed because it retraces another life, in its ordinary but also extraordinary moments. What is a repetition?

Maya Nguen (MN): In John’s chapter, you write that you are “telling someone else’s story without permission,” even when that someone, John, wants to tell it. Yet, in Aisha’s chapter, she is reticent and you actively urge her on with your questions. Can you talk about your process in writing this book?

Maria Anna Mariani (MAM): Everything started during one of my rides. The driver and I were doing a bit of small talk, as you usually do when you get into an Uber. And then, all of a sudden, he revealed to me the most personal thing about himself. It was so personal and so haunting. For many days after the ride I found myself thinking about that interaction. What happens to communication when two strangers find themselves locked inside a moving capsule with no way out? How is it possible that the conversation can oscillate between its two antithetical poles: impersonal and stale small talk and the most intimate and daring confession? I wanted to find out. And so I decided to pay the utmost attention to the interactions during my subsequent rides and to retrace these conversations in my writing. But then something else happened. I started manipulating actual conversations in order to push them to their limits, already fashioning them into narratives. The writing got the upper hand. And it became a performance. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2018

October 24, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Claire Jacobson, Ellen Jones, Joshua Craze, and Lee Yew Leong

Don’t know where to start with our Fall 2018 issue? Here are the stand-out pieces, according to our section editors.

The brand new Fall 2018 issue of Asymptote was released last week and we are still enjoying its diverse offerings from 31 countries, including a Special Feature on Catalan fiction. After the blog editors posted their highlights two days ago, the quarterly magazine’s section editors share their favorites from this season’s haul: 

What good is French today? After years of patient apprenticeship, and years of mastery, perhaps writing in French was only a means of escape, or a way of doing battle. These are the questions that Abdellah Taïa battles with, in ‘To Love and to Kill: Why Do I Write In French?’ Beautifully translated by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, Taïa’s essay attacks the French language, with great vigor and style, and—of course—in French. In a succinct essay, Taïa adroitly sets out the class politics of speaking French in Morocco, and the satisfactions (and oblivions) of conquering a language and a place, and all the complicated forms of hatred (and self-hatred) that come with it.

—Joshua Craze, Nonfiction editor

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 19, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Jiaoyang Li, Marina Sofia, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

Literary awards, festivals, and commemorative exhibitions reign in this edition of weekly dispatches.

It’s been a busy October in world literature! Join us to find out more about literary happenings from around the world, in Taiwan, China, the United Kingdom, and Albania.

Vivian Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan:

The “Double Tenth Day” on the 10th of October has been commemorated as the “birthday” of the Republic of China, the official name of Taiwan. On this day in 2018, the Li Mei-shu Memorial Gallery in Sanxia District, New Taipei City, held an opening ceremony for a series of exhibitions featuring the works by two important Taiwanese cultural figures,  Li Mei-shu (李梅樹, 1902-1983) and Zhong Lihe (鍾理和, 1915-1960), respectively a painter and a novelist. Both were influential to the development of Taiwan’s art and literary scenes, and having lived through the martial law period, Li and Zhong grounded their paintings and novels in depicting the homelands that had nourished them. Both are considered to be among a group of Taiwanese nativist artists, who composed works to express their concerns and affections about the local people and places in Taiwan. The exhibition is open to the public until the 18th of November, featuring many precious manuscripts by Zhong, paintings by Li, as well as artworks of the other two younger Taiwanese artists.

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Reevaluating the Urgent Political Relevance of 20th Century Brazilian Novelist Lima Barreto

September 13, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translations  |  by Lara Norgaard and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

"He’s the author who picks a fight with the republic, demanding more res publica."

Authors forgotten in their lifetimes sometimes resurface decades later, telling us stories that resonate far beyond their original historical moment. One such writer is Lima Barreto, whose poignant renderings of working class Brazilians from the turn of the twentieth century reverberate with contemporary relevance. Today, anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz tells Asymptote about her experience researching and writing the new biography of Lima Barreto, Lima Barreto, Triste Visionário, released in Brazil in July 2017.


Lara Norgaard (LN): In the biography you recently published, Lima Barreto, Triste Visionário, you read Lima Barreto’s fiction through the lens of history and anthropology. How was the experience of studying literature from that perspective? Why is historical context important for reading Lima’s work?

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (LMS): Disciplinary contact zones are engaging spaces, but they are contested. I place myself at the intersection of anthropology, history, and literary criticism. It was a great concern of mine not to see literature as a direct reflection of reality, since we know that Lima Barreto, while reflecting on reality, also created his own. At the same time, Lima said he wrote literaturamilitante, a term he himself used. That kind of committed literature dialogues with reality.

Lima even suffered for that approach in his time. What we now praise as high literature used to be considered unimaginative. Can you believe that? His contemporaries said that because he referenced reality and his own life, he didn’t have imagination. For me, that was a big step. I thought, I’m going to write this life by engaging with the reality that Lima lived, just as he himself did. Take his first novel, Recordações do EscrivãoIsaias Caminha, which is the story of a young black man, the son of a former slave who takes the train to the big city, as Lima did. In that city he experiences discrimination. And the second part of the book is entirely a roman à clef, as it calls attention to journalism as the fourth estate. The novel was so critical that the media blacklisted Lima, and the book was terribly received. His story “Numa e a Ninfa” critiqued politicians and his second novel, The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma, critiqued president Floriano Peixoto. Peixoto is part of the book. History enters the novel. And in that sense these novels dialogue with reality and invite the historian.

I also read the excellent North American biographer of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank, who calls attention to how it’s possible for novels to structure a biography, not the other way around. So I tried to include Lima Barreto’s voice in my book. He’s the writer, and rather than explain something in his place it would be better to let him say it. And so, looking at the biography, you’ll find that I often intersperse my voice with Lima’s. Those were the methods I used working in the contact zones between disciplines.

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I Have Changed Nothing: Seven Paradoxes in Pursuit of Arthur Waley

May 20, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Billings

Fourth in Josh Billings' "Lives of the Translators" Series

Skiing

Of all outdoor sports, skiing is the most dependent on “conditions”; so it is with some confusion that we come across this incredible sentence, from Arthur Waley’s short essay “Waiting for the New”:

But the truth is that for the skier time does not count.

As truths go, this one sounds strange—especially coming from the man who essentially introduced ancient Chinese and Japanese literature to 20th century-English readers. But Waley knew what he was talking about. Over four decades and over two dozen books (an output rivaled only by his fellow Fabian, Constance Garnett), he developed an exquisite ear for the way that time changed words. At the same time, as a poet, he understood that the gulfs separating two seemingly distant eras could be bridged, unexpectedly, by a single act. Later in the same article, he described the skier’s patience:

Waiting is waiting, whether it be for a night or for six months; and inversely the prospect of a ski-run is as exciting, day after day, to the rentier or pensioner who spends Michaelmas to May Day on the snow, as to the breadwinner who snatches a fortnight at Christmas. Each, on waking, thrills at the thought ‘today I am going to ski’; each has sat for hours in heavy and perhaps wet skiing boots, merely to put off the moment when he must confess to himself ‘today the skiing is over.’

The skier in Waley’s description no more ignores the weather than the translator would ignore the echoes of an archaic verb tense; on the contrary, he steeps himself in the conditions of his art, sure that if he waits long enough, his moment will come. The clouds will part and time collapse like a Mad Fold-In, creating a moment that is simultaneously a repetition of previous moments and unique. The name that Waley’s article gives to this miracle will be familiar to readers of either ancient Chinese literature or 20th century poetry. It is “The New.”

Biography

In a note to his 1934 translation and study of the Tao Te Ching, Waley explains the concept of fan-yen:

The ‘which of you can assume murkiness…to be clear’ is a fan-yen, a paradox, reversal of common speech. Thus ‘the more you clean it, the dirtier it becomes’ is a common saying, applied to the way in which slander ‘sticks’. But the Taoist must apply the paradoxical rule: ‘The more you dirty it, the cleaner it becomes.’

As a tool for thought, paradox has a long history in Western and Eastern literatures, but its use in biography has been limited. The mythmaking urge is too great, which means that most of the time biographers from Samuel Johnson to David Remnick have found themselves “cleaning” their subjects’ lives in a way that may sound and even be true, but which hides a certain messiness. The life in question becomes a story with a plot and theme—which is all well and good until you think about your own life, and the thousand things that any story about it would have to leave out in order to make any sense.

The life of Arthur Waley breaks the biographer’s storytelling urge in a number of ways, not the least of which is the fact that Waley didn’t write much about himself. He kept no diary and destroyed his letters, leaving a space, or network of spaces, where most of his contemporaries left maps. Perhaps most importantly, his insane productivity occurred almost exclusively in translation—a discipline that traditionally prides itself on self-erasure. Because of this, any attempt to make a story out of him has to confront the fact that there is, ostensibly at least, not much “him” to make a story out of. READ MORE…