Posts filed under 'cinema'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, Miranda Mazariegos, and Wambua Muindi

The latest from Kenya, Egypt, and Mexico!

In this edition of our column for global literary news, Arabic titles are celebrated with the National Book Award’s longlist of Translated Literature, a vital literacy program in Kenya travels to a women’s prison, and a new cinematic adaptation of one of Mexico’s most important novels premiers at the Toronto International Film Festival. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, literature emerges as a beacon of hope. Now translated into English, three Arabic literary works have been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award for Translated Literature, standing as testaments to the resilience of the human spirit. Nasser Abu Srour’s The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poignant memoir recounting his decades-long imprisonment in Israeli jails. Through the lens of his imagination, Abu Srour transforms confinement into a realm of boundless possibility, exploring themes of love, justice, and the unwavering power of hope. The book’s evocative prose and its author’s unflinching honesty combine into a compelling narrative that has resonated with readers around the globe; interested readers can also see an excerpt published on Asymptote as a part of our All Eyes on Palestine column.

Additionally, Leri Price, a frequent contender for the National Book Award, has once again made the longlist with her translation of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home (which Asymptote had selected for the February edition of our Book Club). This haunting novel delves into the complexities of human relationships and the devastating impact of war on individuals and communities. Another longlisted work is Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, co-translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. This thought-provoking novel examines the censorship of literature and its profound implications for society. I’m so glad that Arabic literature is shining thanks to the fabulous work of its translators. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 2, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the foremost developments from their respective regions. In North Macedonia, a new collection from a renowned poet and director finds solace and profundity in the complex nexus between human life and its context. In the Philippines and Bulgaria, readers bid farewell to two titans of writing and translation. 

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

Prostori (Spaces), the third poetry collection by renowned Macedonian film director and poet Antonio Mitrikjeski, was recently published by Dijalog Press. With a track record of two well-received collections and several films playing at festivals across the world, Mitrikjeski is equally ‘intellectually rich and emotionally lush’ in his visual language as he is in literature, per writer Dimitar Bashevski’s review of Prostori.

The collection is fittingly cinematic; weaving together a mystical sublime, oracular dreamscapes, and a loving mimesis of familiar places, Mitrikjeski’s robust poetic voice blends inner and outer worlds, delving deep into the human psyche as he wanders into distant regions—mountain peaks, the ocean’s floor, the night sky. Frequently apostrophic, he foregrounds the deep entanglement between his human subjects and their environments, their ideas, and the people around them. In ‘Saraj,’ a poem about his childhood home, Mitrikjeski celebrates the ‘fraternity of children’ and ‘the mystique and simplicity of all the silhouettes who confessed their feelings’ in the ‘house bearing the roots of beginnings,’ where he still discovers the ‘eternal. . . fraternity of those present.’ Opening the collection and dedicated to his parents, ‘Saraj’ is programmatic. Throughout Prostori, the speaker is preoccupied with finding connection amidst distance, and this search is mediated via both real and oneiric spaces, as well as the relationships they make possible: ‘The lake’s water connects us all. / The fog is lifted,’ writes Mitrikjeski in ‘The Word’. The word itself, the material of poetry—’invisible, written upon the ruins’—will remain eternally within the lake, that is, within the space of human connections, among ‘familiar names’. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

READ MORE…

Visual Spotlight: Mounira Al Solh on War, Refugees, and the Scatter

February 15, 2024  |  in Visual Art  |  by Mounira Al Solh

My work is a collection of hundreds of encounters, captured by writing and by drawing the moments with each individual and family I met. . .

The liquid condition of being stateless—whether as a refugee, a migrant, or a individual living on occupied territories—means that one’s life begins to revolve around questions: questions of where to go, how to act, what to claim, who the opposition is, who oneself is. In Lebanese-Dutch artist Mounira Al Solh‘s work, these inquiries are given vivid sonic and visual resonances, in the dizzying and hypnotic shot of a boat swaying back and forth, in the slow panning over an animal’s exposed ribcage, in a man that continually raises a foot to step forward or backward, before returning it to its place. Working with her own narrative of migrating from Beirut to Damascus as a child, and overlaying it with a contemplative blend of cultural archive, enactment, and linguistic sensitivity, Al Solh places a beating heart in the centre of displacement’s immense, abstracted web, illustrating not only origins or destinations, but the individual in the middle of becoming.

In any case, in the year 2006, as I was finishing my studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, I made a video piece, Rawane’s Song, in which I stated that “I have nothing to say about the war,” meaning the Lebanese civil war. At that time, everyone expected Lebanese artists to speak about that war. It was also generational, as people who grew up during the Lebanese civil war found the only way to survive was by not speaking about the war, but about survival instead. When I was a young teen, I had the privilege to live the changes that occurred on the ground in Lebanon, the abrupt and absurd end of fifteen years of civil war, and the shift to a postwar time (or perhaps to a suspended civil cold war, as some people called it).

Ironically, when I had finished making Rawane’s Song there was a war again in the summer, when Israel invaded Lebanon and bombed its bridges in a fight against Hezbollah, who had kidnapped a couple of soldiers to tease and provoke Israel. After this war, fighting factions would strengthen and become more popular. Anyway, at that time, I did not refrain from showing Rawane’s Song, and I did not refrain from taking a highly ironical position towards “speaking about the war,” even though we were being bombed and the country was devastated. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

September 13, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Ian Ross Singleton, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Stanyon

Kaufman’s film strikes me as an example of domestication masquerading as foreignization. . .

When Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published, readers lauded the Czech writer’s delicately choreographed story of individual lives pulsating through social and political forces, and soon, the book was hailed as a classic. Philip Kaufman’s adaptation, written with the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, was released four years later, in 1988—despite the director admitting that he had considered the book’s “elaborate, musical structure” to be “unfilmable.” In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, our editors take a look at the works of Kundera and Kaufman in a discussion that ranges over domestication, kitsch, and the two artists’ respective treatments of “lightness” and “weight.”

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): Let’s clear the elephant out of the room; Milan Kundera famously disowned the film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being as “[having] very little to do with the spirit either of the novel or the characters in it.” In other words, Kundera felt that his novel’s “aura,” his authorial intent, was not translated well to Philip Kaufman’s screen. Much has already been said about the differences between the two works, especially in Patrick Cattrysse’s analysis of the adaptation. For one, the film elides the novel’s heterodiegetic narrative voice, instead inserting three expository intertitles at the film’s opening. It then never uses intertitles again. As such, the film’s narrative movement takes place at a distance, never immersing itself in its characters’ interior moral or emotional discontinuities. For me, this perspective erases a significant part of what makes reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being such a scintillating pleasure. The novel reads like a mirror, a commentary on the kitsch and contradictions inherent in human nature; the film reads like, well, a screen, projecting an image of kitsch without penetrating it.

The film’s chronological order also undermines that omnipresent, digressive, ironic voice, which swerves between focalizations and temporal frames to reveal the mind behind the speaker. I visualize it as a white expanse of space in which Kundera’s narrator, leaning forward on the edge of a stool behind a control panel, holds forth on the dialectics of “einmal ist keinmal.” In my view, the film opts for what we might analogize as a domesticating approach; it mechanically “reproduces” Kundera’s Czech novel in the traditional codes and modes of a Hollywood production, complete with primarily Western European actors. Kaufman’s direction untethers his film from the burdens of voice, nonlinearity, and metaphor, resigning the narrator’s ponderings on eternal return to a few hasty lines of dialogue. What does the novel’s aura, and its reproduction in the film, mean to you both? Is the film a product of lightness or of weight?

Ian Ross Singleton (IRS): I’ll start by answering your last question; I think the film is more of a weight, while the novel’s aura is, on the other hand, one of lightness. I agree with you that we can put aside a more superficial discussion of the differences between the film and novel—a friend of mine said that no film can ever reproduce a novel well, and I have to admit that any exception I can come up with is rare. It is interesting, nonetheless, to discuss, as you do, the quality of the transmutation (in the sense of Roman Jakobson’s idea of intersemiotic translation—that of verbal signs by means of a nonverbal sign system) of the novel into film. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 21, 2023  |  in Dispatches  |  by Andriana Hamas, Jiaoyang Li, and Michal Zechariah

The latest from Germany, Bulgaria, and China!

This week, our team members report on poetry and performance art, multilingual panel discussions, and inventive book events. From a cinematic book launch in Bulgaria to a night of diasporic literature in Berlin and a poetry installation in Shanghai read on to find out more!

Michal Zechariah, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from Berlin

I have moved countries twice—once when I moved from Tel Aviv to Chicago for my graduate studies in English literature, and the second time when I moved from Chicago to Berlin for a postdoctoral fellowship. One thing I hadn’t anticipated about that second move was how it would affect my relationship not with my first language, Hebrew, but with English, my second. I started questioning the place of the language that has become so important to me, even though it wasn’t my mother tongue, in my new life.

For this reason, I was immediately drawn to an event titled Literature in Diaspora hosted by the Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora at the Katholische Akademie Berlin last week (the choice of location is interesting; perhaps for those of us who look forward to the afterlife, the earthly world presents a diasporic experience of sorts). READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Happening

March 6, 2023  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Georgina Fooks, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

But how does the visual operate in cinema, as opposed to literature?

Annie Ernaux’s memoir of her 1963 abortion, Happening, originally published in 2000, and Audrey Diwan’s 2021 movie adaptation of the same name are the subject of our latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies. Ernaux’s memoir tells the story of an abortion she sought before the procedure was legal in France, and the story of her reflecting on the experience decades later, well after France legalized abortion. Diwan’s movie came out in a very different world than the one Ernaux’s memoir reflects on and, indeed, the one in which Ernaux wrote her memoir. Both the book and the movie follow young Annie’s struggle to find the medical care she needs—Ernaux said that watching the film “plunged” her back into the experience she wrote about. Taking the two together underscores the urgency of her situation and raises questions about the difference between cinematic immediacy and memoiristic distance. In the following roundtable, Meghan Racklin, Xiao Yue Shan, and Georgina Fooks discuss the relationship between these two works, the translation of memoir into fiction, and experience of reading and watching the movement of time.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Halfway through the pages of Ernaux’s Happening, there’s a line that I saw as a kind of summation of her entire corpus’ ethos: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled.” It seems to me that a similar sentiment across nearly all of her texts—which are, after all, in their obsessive tunnelling and metaphysical depth, a refusal of any verdict that women’s lives are mundane, and their thoughts unserious.

And there is a particular impact to that Serious Verb—chronicled. In French, Ernaux opts for the less indomitable l’écrire, but I’d like to believe that Tanya Leslie, in her translation, understood that to write would have been too pliant for what Ernaux wanted to say: that such experiences needed to be inscribed into the archives of human history, that they needed to be preserved as well as they can for future excavation, and that such texts would fill the void in the scaffolding of time.

Happening, then, is a text about writing, but also the remembering that feeds the writing, and also the rupture that must be navigated when reality and recognition are trying to find one another on the page. If there was any image that came to mind while I read Happening, it was only of the older Ernaux holding a pen, gazing out the window, closing her eyes in conjuration of an image. Because Happening does not centralise the abortion that propels its narrative, but the intellectual clarity that is required to unveil “what can be found there,” I almost expected a cinematic replication of that once-removed perspective in Audrey Diwan’s adaptation: voiceover narration, analepsis/prolepsis, superimpositions . . .

The film, however, makes no use of such manipulations, and completely isolates itself within the parameters of the Event; it is a movie about abortion, and its illegality and ramifications in 1960s France. It is so dissonant from its source text—not in content but in intention—that it jarred me when Anamaria Varolomei, who plays Ernaux, is first addressed as Annie. It was impossible for me to connect her with the woman of the book—not only because the woman is older, but because the woman is remembering, not living through. The film is an intimate, occasionally chilling, and politically effective film about the alienation and humiliation of being accidentally pregnant in that era—and as such it is rooted in the immediate, in the physical, and in the cinematic present. Ernaux’s text read to me in direct opposition, weaving and defining that tenuous space of the eternal past. How did the two of you feel about this variation in treatment? Was it as disconcerting for you?

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

October 6, 2022  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by MARGENTO, Rubén López, Thuy Dinh, and Xiao Yue Shan

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 2, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Suhasini Patni

Literary news from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

In India, the country mourns the loss of Kerala’s groundbreaking tribal novelist. In Hong Kong, a genre-bending poet is being celebrated across the nation. And in Sweden, two talented writers have won the prestigious Klas de Vylder’s Grant Fund for Immigrant Writers. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

On August 16, India’s first tribal novelist Narayan passed away in Kochi. Born in the Mala Araya tribe in Kerala, Narayan gained nationwide recognition for his book Kocharethi (1998), which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award. The book was a way to counter the misrepresentations of his community from outsiders, and Narayan struggled for ten years to find a publisher willing to release it; despite critical acclaim, many complained his work lacked literary merit. Translator Catherine Thankamma, who translated the text into English—winning the Crossword Book Award for it—wrote a tribute to him for Scroll.in. Her tribute honors the struggles and biases he faced in the literary world.

August has seen many new releases in translation. A significant one is Satya Vyas’s Banaras Talkies, translated from Hindi by Himadri Agarwal. A campus novel, the book is centered around three law students from Banaras Hindu University. The translation was facilitated by Ashoka Centre for Translation from Ashoka University, where Agarwal graduated from. According to Mohini Gupta’s review, “The Hindi novel seamlessly accesses Bhojpuri and English words and phrases and the translation captures these linguistic variations beautifully.”

Many translators in India are also turning to writing fiction. Aruna Chakravarti, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for her translation of Sarat Chandra’s Srikanta, is known for her dedication to Bengali literature. Her first translation, Tagore: Songs Rendered into English, came out in 1984, and her critically acclaimed novels explore the lives of women in the household of Rabindranath Tagore. Her latest book, The Mendicant Prince, explores the Bhawal case—an extended court case from 1920-46 about a man claiming to be the prince of Bhawal. An excerpt of the book can be read here. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

December 9, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin, Fairuza Hanun, and Lara Norgaard

If I were to visualize the novel’s plot, I would not draw a line, but instead a scatter plot of points [...] Shrapnel from an explosion. . .

Arguably one of the most recognised Indonesian writers in world literature, Eka Kurniawan has earned a global audience—most notably for being the first Indonesian to earn a spot on the Man Booker International longlist with translator Annie Tucker for the sweeping novel, Beauty is A Wound. This August, acclaimed Indonesian director Edwin bagged the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for his adaptation of Eka’s Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (reviewed here). The story follows the young Ajo Kawir, who tries to compensate for his sexual impotence by turning to fighting, subsequently falling in love with the bodyguard Iteung. In this special edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we are honoured to have Edwin discuss his adaptation of Eka’s work with assistant editor Fairuza Hanun and former-Editor-at-Large for Brazil Lara Norgaard in a wide-ranging conversation that considers the role of language in the multicultural archipelago, critiques of masculinity, and how Eka’s famed fragmentation on the page can hold up as it moves onto screen.

Note: the following piece includes discussion of sexual violence.

Fairuza Hanun (FH): Edwin, I’ve been fascinated by your works, especially Aruna & Lidahnya and Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, which have explored numerous topical issues, ranging from—but not limited to—gender, race, sexuality, culture, and identity. However, compared to the gritty action-packed Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, your earlier films retained more “domestic” and bittersweet compositions with a main narrative thread. Eka Kurniawan’s literature is well-known for its meandering plots and fusion of socialist and magical realism, and although Vengeance is one of Kurniawan’s more straightforward works, it still possesses his love for multiple threads. This poses my first questions: what are your thoughts on the process of adapting Kurniawan’s braided narrative into a limited screen time? Were there any challenges in transposing his subtlety and explicitness when approaching the taboos of Indonesian society?

I know quite little about the technicalities of cinematography, but I found the film to be absolutely stunning, every scene evoking emotion—the simultaneous isolation and communalism in a village community—and remaining faithful to the descriptions in the book; the actors did a spectacular job at fleshing out the characters. I noticed that the book’s dry, witty humour remains present throughout the film, as well as some of the vocabulary from KheaKamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) being maintained in the dialogue. This intrigued me, as the effects of dialogue in literature and cinema often differ; for instance, how it is made more “acceptable”, or how it can be ignored, if dialect—i.e. contractions, local diction, etc.—is “smoothed out” in writing, reconstructed into a formal, almost mathematically-structured, rendition. Yet, in film, an accurate depiction of the setting can make such a move jarring something out of place in a village with perhaps limited resources to literature, as it seems the people are still steeped in traditional, often superstitious, interpretations. Language should be an intercultural exchange, and Indonesia is a multicultural, multilingual country; mediums of expression which strive to preserve culture should not promote or normalise the process of lingual centrism. I feel that the widespread use of Indonesian and its normalisation or expectations pose an issue of the slow erasure of local languages which have been cultivated throughout generations, to be replaced by the “central” national language.

In regards to that, what are your thoughts on language in the arts, and the process of adapting a book to a film and vice versa? And what is your opinion or definition of a faithful adaptation?

vengeance a at the movies 2 READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Love in a Fallen City

June 10, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Allison Braden, Shawn Hoo, and Xiao Yue Shan

A literary style that lends itself so naturally to cinema has its pleasures and, in some cases, its perils when it comes to adaptation.

The allure of Eileen Chang’s prose is a bewitching combination of insight and precision—sensual acuity married with an editorial scrupulousness. Earning widespread renown with renderings of the delicate, tenuous relationships in the volatile societies of her time, Chang has become known for her ability to create vivid, lasting images. It’s no wonder, then, that her works have served as the material for several celebrated films; today, our blog editors are taking a look at Hong Kong director Ann Hui’s adaptation of Chang’s rich novella of courtship and compromise, Love in a Fallen City (1984). What follows is a discussion on the transposition of Chang’s “cinematic” language, the pitfalls of overly faithful adaptation, and the difficulties of portraying interiority.

Shawn Hoo (SH): I have always thought of Eileen Chang’s prose style—her montage of overlapping timelines; her patient, exquisite visualising of scenes; her keen ear for dialogue—as having an affinity with the language of film. That is, her stories come to me almost ready-made for film. Unsurprisingly, Chang herself did write fourteen screenplays (a neglected part of her oeuvre), and several of her stories have been adapted by celebrated Sinophone filmmakers such as Stanley Kwan, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and of course, Ann Hui (all of whom have no doubt disseminated Chang’s legacy to new audiences). A literary style that lends itself so naturally to cinema has its pleasures and, in some cases, its perils when it comes to adaptation. Just hear what Hui admits when asked about her interpretation of Chang’s story: “There is no interpretation at all,” she says, “It’s more a representation. The novel is so good that adding anything at all seems impossible.” If by “representation” Hui means to hew close to the original text, then this bears out in the film’s dialogue, which is used almost verbatim in its Cantonese translation, as well as in its rendering of key scenes which appear largely unmodified on screen. Consequently, what is arguably Chang’s most loved story has had a relatively lukewarm reception in its filmic context (and in Hui’s otherwise prolific oeuvre). Faithfulness—that contested word so frequently used to discuss translation—it seems, does not always reward.

This for me raises questions about the merits of transferring what is ostensibly cinematic writing onto the film medium, and how their relationship—as well as mutual realisation—can be understood beyond a scene-for-scene, image-for-image correspondence, which is at least how I conceive of Hui’s approach: too faithful. To be clear, there is much to admire in this film, especially Hui’s treatment of early 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong. Whereas the former has the camera concentrated on the decaying, claustrophobic Bai household and moves between adjacent rooms only to hear Liusu’s relatives badmouthing her, the latter moves liberally between the historic Repulse Bay Hotel, couples dancing to a jazz number at the Hong Kong Hotel, outdoor Chinese opera, and a rendition of Greensleeves all heard while Liusu and Liuyuan walk the city. The film’s construction of these two settings dramatises the shifts in Liusu’s psychology, one that liberates her from the sad huqin of an insular household into the cacophonous colonial cosmopolitanism of British Hong Kong which signifies new beginnings. Or rather, three settings: if we distinguish Japanese-occupied Hong Kong for its distinct aural and visual qualities. Here, I think Hui successfully leverages on the medium to elaborate on Chang’s vision, that is the role of contingency—of situated time and place—to precipitate love.

At this point, I wonder if either of you might have a different take on the relationship between representation and interpretation, to borrow Hui’s own distinction?

Allison Braden (AB): The film did strike me as a fascinating testament to the idea that extreme faithfulness can be, paradoxically, a detriment to adaptation. Conventional wisdom holds that books deal in emotions, plays in dialogue, and films in images. The limited visual scope of the first part of Love in a Fallen City—the repressively close Bai home, the tight shots in various hotel settings—calls to mind a teleplay, with more reliance on dialogue than images. This approach shortchanges Liusu’s interiority and writer Eileen Chang’s careful attention to emotional nuance. I spent the initial Hong Kong portion of the movie baffled by Liusu’s ambivalence. She clearly needs to escape her family but also seems determined to make a match for herself rather than meet anyone else’s expectations. “The first marriage is for your parents,” she says, “the second is for yourself.” But can she afford to dawdle? To repulse a supremely eligible suitor? Sure, Fan represented a foreign sensibility and exhibited domineering and misogynistic traits, but Liusu’s alternate reactions—charmed and put off—and quiet (is it too much to say sulky?) responses to his overtures didn’t offer a sufficient window into her feelings. The viewer is left to project her own interpretation on Liusu’s mystifying reticence, which I see less as intentional ambiguity and more as a failure to adequately adapt the interiority of the novel to a medium that relies on a different form of exposition. READ MORE…

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

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . 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…

Asymptote at the Movies: Pedro Páramo

November 2, 2020  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin Alanís-García and Xiao Yue Shan

The script writers seemed to juggle the fragmentary structure of the novel with the linear conventions of cinematic narratives.

Today, on Día de Muertos, Asymptote is resurrecting Asymptote at the Movies, our column on world literature and their cinematic adaptations. In a marvellously topical fusion, we’re returning with a discussion on Juan Rulfo’s beloved and widely acclaimed Pedro Páramo, and the film of the same name directed by Carlos Velo, who dared to take this complex and mystifying text to the screen. 

John Gavin, the American actor who portrayed Don Pedro in the film, likened Rulfo’s novel to Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, or Goethe’s Faust. What those books are to Spain, Italy, and Germany, Pedro Páramo is to Mexico. It’s a declaration that would seem hyperbolic if it weren’t corroborated by so many other literary masters and critics. In her preface to Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of the novel, Susan Sontag declared the novella “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” Borges declared it one of the greatest texts ever written in any language. In the following conversation, Assistant Editor Edwin Alanís-García and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan dive into the myriad thrills that arise between this pivotal work, and its strange and brilliant cinematic counterpart.

Edwin Alanís-García (EAG): It’s a tradition to watch Pedro Páramo on Día de Muertos. I’m not sure how or when this tradition started, but I liken it to how airing It’s a Wonderful Life is a perennial custom at Christmas. To be clear, I don’t mean that Día de Muertos is simply another holiday. It might be unjust to even regard it as a holiday; perhaps ritual or ceremony is more apt. However we label it, it’s one of Mexico’s most sacred and revered traditions, perhaps even more so than Christmas or Independence Day. A defiant celebration (literally, it’s a party for the dead) of the ubiquity of death, Día de Muertos acts as a sobering reminder that the only guarantee in life is that it ends. At the same time, it’s a festival to remember and honor the dead, especially our ancestors and those we have loved and lost. On this day, it’s said that the spirits of the dead can travel to our world, hence the importance of ofrendas, ritual displays where gifts are offered to the dead to welcome them home.

In a very concrete way, these sentiments permeate Juan Rulfo’s novel and Carlos Velo’s film: the realm of the dead and the realm of the living are constantly woven together throughout the story. We start with Juan Preciado at his mother’s deathbed, vowing to fulfill her dying wish. His mother’s voice takes him to a literal ghost town in search of his father, Pedro Páramo. Through the testimonies of the living and the dead (and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the two apart) we’re treated to flashbacks of a once thriving town and the tyrannical legacy of our titular villain.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Cultural commemorations and reconciliations of death seem to be mirrored across the world. In China, during a day of early springtime (a varying date on the Chinese calendar), we observe the Qingming Festival—heading to the graves of our ancestors to sweep and tidy up the grounds, burn incense and paper money, pay tribute. It is—in the same vein as Day of the Dead—an acknowledgement of the steep and synchronous passage between the realms we experience, and all the others we are offered only brief glimpses at.

Something I thought about was that—when sorting through the wreckages of a national trauma, there tends to be a reprise of narratives that amalgamate death and spirituality with day-to-day life. Day of the Dead, and what it means to Mexico, bring to mind a section of Robert Bolaño’s vividly wandering long poem, “The Neochileans”:

To the Virgin Lands
Of Latin America:
A hinterland of specters
And ghosts.
Our home
Positioned within the geometry
Of impossible crimes.

“Holidays” of remembrance are communal methods for managing the irresolution of death; when the abrupt disappearances of lives become a ceaseless tide, acceptance of its pervasion does not equate to understanding. Reading and watching Pedro Páramo brought to mind firstly the human impulse to fight against and disprove the terrifying concept of permanence. Death, our only pedestrian encounter with the eternal, is something that feels instinctually wrong for both its ineradicability and inevitability—perhaps because we have nothing to measure it up against, no certain qualifiers or records, a complete void of comparability. The persistence of ghosts, and spirits, and their continual autonomy and humanity, then, is an automatic salve for the mystifying absolution of death, and Pedro Páramo is such a brilliant dissolution of permanence, an astonishing textual disprovement of linearity and the limits of our living experience. I often find that cultures that incorporate spirituality more seamlessly into their daily philosophies are also generations that have suffered formidable violence. Along this vein of thinking, there are some who say that writing this book was Juan Rulfo’s way of protesting the failed promises of the Mexican Revolution. What do you think?

Screen Shot 2022-10-06 at 12.52.29 AM READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2020

October 12, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, George MacBeth, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…