Posts filed under 'Cities'

Translation Tuesday: “The Vanished City Hall” by Zsolt Bajnai

April 6, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Diana Senechal

But, well, in the last decades so many beautiful and interesting things have vanished from our midst.

I first read “The Vanished City Hall” one extremely foggy morning, on Mr. Bajnai’s historical blog, as I was just waking up. We had had a series of foggy days, so when I came to the part that mentioned the fog—“With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings”—I began to wonder whether this had actually happened: whether the city hall had been taken away and I simply hadn’t noticed. As I read further, I found more and more hints that this was a satire (for one thing, it was assigned to the blog’s “Szolnok Stories” category), but on my way to work, I bicycled by the city hall just to make sure. By then the fog had lifted, and the domes glistened in the sun. When translating this story, I tried to convey both the rhythm of the language and the bizarre plausibility of the plot. The former required rearrangement of the sentences at times; the latter required colloquial flexibility. I strove to convey not only the events, but the many voices of the many characters, from the anonymous complainant to the “ridiculed local architect-historian.” I enjoyed the time spent with the words and hope that the English translation will reach many readers.

—Diana Senechal, translator

By Monday morning Szolnok’s city hall had disappeared. To wit: on the plot at the corner of Kossuth Square and Táncsics Street, on the flattened, muddy soil, nothing was left but some construction debris and truck tire marks. And the worn metal fence, which had been erected around the building as early as Friday. What had become of the building was anyone’s guess.

“On Friday afternoon we noticed some people putting up a fence around the city hall,” said a resident of the house across Kossuth Square who requested anonymity. “It didn’t even occur to us that something fishy was up. We thought they were re-renovating the building. My wife even said that this was Brussels all over again. She meant that the union must have funded some newfangled idiocy.”

From neighboring Táncsics Street, on Friday afternoon, someone started placing phone calls to various authorities. He called the police, public places, even the city hall, because, according to later hearsay, he was furious that people would operate enormous machines on the weekend in downtown Szolnok. After the fence-builders left, the excavators, conveyed in the same trailer to the site, got down to work. In retrospect, you could deduce that the perpetrators had been playing it safe. Their demolition of the city hall, built in 1884, began from the courtyard. This way, until Sunday evening, locals could sense that something was happening behind this neoclassical building’s street facades only because huge dump trucks turned up in great density, plowing the cobblestone roads not only around Táncsics street, but around the theatre and Verseghy Park.

The police told the caller on Friday afternoon that this case was outside of their purview until blood flowed or a crime was committed. True, they had sent a patrol once or twice to the site because of the noise. It could later be gleaned from the reports that each time they came, they warned the noisemakers to knock it off, and each time they received a promise in return. So after the fourth or fifth call, the Miskolc center no longer forwarded the notices to Szolnok. They later explained that after so many calls they began to suspect a prank.

With regard to the disappearance of the Szolnok city hall, it is worth noting that that weekend was especially cold and so foggy that you couldn’t even see Kossuth Square from the nearby buildings. Not only that, but it just so happens that this, the city’s main square, is basically deserted except during Advent and a few summer weekends, so hardly anyone heads there on non-workdays. Still more important—and a ridiculed local architect-historian brought this to our attention years ago—is that Szolnok has long been accustomed to weekend demolitions, old buildings disappearing, all sorts of investment projects without any advance announcement or on-site notice. Later it turned out that the perpetrators knew about none of this yet benefited from it. “Probably all of this started with a real estate sale contract that had been switched with another by mistake,” stated the police officer originally in charge of the investigation, who was convinced he had been fired on the go because the facts—forget about how much time he had put into assembling them—seemed so incredible that those with a stake in covering up the case could easily chalk them up to incompetence. “The contract of sale for the apartment building at Kossuth Square 7-8 was carelessly replaced at some time or other with the decades-older contract for number 9, and thus only the transfer of Kossuth Square 9 was valid. This faulty contract then ended up, through an inheritance lawsuit, in the hands of a resourceful local lawyer, who was up to his neck in debt, from which he essentially released himself through the sale of the city hall.” In the former policeman’s seemingly unbelievable report, it appears that, with the sale contract that he had acquired for pennies, the lawyer paid off Serbian creditors, who in turn paid Bulgarian human smugglers with the title to a larger building in the center of an unknown Hungarian city. Later the property, which had never actually been seen by anyone in this succession of deals, and which in the meantime had been described as a “nineteenth-century eclectic office building,” went on paper in a thick dossier to an investor, and from him to an Austrian financial institution as collateral for defaulted loans. Then, during the bank’s year-end balance beautification process, thanks to a recommendation prepared by a Hungarian junior clerk working in Austria and supplemented with photos, topographic identifier, and building history, a Hungarian big businessman became the owner of that basemented, storied, domed building. READ MORE…

Sea-Change & Rubble: Mourning Our Beirut

September 2, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Reem Joudi

Where does one search for words when the air is sucked out of one's lungs? Where do we excavate the vocabulary to express our sorrow?

On August 4, 2020, the port explosions in Beirut devastated the city and sent shockwaves throughout the world within a a matter of minutes. In a year already thick with disaster, the eruption—one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in human history—appeared to be a harbinger for the fact that the worst days are not yet behind. From south Lebanon, Reem Joudi felt the reverberations of the blast, and penned this intimate and lyrical essay in its immediate aftermath, reflecting on the felt and lived traumas of her beloved Beirut, the human capacity for survival, and what it means now to look forward.

We were having coffee at my grandmother’s house, as we usually spent most afternoons, when our bouts of daily chatter were interrupted by a series of strange events: the living room door slammed shut, the sliding glass doors shook, and a loud thud echoed outside. “Was it an earthquake?”; “No, it sounded like gunshots.”; “Quick, turn on the TV!”. After a few seconds scrambling for the remote, my grandmother switched on the television to a local news channel, which was covering a meeting with resigned Prime Minister Saad Hariri at the Grand Serail. We assumed that the building had experienced an explosion of some sort, due to the minor damages we saw onscreen.

Our first guess was an assassination attempt; Hariri’s father—former PM Rafic Hariri—was assassinated in 2005, and the Special Tribunal investigating his death planned to release the final verdict on August 7, 2020. Our first instinct was to pray that this was not the case—not out of love for the political leader, but out of fear for the people’s mental and emotional health, which could no longer sustain such consecutive trauma and instability. The list of what we had already survived was long and seemingly endless, split in two columns between pain currently lived and years of past unrest. The former enlisted a collapsing economy, a devalued local currency, hyperinflation, twenty-hour power cuts, a global pandemic, a trash crisis, predicted food shortages, a breakdown in the banking sector—an inventory of present loss piled atop years of past losses.

Seconds later, the reality of what had happened unfolded before our eyes in disjointed fragments: partly transmitted through WhatApp videos circulated with panic-stricken urgency, and partly through live news reports. The reality was more heartbreaking, more expansive, and more destructive than imaginable. Beirut’s port had exploded, and everything scattered into dust and nothingness—ungraspable, unimaginable, slipping through fingers. Beirut’s port had exploded, and we heard it forty kilometers away at my grandmother’s house in Saida, south Lebanon. Beirut’s port had exploded, yet all I could think was: “Why am I not in Beirut right now?” The moments that followed were a blur—frantic texts to friends and loved ones, agonizing moments awaiting their replies. “Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay.” Blood, blood, blood, and rubble refracted through screens as we stayed glued to our phones, re-watching the horror of the explosion in slow-motion. Screams as loud as the blast. A crippling numbness that I could neither untangle nor understand. When I went back home an eternity later, I found my entire body covered in red marks. I did not understand how they appeared. Why were they not bleeding? READ MORE…

Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision

April 22, 2020  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Franca Mancinelli

Before this city is scattered or rises like a curtain over the void. Keep living in it, believing in this space, stay.

Franca Mancinelli (b. 1981) is one of the leading poets of her generation and has received several important prizes in Italy. I have had the pleasure of translating all of her published poetry to date: her prose poems in The Little Book of Passage (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018) and her verse poetry in At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). Her writing is cherished by readers because of the way she grapples with wounds, losses, and what she has called “fault lines”—sometimes personal in origin, sometimes not. By writing, she often seeks to transform these negative events or situations into something potentially affirmative. The title of her new book of poems, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto, which is forthcoming in September at Marcos y Marcos, comes from a line in one of her poems that expresses this new possibility of vision: “All the eyes that I have opened are branches I have lost.” 

Over the years, Mancinelli has also written compelling personal essays. Published in anthologies and journals, these texts often evoke her hometown of Fano or meditate on works of art. Such is the case with “Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision.” Mancinelli bases her text on a fifteenth-century Italian painting that is found in Urbino at the National Gallery. The painting represents an “ideal city” from which all, or nearly all, the inhabitants seem to have fled, arguably because of some invasion or plague-like disaster. Her text is a kind of reverie on this painting: its architecture, its empty city square and buildings. It raises the question of stepping into the painting, of having “the courage to cross the threshold, [to] enter the darkness, hollow and round like a belly that has taken you back into itself.”

—John Taylor

It emerges when I close my eyes. As clearly as an island suddenly appearing beyond the haze and the mist on the horizon. You see it and can only believe your eyes even if you know you are daydreaming. It happens every time in a different light, as if that square and those streets were the setting of a story. Perhaps only the ghost of a voice that has taken a breath, a gust skimming over the cobblestones, whirlwinding dust across the space, beating lightly on the windows like a bird that has lost its flock.

With sure footsteps, I was heading towards the half-open door. That of the large pagoda a magic spell had brought to a stop at the center of this gently drawn desert. I was moving forward over the large, ash- and sand-colored marble slabs. I could not take my eyes off the geometry seemingly guiding me to the center, like a rolling marble that gathers speed, approaching the hole where it must fall. The darkness beyond the door and a growing fear could have gripped my body and kept me from moving, but it was impossible: my steps continued towards the center while my terror was blooming like a black flower. The door might have opened slowly, then widely, to the breath of the void barely covered by the constructions that now seemed made of cards. They have been aligned in a lukewarm light, but, as you see, they cannot halt the fathomless blackness pressing outwards from the windows and the half-open doors. If you enter the pagoda you sink into the center of the universe, in an endless fall. The beast looks at you, awaits you, pretending to sleep with its hollow eyes: six large square pupils in a clear mellow sky that tells you not to believe in the darkness, not to be afraid. Come to the center; enter. You can imitate a childhood game and jump only on the light or the dark slabs. Precisely, calibrating each movement as if your life depended on it. With such concentration, obediently, you can advance to the foot of the staircase. Now you’re there, standing in front of the dark crack. You have gathered all the soft light of this scene; you have the balmy sun concealed by buildings but warm and sure, as in a late morning without school. You can see the pagoda slowly turning on its axis like a carousel without horses and without music, so slowly that it seems almost motionless; yet it rotates—of this you are sure—rotates like the earth. At the top, the almost invisible thread supporting it could lift it up again, restoring its airy foundations. READ MORE…

Announcing our September Book Club Selection: Moving Parts by Prabda Yoon

October 10, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Is it a sadder thing to throw oneself unnoticed from the top of a building or to live out one’s days without a functioning butt plug?

Moving Parts, our September Asymptote Book Club selection, is the second book-length English translation of Prabda Yoon’s work, but perhaps the first book (in any genre) ever to culminate in what our reviewer describes as one of life’s “most seductive question[s]: is it a sadder thing to throw oneself unnoticed from the top of a building or to live out one’s days without a functioning butt plug?”

In addition to translating A Clockwork Orange and Lolita into Thai, Prabda Yoon has, according to Words Without Borders, “popularized postmodern narrative techniques in contemporary Thai literature.”  Bringing Prabda Yoon’s work into English (together with Tilted Axis), Mui Poopoksakul demonstrates a “facility for translating puns” and delivers one of this year’s must-read short story collections. We’re excited to be sharing it with our subscribers in the USA, Canada, and the UK.

If you’d like to receive next month’s Asymptote Book Club pick, all the necessary information is available on our official Book Club page. Current subscribers can join the discussion on Moving Parts, and each of our nine previous titles, through our facebook group.

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In Review: Once There Was a City Named Dilli by Intizar Hussain

August 28, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Sneha Khaund

Delhi is in a perpetual cycle of becoming and being unmade.

After our feature on studying language in South Asia on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of Indian Independence, we focus once again on the complex social and linguistic landscape of the subcontinent. Sneha Khaund reviews Man Booker Prize shortlisted author and Ordre des Arts et des Lettres awardee Initizar’s Hussain’s loving, nostalgic account of Delhi that has been recently translated by Ghazala Jamil and Faiz Ullah and published by Yoda Press. The Pakistani author (1923-2016) is widely recognized as a great Urdu writer and was a regular literary columnist for Pakistan’s leading English-language daily Dawn. He migrated to Pakistan in 1947 after it was created by partitioning colonial era India into the two nations of India and Pakistan. Hussain’s acclaimed novel Basti, published in 1979 and later translated into English, addressed the history of Pakistan and the subcontinent. As this review argues, the issues of secularism and language politics are as important in contemporary times as they were during the Partition. 

As I reflect on the themes of the book I wish to dwell on in this review, my attention is interrupted by bits of information pouring in through news channels and the internet. A self-styled godman has been convicted of raping two of his former disciples. His followers are spread across Haryana and Punjab, neighbouring states of Delhi where I am writing from. The judgement has come fifteen years after the charges were made, during which period he has cultivated a flamboyant personal image, complete with movies and music videos. On Friday, the time leading up to the verdict was fraught with tension as the media speculated whether his followers would riot if he was convicted. The police had emergency preparations on stand-by, including three stadiums to hold people after arrests. Violence erupted after the verdict, as feared, and at last count, thirty people have died. Curfew has been imposed on parts of northern India and there has been an internet block-out in certain parts so that rumours don’t spread and incite fresh violence.

The deafening silence in the wake of violence in the modern state—whether it is Darjeeling, Kashmir, Punjab, or Haryana—is with what Intizar Hussain begins Once There Was a City Named Dilli. Hussain starts the first chapter by saying that he had arrived in Delhi “two and a half or three years after Partition” (3) and had headed to the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin where he was taken aback by the silence that greeted him instead of the usual hustle and bustle. His surprise will be relatable to modern day readers familiar with the shrine of the Sufi saint in the heart of Delhi that draws throngs of devotees and tourists alike and is located close to one of the busiest railway stations in India. We wonder if a hush has fallen over the city in the aftermath of the violence of Partition, but Hussain draws a larger arc of history.

As he searches in vain for the nineteenth century Urdu poet Ghalib’s grave while the melancholy scream of a lonely peacock tears through the “dusk of that sad evening” (6), he is struck with amazement at how many times the city has been plundered and resettled. Thus begins Hussain’s quest to write the history of Delhi as a series of plunders, conquests, settlements. “Who were the settlers, who were settled?”, he writes. As scholars such as Romila Thapar have shown, these are complex questions because they carry within them the issue of who is the legitimate citizen of India. Both colonialist and nationalist historiography have been guilty of perpetuating the perception that Islam came to India by way of the sword, through figures such as Nadir Shah and Timur. Hussain then proceeds to draw up a historical narrative of the city from the time of the mythical Pandavas of Mahabharat, the period of Islamic dynasties, the colonial era where India’s capital was shifted to Delhi from Calcutta in 1911, ending finally with the nationalist movement in the early twentieth century that eventually led to the creation of two nation states—India and Pakistan.

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In Divisible Cities: A Q&A with Dominic Pettman

December 12, 2013  |  in Interviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Asymptote catches up with a past contributor whose new book was released this summer.

How is In Divisible Cities related to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities?

I would call it a primary inter-text. For twenty years or so I have been enchanted by this kind of genre, restrained, aphoristic magical metafiction, or whatever we might call it, including Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. But Calvino’s book really inspired me in terms of its condensed, crystalline approach, concerned with what Bachelard calls “the poetics of space.” Some critics believe that all of these different cities in Calvino’s book are in fact the author’s beloved Venice, in various imaginative iterations. Rather than celebrate one single city in various disguises, however, I wanted to trace the connections or song-lines between different ones; since no city is completely foreign in the 21st century. So the writing strategy was a series of postcards from different places, which hopefully add up to a single holographic image—like a jig saw puzzle.

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