Posts filed under 'classics'

An Unexpected Lurch of the Heart: An Interview With A. E. Stallings

February 28, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

It’s an awareness of diachronic time, of the present and the past coexisting in the same space.

In the world of contemporary English poetry, A. E. Stallings is a giant. Known for both her innovative, various work within traditional poetic forms as well as her extraordinary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, her poems celebrate both the timelessness and resilience of technique, as well as how ancient constructions can continually metamorphose and evolve to enliven contemporary internalities and realities. In this following interview, she speaks to the allure of the classics, the essential work of keeping words alive, and the symbiotic relationship between translation and poetry.

Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Although you’ve spoken on writing poetry from a young age, you did not start to learn Latin until you were an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, where you switched from an English and Music major to a Classics major. What was it about Classics that attracted you?

A. E. Stallings (AES): I think I probably always had a sneaking attraction to it… to anything a bit arcane or out of the ordinary. My grandfather had studied Greek in seminary (he was an Episcopal priest), and was proud of his accomplishments in that regard. My Dad had wanted me to take Latin in high school (having been quite good at Latin in high school himself), but in the end, defiantly, I took Spanish—which I also much enjoyed. But I think I started to feel I was missing out, missing something. You know, you would run into these Latin or Greek tags in English literature, and feel that this was something you really ought to know. In the end, I thought I’ll just take Latin 101 and get a taste for it, but I had an extraordinary and extraordinarily eccentric professor, Dr. Robert Harris (at the University of Georgia). The class was riveting. And my classmates were interesting too, harder to pigeonhole than the average English major or even music major.

I then just kept taking Latin classes (because what was the point, Dr. Harris would say, unless we were going to get as far as some Virgil, which he recommended we read in the graveyard), until one day the department head (Dr. Rick LaFleur) took me aside and suggested I might as well change my major at that point. As an aspiring poet, I also appreciated the rather old-fashioned close reading we did of poems—scanning the meter, memorizing, looking at allusions and sound effects, rhetorical devices. This felt useful to me as a writer. I was not particularly interested in theory, which perhaps was having an ascendance in other literature courses at that time.

SS: In 1999, you moved to Athens and have lived there ever since. What led you to make this decision, and how did this impact your development as a writer?

AES: It was supposed to be, like so many things in life, a temporary decision. My husband is Greek, and he wanted to try moving back to Greece and living there a while. I think we said two years. Two children and two decades later, of course, it seems more momentous than it did at the time. It is hard to say how it may have affected me as a writer. It did probably affect how I wrote about Greek mythology (it all seemed less… mythological, I guess), and no doubt made me more aware of modern Greek literature. It probably pushed me more towards Greek generally, even though I had trained more as a Latinist. It has affected me in other ways; being in Greece and married to a journalist, I felt like I was both on the edge of where things are happening and at the forefront of some more general trends—the economic crisis, the migration surge, and climate change, all of that seemed more visible and more towards the surface of things in Greece, which is on the border of so much. That in turn has changed how I read classical literature, with an understanding of the geography: the placement of Greece, in the Aegean, is further towards the East and the global South than Western classics departments tend to place it, at least theoretically. It has re-oriented my sense of Classical literature quite literally. READ MORE…

Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

January 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 edition—Asymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

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If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Les pays by Marie-Hélène Lafon

July 5, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens

Rumors made the rounds, Monsieur Jaffre was a rebel, a sort of Prometheus chained to the cause of second-rate students

This Translation Tuesday, glimpse into the novelistic invention of Marie-Hélène Lafon’s award-winning Les pays through her protagonist Claire who, much like the author herself, moves from agricultural France to the city. Encountering a certain professor of Greek at the Sorbonne, Claire’s eyes open to this world of “impeccable choreography” and the difference that Monsieur Jaffre brings in his manner and mystique. Translator Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens brings us through the landscapes through which Lafon writes, and the feeling he tries to evoke in a translation that bubbles with a kind of intellectual and spiritual wonder. 

“The title of Marie-Hélène Lafon’s 2012 novel, Les pays, suggests a humanizing plurality. Ordinarily, ‘les pays’ would refer to ‘countries’ or ‘nations.’ Here it seeks to make of the French ‘countryside’ something more than how the region is traditionally depicted: instead of the simple monolith that may be found in literature of the city, rather a set of places with their own complex histories. This chimes with Lafon’s stated hope to develop a contemporary literature that would lift rural lives—likewise plural—to the level of myth.

Thus Lafon refigures her own upbringing, with her move from countryside to city modeling that of Les pays’s main character, Claire. Like Lafon, Claire has left her childhood home in Aurillac to study classical literature at the Sorbonne. In this excerpt, which starts the second part of the novel, Claire is in her first year at the Sorbonne. Overwhelmed by the work and not helped by other teachers, she yet delights in language, privately calling the coursework ‘cursus’ and its masters ‘mandarins’ (for, implicitly, they are tart). That sparkling delight she finds reflected in Monsieur Jaffre. His love of the material, his home library overrun with ‘paunchy dictionaries,’ a desk under the spreading arms of a—Chekhovian?—cherry tree: such details suggest to Claire that a life of joy is possible, albeit a ‘joy both ardent and austere.’ It is that complex feeling, felt by the author no less than by her character, that I have hoped to capture in this translation.”

—Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens

The Greek professor has a woman’s hands, he rubs them together, interlaces his outstretched fingers; his wrists are supple, and Claire thinks that he must play the piano. She imagines him in a large living room, the piano is black and stretches across a patterned rug, the room is studded with books; his daughters would be listening to him, he has three daughters she knows that he has said so, all three in sciences like their mother, they did however do Latin and Greek in high school, through their final year; the eldest a doctor, a geneticist, a PhD candidate, the other two engineers. Two daughters would be seated on stiff armchairs upholstered in pale yellow fabric, like you used to see for sale in pairs in the window of the antiques dealer in Saint-Flour, you did not know the price, which was not posted, behind the senatorial armchairs you could make out gleaming dressers, pontificating armoires and distinguished vanities, you did not stop you never went inside. The Greek professor’s youngest daughter would stand up straight at her father’s side and turn the pages of the score, or the father would play without one; Claire hesitates, she does not know if playing without a score, by heart, is a sign of greater distinction at the piano; she hesitates also on their first names, Anne, Alma, or Sophie, she sees the girls’ hairstyles, smooth brilliant blunt bobs for the younger two, long hair left down the back for the eldest, they are brunettes like their father, the color matte. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 9, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Nestor Gomez, Thuy Dinh, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from Central America, China, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

Want to keep up with the newest literary developments across the world? This week, our team members cover: an academic conversation on the state of Central American literature, the gargantuan literary output commemorating the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the politics and poetics of translation in the film and literature of the Vietnamese diaspora. Read on to find out more!

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador

Cátedra Centroamerica, an online space for academic analysis of Central America, recently held a series of talks on Zoom focusing on the state of art and literature in the Central American region since its independence about 200 years ago. The conversation, held on July 2, revolved around the question of the future of Central American art and literature after 200 years of independence.

Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, a researcher who specializes in Central American literature and culture at the Freie Univesitat Berlin, presented a “literary roadmap” on how Central American literature has developed after the turn of the century. Currently, Central America is in a postwar era following the wars, dictatorships, and political upheavals of the 1970s to the 1990s. The transition from war to democracy and peace has had two notable effects in the identities, histories, and cultures of Central Americans. The first effect is the mass exodus of Central Americans to settle in other parts of the world. This mass migration has redefined the borders of Central America and the identity of Central Americans as people living in the region of the isthmus. Because of the large and growing size of the Central American diaspora, Central Americans are redefining themselves as global citizens. Secondly, the rise of alternative publishing through social media has provided new spaces that welcome new literary voices in postwar Central America. These new literary voices have led the movement in reconstructing political and cultural identities as well as histories of individual Central American countries into a new, shared regional identity and culture that includes the diaspora.

Wallner also shared an example of postwar literature, Horacio Castellano Moya’s novel El Arma En El Hombre, which describes a new aesthetic of violence. This new violence is born in the urban environment of a postwar city. There is no explanation as to where this violence originated from and the main character of the novel, a displaced ex-soldier, is left alone in the city to combat this new urban violence that attacks from every corner: politics, economy, education, society, family, etc. El Arma En El Hombre is a key novel that aptly foretells the state of affairs in Central America. It describes perpetual chaos and oppression as the normal state of everyday lives of Central Americans. READ MORE…

Words Containing Multitudes: Theodor Kallifatides on Writing The Siege of Troy

October 16, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

A basic human need is also to remember and be remembered. That is why we put one stone on top of another, we paint, we sing, we write.

In September, we were honored to present Theodor Kallifatides’s The Siege of Troy as our monthly Book Club feature. This poignant, multilayered novel intertwines a modern coming-of-age wartime story with a psychologically profound retelling of the classic Iliad. In the following interview, Assistant Managing Editor Josefina Massot speaks with the author on overcoming writer’s block, writing about Greece in a foreign land and tongue, and humanizing ancient heroes.

Josefina Massot (JM): You had an unexpected bout of writer’s block at age seventy-seven, back in 2015, after almost fifty years of uninterrupted literary output. The Siege of Troy was, I believe, the first novel you wrote once you overcame it. Did your writing process change at all as a result? What was it like, rediscovering your narrative voice in novel form?

Theodor Kallifatides (TK): Yes, it affected me and my writing greatly. I felt free from all expectations, from all demands from the publisher, the public, and myself, and my writing got wings it never had before. I did not care about anything except doing justice to my deepest feelings and ideas. I got back both my eyes. Before it, I always had—as most writers do, I dare say—an eye on what people would think about my work. Suddenly, I simply did not care. I was free. READ MORE…

Classic Philosophy Meets Arabic Language: A Dialogue with Professor Peter Adamson

March 21, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Jonathan Egid

A tenth-century resident of Baghdad could read Arabic versions of just about everything by Aristotle that we can read today.

The great Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries changed the Near East and beyond politically, culturally, and, in a particularly profound and lasting way, linguistically, resulting in the near hegemony of the Arabic language. This new Islamic world took shape around an original and powerful new religion, but the consolidation of an Islamic civilisation was also a period of immense cultural exchange and mutual influence, not only from fellow Abrahamic traditions such as Judaism and Christianity, but also from the world of classical Mediterranean antiquity. Indeed, while knowledge of classical Greek science and philosophy fell into virtual oblivion in the Christian West, Islamic scholars kept the tradition alive by means of large scale translation projects and sophisticated philosophical works, from the Persian Avicenna to Baghdad’s legendary house of learning and the Andalusian polymath Averroes. In this interview, Professor Peter Adamson of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München talks us through this fascinating and often overlooked period in philosophical history by exploring the works of translation that made it possible.

Jonathan Egid (JE): By the time the grand translation projects of the early Islamic world began, the wonders of classical Greek philosophy had attained the status of ancient wisdom, almost one thousand years old and already much discussed and much translated. How did the works of Greek thinkers come to be translated into Arabic, and what was the interest in these ancient and foreign ideas?

Peter Adamson (PA): This was a process that unfolded over the course of centuries. The translation movement begins already in the eighth century CE and continues well into the tenth century. It was basically an initiative of the elites under the Abbasid caliphate, including even caliphs themselves and the caliphal family, who also had philosophers as court scholars. For instance, al-Kindī, the first philosopher to make explicit use of Hellenic materials in his own writing, was tutor to a caliph’s son and dedicated his most important work to the caliph himself. The translators were well paid experts, so this was a very deliberate and expensive undertaking managed from the top down. It should, however, be said that it was not something that was undertaken in a vacuum. For quite a long time there had already been translations made from Greek into Syriac and other Semitic languages, and these were a model for the Arabic translations (sometimes literally: it was known for works to be translated first into Syriac for the purpose of making an Arabic version on that basis). Also I would say the translation movement had a kind of momentum of its own: whereas at first the texts to be translated were really selected by the elite and for a variety of practical or political motives, eventually they get to the stage where they are translating the entire output of certain thinkers, or at least everything they can get their hands on, in a kind of completist project. So for instance, one of the greatest translators, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, was clearly trying to translate whatever he could by Galen, the most important Greek medical authority, while his son Ishaq ibn Hunayn worked his way through Aristotle.

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Winter 2018: A Treasure Hunt Without A Map

September 28, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Lara Norgaard

That viewer is me, is you, is us: readers of Asymptote, a journal offering the freedom of infinite interpretations.

Thanks to the hard work of Duncan Lewis, Jacob Silkstone, József Szabo, Marina Sofia, Emma Page, Kyrstin Rodriguez, Giorgos Kassiteridis, Tiffany Tsao, Alexander Dickow, and myself, November 2017 sees the launch of the Asymptote Book Club, a sustainability initiative meant to support independent publishers of world literature while also helping Asymptote stay afloat. By January 2018, after an intensive marketing campaign (e.g., I answer some questions about the Book Club here), we succeed in attracting more than 120 subscribers. In addition, our seventh anniversary is greeted by two important milestones, both to do with the number 100: We cross the 100 mark for number of team members on our masthead, and, with the addition of Amharic and Montenegrin in the Winter 2018 edition, we have gathered work from exactly 100 languages in our archive of world literature! In his interview with Asymptote that we ran in this issue, Lithuanian editor Marius Burokas laments that, as with many peripheral literatures, Lithuanian writing “can only speak of a one-way influence” from English at the moment; that said, Lithuanian literature is by no means a “small [one].” “There are only writers who are not good enough,” he observes wryly, “or writers who are not publicized enough.” This speaks to the very heart of Asymptote’s mission, which is why we have whole teams (from social media to graphic design) set up for the purpose of marketing the work that we’ve been entrusted with, as detailed in an earlier post where I released this publicity report. Where we direct our efforts applies to where we direct our funds as well: For instance, by January 2018, the money we’ve cumulatively thrown at Facebook promotion alone has exceeded $10,000 USD. It’s not only money that I’ve staked personally; in our eight years, I’ve supported almost every single Facebook post in order to encourage other team members as well as our own readers to engage with Asymptote’s feed, all so that we can be a more powerful advocate for so-called “small literatures.” Cruelly, then, around this time, because of the backlash from Russian interference of the 2016 US elections, Facebook deprioritizes social media pages like ours, hurting our ability to connect authors with new readers. I know because I was still supervising the new English Social Media Managers (as well as the Assistant Director of Outreach—whose day job was in social media analytics—I was hoping to install as a permanent team member) from the hospital ward where I was quarantined after radioactive treatment, anxious as much about our falling social media engagement as my own Geiger counter reading (which on the other hand refused to fall as quickly as the doctor and I had hoped, thereby prolonging my hospitalization and resulting in a larger medical bill). Here to introduce the Winter 2018 issue is Brazil editor-at-large Lara Norgaard.

Two parallel snapshots of everyday scenes spliced by double-circle frames form the cover image of Asymptote’s Winter 2018 issue. A woman calmly pushes a stroller on the left, mirroring a different woman on the right who wears dark sunglasses and stares directly into the camera, allowing us to only guess at her penetrating gaze. In these cover photographs, the edition’s guest artist, Elephnt, captures one of its central components: the way each contribution takes a powerful approach to perspective. The authors in this issue all write with a particular and intense gaze that confronts or perhaps commiserates with the reader.

I decided to look back at the woman on the right as I prepared to write this reflection. It is not just her staring back at me that catches my eye; she seems to recognize the camera, to acknowledge how the image representing her was created. The Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote was my first as part of the magazine’s team. I witnessed—and participated in—the compilation of so many voices into one unified whole. READ MORE…

What’s New In Translation: February 2018

February 5, 2018  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, Jessie Stoolman, and Lara Norgaard

The books from Albania and Latin and Central America hitting shelves this month.

For many of us, this month will be either the coldest or the hottest of the year; luckily, the books we’re focusing on this February are resilient and long-lasting—featuring new titles from Albania all the way to Latin and Central America. 

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Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, translated from the Spanish by John Washington and Daniela Ugaz, Zed Books

Reviewed by Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large for Tunisia

Blood Barrios, Alberto Arce’s account of his diverse experiences as the only foreign journalist inside Honduras between 2012 and 2014, gives a platform to voices inside this small Central American country that are seldom heard. From deep within the Mosquitia jungle, where Arce investigated possible American involvement in massacring innocent civilians, to an overcrowded prison farm where over 350 people died in a fire, he makes “[t]he privileges of a foreigner” in Honduras “his obligations,” asking questions that others cannot.

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A Conversation with Norwegian-to-Azerbaijani Translator Anar Rahimov

December 4, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by David Smith

There was not a single moment when I said to myself, “Stop”—even when I spent 10 to 15 minutes on one sentence!

As a translator of Norwegian, I travelled to the Gothenburg Book Fair in September to meet with Scandinavian authors, publishers, and fellow translators. One of the translators I met there was Anar Rahimov, a translator of contemporary Norwegian prose into Azerbaijani.

I was intrigued by Anar’s story as one of only two translators of Norwegian in Azerbaijan. I translate into English, probably the world’s most dominant language, and I was curious about the exchange between two relatively small languages, Norwegian and Azerbaijani. I wanted to ask Anar a little more about his work as a translator and how it fits into the literary culture of Azerbaijan. 

David Smith (DS): How did you come to learn Norwegian and what inspired you to translate literature?

Anar Rahimov (AR): Well . . . it was quite accidental, I have to admit. I was working at the University of Languages in Baku as an English language teacher. Then an event took place that changed my whole career, priorities, and future standing in life. In 2010, I heard about an interview that included financing two and half years’ study in Oslo. Ever since childhood, Norway has appealed to me as a northern, far away, and very cold land. Besides, studying in the prestigious universities of Europe was tempting in itself. After a little hesitation, I applied and was selected.

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In Conversation: Daniel Mendelsohn on his new memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic

September 22, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Henry Ace Knight

What I’m interested in creating is something that combines all the things that I do in my life as a reader and writer and teacher

Memoirist, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn is perhaps best known for the application of mythic paradigms from the Western classics to the analysis of popular and literary culture. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006 for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, and finalist again in 2012 for his essay collection Waiting for the Barbarians, his criticism frequently graces the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The forthcoming release (Knopf, September 12) of his new memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic—about his octogenarian father’s experience auditing his Odyssey freshman seminar at Bard College and their subsequent voyage aboard an Odyssey-themed cruise—occasioned this conversation with Asymptote Interviews Editor Henry Ace Knight.

Can you tell me about the genesis of the book? Was it taking shape in your mind as early as your dad’s request to sit in on the Odyssey course?

No, not at all. The sequence was that early in 2011, before the semester began, he approached me about taking my course; I knew that he was interested in rereading the classics in his old age, and I said, “Well, I’m doing this Odyssey course in the spring…” And he said, “Oh, can I take it?” It didn’t occur to me at the time that it might be something that I would write about. Then, about halfway through the course, at which point so many interesting and funny things were happening, I started taking notes—his interactions with the kids, the things he said about the text. Much of the book is based on the notes I took right after class, memorable exchanges I recorded. Around the midterm, I thought, “OK, somehow I’ve got to write about this,” although I hardly envisioned a book at that point. In fact, at the end of the semester, when Froma [Zeitlin, a Classics professor at Princeton and Mendelsohn’s mentor] told me about the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, I called a friend of mine who was the editor of a travel magazine, and I said, “My dad and I are going on this Odyssey cruise and I think I want to write about it.” But I only thought I was going to write a magazine article! Then, when my dad fell ill, I started thinking all of this was…suddenly it took on a shape, you know: the class and the cruise and his illness. And so I started thinking, in a sort of inchoate way, of how all of this could add up to something: him taking the class, us going on the cruise, and him suddenly having a stroke and thereby raising the question of whether he could be his old ‘self’—a very Odyssean question indeed. I started to see it all as one event moving along an arc and that that arc was the arc of the Odyssey.

Did you start to draw more and more parallels between the Odyssey and your relationship to your father as the semester progressed?

I’ve done this with several books now, this entwining ancient texts and personal narratives. I did it in my first memoir, The Elusive Embrace, in which I wrapped exegeses of various classical texts around a story about me and my family and being a gay man who decided to become a father—my story was interwoven with musings on classical texts about desire and parenting and so on. And then I did it in The Lost, in which the intertext is not a classical text but a biblical text: I used Genesis, with its memorable narratives about fratricide and global destruction and wandering and miraculous survivals, as a kind of foil for this family story about the Holocaust. Once you start thinking about a text, these parallels to your life start to present themselves. So in this case, because my mind was on the Odyssey, everything about what happened to Dad and me, the course, the cruise, started presenting itself as “odyssean,” as potential material, and the parallels between the personal narrative and the text started to make themselves felt. So, for instance, the first major section of my book, which recreates the first weeks of the Odyssey course and our discussions of the first four books of the Odyssey, which are about Odysseus’s son Telemachus going on a sort of fact-finding mission to learn what happened to his absent father, twines around flashbacks to my childhood in which I too am a boy searching for his father, trying to understand who he is. And so on.

What happens when I start thinking about a memoir is that I’ll have an intuition about how a certain text is going to structure the memoir, and then once I’m thinking that way it just takes off. But of course it’s only in the writing that you can really carefully work out the parallels and draw attention to them in a rather purposeful, literary way; so in this sense I’m also creating the parallels, I’m establishing them in my text for the reader. I know the Odyssey intimately, so as things were happening in real life I would think, “Oh my God, this is so Odyssean!”—like the guy on the boat with the scar. [A major revelation in An Odyssey turns on an encounter between Mendelsohn and an elderly fellow passenger who had a scar on his thigh dating to an incident in World War II. In Homer’s Odyssey, a climactic moment is linked to the history of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh.] When I met that old gentleman with the scar I thought, “You cannot make this stuff up!”—as it was happening, I was thinking that no one was going to believe this, it was just too good to be true. But it really happened!

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In Review: Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U.R. Ananthamurthy

December 14, 2016  |  in Reviews  |  by Melissa Beck

Asif he had become a stranger to himself, the Acharya opened his eyes and asked himself: Where am I?

NYRB Classics’ reissue of this book comes at an opportune moment, as societies around the world face the dangers of religious extremism and its focus on ritual and regulation rather than humanity. U.R. Ananthamurthy, in A.K Ramanujan’s translation from the Kannada, tries to teach Indian society a lesson in this story about the trouble with prioritizing tradition over compassion.

Samskara begins with one of the central cleansing and purification rituals in the rites of Hindu worship. Praneshacharya, the most respected Brahmin in his traditional and conservative agrahara, begins each day by bathing the sickly and desiccated body of his infirm wife.  Praneschacharya has faithfully carried out this ritual for more than twenty years. He views sexless marriage as a penance and a sacrifice that will deliver salvation in this life and in the next.  But the death of an impious and sinful Brahmin, Naranappa, in the agrahara brings Praneshacharya to a spiritual crisis of his own that makes him question his long-practiced rituals and beliefs. The cleansing ritual that he performs on his wife at the beginning of the story is the last time that he will perform this expiating routine; this is the beginning of the end for Praneshacharya’s spiritual cleanliness and purity.

Samskara—the compulsory rite given to Brahmins at their passing—becomes the central controversy of the novel. Naranappa has renounced the Brahmin rituals of the agrahara and has carried out the most outrageous and offensive acts to show his disapproval of his fellow worshippers and neighbors. He’s taken up excessive drinking, spent time with Muslims and ate meat with them, and caught fish from the sacred temple pond. The most impious of his actions, however, was casting off his lawful wife and his choosing to live with a lower class, outcast woman named Chandri.  Despite his hedonistic behavior, the Brahmins never excommunicated Naranappa from their small, conservative village.

It is Chandri, Narranappa’s low-born lover, who delivers the news of his death to the agrahara.  This announcement causes an immediate conflict over the performance of the death rites for this blasphemous man whom they continued to allow to live among them. The Brahmins’ failure to act in the face of Naranappa’s sacrilege can be viewed as the first of Ananthamurthy’s many criticisms of the Brahmins way of life; their laziness or fear or lack of conviction, or a combination of all three, prevent them from expelling Narranappa from the agrahara.  Now that he has died, none of them want to be responsible for performing the death rites for his body.

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The Tiff: How Often Should We Re-translate the Classics?

September 25, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Antony Shugaar and EJ Van Lanen

Two literary voices sound off in Asymptote blog’s newest regular column

Antony Shugaar, translator, writer, Asymptote contributing editor

I remember reading a science fiction short story many years ago in which a disgruntled author of historical novels gets his wish to witness the crucifixion of Christ. The plot’s twists and turns escape me now, but I know the final outcome is that he winds up crucified on a secondary cross, an all-too-eager witness to the truth behind the familiar version.

Historians are constantly pawing through the rubble of memory, language, and inference in search of an unproven and unprovable truth. Death—of course—intervenes, as does the slow grind of time, but memory and perception get in the way, too. So does institutionalized meaning: once you’ve heard “By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water,” you can never unhear it. READ MORE…