Posts filed under 'collective memory'

In Remembrance of Time Wasted: A Slovak Memoir on the Impossibility of Escape

May 22, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Rozner illustrates how the state is able to reach into any of the nation’s corners, even as individuals sought freedom by opposing urban society.

Seven Days to the Funeral by Ján Rozner, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood, Karolinum Press, 2024

In 1968, troops of the Warsaw Pact—led by the Soviet Union—invaded Czechoslovakia to crush an ideological rebellion against Communist orthodoxy, bringing the daring freedom movement to to its inevitably violent end. The world would come to define that era as the Prague Spring, yet as well as the subsequent arrests, heavy censorship, and exile for many intellectuals affected not only Prague, but also Bratislava and the whole of Slovakia—the eastern part of what was then one country.

In the foreign imagination, Slovakia largely remains in the shadow of Czech narratives—something Prague-centric fiction and non-fiction have long perpetuated. The recent translation into English of Seven Days to the Funeral (Sedem dní do pohrebu), by Slovak author Ján Rozner, fills this major gap in the perception of post-1968 Slovakian and Bratislavian intellectual life. In a four hundred-page long autofiction, meticulously and elegantly translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood, Rozner provides a rare testimony against the blind spots of collective history and memory—including those, as it turns out, of Slovak readers.

What is particularly striking is how the shape and the style of Seven Days to the Funeral espouse the despair and dread of what was experienced in Czechoslovakia as “normalization”—party-speak terminology used to describe the post-1968 period of obsessive governmental control, enacted to ensure that any dissent against Moscow would never again be possible in Central Europe. This translated into the elimination of any possible contest or alternative culture, be it intellectual or religious opposition, or simply works of music, literature, or art. However, as the dissident movement (with Václav Havel and the rebellious manifesto of Charter 77) proved, the liberating aspirations of underground gatherings, samizdat literature, and civil uprisings would eventually triumph three decades later, in the Velvet Revolution. READ MORE…

Knowledge and Resistance: An Interview with Maggie Schreiner of Librarians and Archivists With Palestine

April 17, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Interviews  |  by Julie Shi

[W]e really start with the position that knowledge . . . is a central part of Palestinian self-definition and Palestinian resistance.

To eradicate an archive is to destabilize lived presences, delegitimize extant lineages, and omit vital intellectual and socio-historical discourses from our understanding of the world. For over a decade, the international organization Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) has stood witness to this fact, creating programs and resources that detail the ongoing destruction of artifacts, heritage, and knowledge institutions throughout the region. In connecting workers, academics, and activists from around the world and within Palestine, the LAP has steadfastly ventured forward in their efforts to establish solidarity with Palestinian resistance, document the limitations put upon literary access, and highlight the importance of cultural and historical material in the ongoing resistance against Israeli occupation. In their reports, records span the ruination of rare collections, institutions, publishing houses, and libraries that provided shelter for displaced citizens—a brutal enforcement of forgetting that will have reverberations long into the future. 

In this interview, Maggie Schreiner, an active member of LAP, speaks to us about acting against erasure, the many losses that have incurred, and defining solidarity over charity.

Julie Shi (JS): Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) describes itself as “a network of self-defined librarians, archivists, and information workers in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.” Could you share a little bit about how LAP came together, who you are, and the work that you do?

Maggie Schreiner (MS): We originally came together in 2013, and our original focus was on forming a delegation to go to the West Bank. We went as a group of twenty librarians, archivists, and information workers, and we spent two weeks travelling in the West Bank and Israel, which I will call ’48, in reference to the borders erected in 1948 during the Nakba. We met with Palestinian colleagues—librarians, archivists, and cultural workers—and, in the spirit of solidarity and collaboration, we learned about the work that they were doing and the struggles and challenges they faced because of the occupation.

When we came back, our initial work was really focused on what we’d learned on that trip. We did a lot of talks and lectures and we worked with the art book publisher Booklyn to create an art portfolio of posters, zines, and photographs documenting our trip. Eventually we decided that we wanted to become a more permanent organization to continue moving the work forward—and that’s when we became Librarians and Archivists with Palestine.

The “self-defined” language is because some people in our network are librarians or archivists for their day job, but other people might do this work primarily in a volunteer capacity, or they may do cultural work or information work writ large. We didn’t want the organization to be open to only those in professional roles; we wanted to have a wider range of people who could be involved. READ MORE…

The Redemption of the Collective Past in the Infinite Present: Annie Ernaux’s The Years

October 13, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Katarina Gadze

With her narrative having already begun, she must live, and in doing so continuing this act of physical telling.

The Nobel committee’s decision to award Annie Ernaux with the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature communicated a certain message: of writing‘s pivotal responsibility to situate the individual life amidst the ever-elaborating stream of history, and that personal experience—no matter how specific or inward-looking—speaks to the greater picture of a landscape, a culture, and a time. In this following essay, Katarina Gadze takes a close look at Ernaux’s 2008 memoir, The Years, an emblematic work of her masterful collapse of private and public time, of her mind’s stabilizing force as it moves through a constantly shifting world.

In attempting to decipher the uses of autobiographical writing, Sébastien Hubier, in his Littératures intimes, speaks of what he calls reflexivity: “the phenomenon by which discourse refers to its own enunciative activity rather than merely speaking about the world.” Autobiography is then defined by “the narrative of one’s life . . . infused with the critical discourse of the one who writes it.” As a “heuristic project,” it stands for all personal writing that makes, by fact of its production, “a mode of resolution for the conflicts associated with profound shifts in social space.” Objectification of an identity, recourse to writing and the distancing it entails, lends itself to all the symbolic manipulations—reconstructions and redefinitions—of that identity. Such was the mechanism of Annie Ernaux’s writing in The Years, and her lifelong experiments with the autobiographical genre, as well as her construction of temporalities—in relation to both herself and society at large. When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize to Ernaux, they praised her “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” perfectly summarizing her work. Indeed, by penning these paradoxically impersonal texts, she inevitably moves away from traditional autobiography and spares us the usual novelistic practices in The Years; the resulting memoir is less a traditional recollection and more an existential examination of Ernaux’s sixty years, told in the third person. The years meander along in the order of her life events, though chronology comes second to Ernaux, whose goal is to expose the illusion (or delusion) of time. She moves through time in leaps and bounds, talking about what it means to live not just as one person in the present, but as one person (and an entire generation) that exists across centuries.

Autobiography as reconstruction places the past in chronological order, which, as Hubier points out, is illusive. Despite the “temporal linearity inherent in an organized retrospection” that probes collective memory, to write truly of the constant scrambling that is our general experience of time interferes with the reader’s ability to feel any dynamic flow—which treads backwards into the past, the opposite direction that the narrator claims. Ernaux interrogates this literary device by highlighting the intertwining of its present, past, and future dimensions, as well as its inevitable divide into two distinct temporalities: personal identification and cultural identity:

Then, in a state of profound, almost dazzling satisfaction, she finds something that the image from personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself. She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things.

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Manaschi, A Modernist Novel Inspired by Central Asia’s Oldest Epic, the Manas

November 3, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Manaschi is a powerful book that lies at the nexus between the individual and the culture they are born into.

Manaschi by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Donald Rayfield, Tilted Axis, 2021

Despite being home to incredibly rich and ancient traditions of both spoken and written word, little of Central Asian literatures is known to English-language readers. Such is what is being spectacularly rectified in Hamid Ismailov’s latest novel to appear in English—Manaschi. The text, artfully translated from Uzbek to English by the meticulous Donald Rayfield, is an ode to the deeply rooted tradition of storytelling that crosses boundaries of ethnicity, gender, age, and time, taking truly epic proportions in Ismailov’s riveting prose.

A manaschi, in Kyrgyz tradition, is the person—usually a man, young or old—who performs the recitation of the epic poetry Manas, a body of narratives that contains up to 900,000 verses, and transmitted only orally before given a written form in the late nineteenth century. Reciting the Manas is an act of shamanism; it involves phenomenal memory, years of training, musical talent, and inspiration kin to a trance state. For some, the act even enables in the performer the ability to interpret dreams or foretell the future. Learning and performing the Manas embodies a lifetime’s dedication to one of the longest oral texts known to humanity, and the sacred practice prevails to this day, as new generations—now including women—continue to be trained.

The story takes place on the contemporary Kyrgyz-Tajik border in Chekbel, a mountainous village inhabited by mixed populations of nomadic Kyrgyz and sedentary Tajiks. Bekesh, the main character, is a radio journalist who lives in an urban part of Kyrgyzstan. Upon receiving the news that his uncle Baisal—a reputed manaschi—has died, he returns to his ancestral village to attend the funeral. This visit, initially conceived as a temporary break from his modern routine, turns into a life-changing experience, opening formidable questions regarding his familial and cultural duties, his unequivocal choices on identity, and his moral responsibilities to his call as a manaschi.

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Against Invisibility: Poet Roy G. Guzmán on Queer Identity, Memory, and Honduras

March 18, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

The literary market, films, music, everything tells you, in some way, that no one’s interested in your voice, in your stories, and in your culture.

Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) was born in Honduras, grew up in Miami, lives in Minnesota, and last year, Graywolf Press put out Catrachos, their first book of poems. In February, the book was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards in the poetry category, alongside Ray González, Danez Smith, and Torrin A. Greathouse. Roy debuted with authority, potency, rebelliousness, and nonconformity, but also with pain and sensitivity, with empathy and nostalgia and tenderness, with admiration. Catrachos is filled with references to their childhood in Miami and how it was for them, a poor Central American person, to grow up in a hostile environment. In a country that considered them, in their own words, “an afterthought” and “a second-class citizen.” Catrachos, in a way, serves as a testimony for the experience of the Central American diaspora in the United States. But it’s more. Mucho más.

In Roy’s poems we find, yes, family traditions, but also violence, resistance, what it was like for them to grow up as a queer kid. Catrachos is a beautiful and soothing portrait, not devoid of harsh and urgent criticism toward imperialism and racial violence. Roy, in their debut, speaks with curiosity and tenderness, while acknowledging the devastation caused by colonialism. Trailblazing, the gringos might say.

Last year, Roy and I spoke about all this. About Catrachos, their memories of Honduras, their family, their identity, about considering themselves “the other.” We spoke about Rubén Darío, X-Men, and the Pulse massacre—the basis of a poem they wrote called “Restored Mural for Orlando.” We spoke about being a poet, about being queer, Latinx, mestizx, mulatx, indigenous in the United States and in Honduras.

–José García Escobar

José García Escobar (JGE): First, I wanted to ask you about leaving Honduras and growing up in the U.S. I’m curious about the Central American communities in the U.S. You reference your childhood much in Catrachos, but I feel like it’s often indoors. Were there many Hondurans where you lived?

Roy G. Guzmán (RGG): Miami often gets talked about as this cosmopolitan city, as sort of Mecca of Latin America, right? The Miami that I grew up in was very different than sort of what you see in Texas, what you see in California, where there’s much more solidarity not only among Central Americans but also between Mexicans and Chicanxs people. That’s something that I did not grew up with in Miami. Miami, at least in the nineties, it was much more Caribbean. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans and Cubans. And I think that when it came to the Central American diaspora, many more Nicaraguans. We saw many more Nicaraguans because they were considered political refugees. This is important. There were many Cubans, and they were seen as political refugees. There were Nicaraguans, and they were also seen as political refugees. Then there was us. We were basically seen as immigrants that had made this transition because of economic instability, and so I felt like a second-class citizen. I was less desirable than the political refuge. The other thing was that many Hondurans I grew up with were undocumented. Add that to the equation. This means that our communities were very disconnected. So, I grew up in a place that treated me as an afterthought. It wasn’t until I left Miami and I moved to Chicago, for my undergrad, that I was exposed to a very different kind of resilient. There are conversations that I never had in Miami and suddenly I had, the minute I left. And off course years later when I ended up coming back to Miami, after my master’s, to teach, I was incredibly aware of the power dynamics, the imbalance, the issues with, not just representation, but visibility and invisibility. I was able to understand shame, internalized racism. I was able to understand things like white privilege. I was able to understand anti-Central American discrimination.

JGE: You arrived to Miami in the mid-nineties, right? This was before Hurricane Mitch devastated a large part of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua as well. After Mitch, did you see more Central Americans arriving to your community?

RGG: Not as many. But I did live the impact of the hurricane. My family, obviously, as part of the diaspora, one of the things that we do as Central Americans in the U.S. is we send money back to our families. So, after the hurricane we had to make sure that our family had a consistent form of funding, so they could get by. Our family would also tell us that they would see bodies left and right, bodies floating in the rivers, or people’s businesses completely destroyed. READ MORE…

Of Dreams and Dames: Ted Goossen on Translating Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood

September 17, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

What Westerners . . . call magical realism … [is] a way of normalizing that which doesn’t easily fit into our categories.

Last month, we were delighted to bring you award-winning author Hiromi Kawakami’s latest in translation. Like much of her writing, our August Book Club selection tackles the everyday with a deliciously fantastic twist. In this interview with assistant managing editor Lindsay Semel, the inimitable Ted Goossen gives us a fascinating glimpse into the Japanese canon and the author’s place within it. He also shares his aversion to labels like “magical realism” or “women’s writing”: there are as many forms of the real and the female as there are cultures, he suggests, and that’s quite a gift.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve mentioned in interviews (mainly in connection to MONKEY, the magazine of Japanese literature you co-edit) that you strive to bring non-canonical Japanese writers to Anglophone readers. Do you think there’s a difference between the Japanese literary canon and the Western canon of Japanese literature in translation?

Ted Goossen (TG): That’s an excellent question, and of course there’s a difference. Regarding the Western reception of Japanese literature, one of the earliest works was The Tale of Genji: a 1,200-page, thousand-year-old novel written by a court lady, whose manuscript was initially hand-copied and circulated among her female peers. The first English translation, Arthur Waley’s, was published around 1920. At that time, Genji was highly exotic, even for the Japanese, because it was written in a way they couldn’t read. So Waley did us all a great service with his beautiful translation, and since then, there have been four or five more.

Other than that, Japanese literature didn’t really gain a Western audience until the 1960s; at that point, the US had made Japan—its enemy in World War II—an ally, and it had tried to resurrect its reputation. Because of the war, Americans thought of the Japanese as cruel and heartless, so the US needed to make them more “human,” render them more attractive. Not only was there an element of exoticism when it came to Japanese culture, then, but also a need to rehabilitate it. When Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968, Japanese literature was prized for the kind of poetic, Zen-like quality present in his writing. Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel in 1994, distanced himself from that whole stream, and his literature is unlike any that preceded it; it did garner a Western audience, albeit a relatively small one. Now, of course, it’s Murakami. He dominates the West to such an extent that when we speak of “non-canonical,” it’s almost like we’re saying “non-Murakami.”

You’ve mentioned MONKEY, and the paradox there is that Murakami is one of our biggest supporters; he and my co-editor Motoyuki Shibata are very close, I know him as well, and Jay Rubin, a frequent collaborator, is one of his best translators. So ironically, we’re using the magazine to highlight the work of writers who aren’t Murakami, but we use Murakami to draw attention to it by publishing lots of interesting interviews, essays, and dialogues about or with him. Still, certain authors like Mieko or Hiromi Kawakami are getting lots of buzz in their own right, simply because they’re so good. There are others, too, so we’re seeing the rise of quite a few Japanese writers in the English-speaking literary world. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

September 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and Filip Noubel

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

amang

Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: I Didn’t Talk by Beatriz Bracher

July 26, 2018  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Georgia Nasseh

With this translation, Adam Morris introduces a singularly powerful voice of Brazilian contemporary literature to English–language readers.

Under an authoritarian dictatorship, a single sentence can be the difference between life and death. In our July Asymptote Book Club selection, Beatriz Bracher’s I Didn’t Talk, retired professor Gustavo is preparing to leave São Paulo. First, though, he has a more demanding journey to make: a journey that will take him back to a darker time, when he and his brother-in-law were tortured by Brazil’s military regime. Did he talk?

Adam Morris’ English translation of I Didn’t Talk, published by New Directions, has been described as a “brilliant, enigmatic rumination of a novel.” We’re delighted to be sharing it with our Book Club subscribers across the USA, the UK, and Canada.

If you’re not yet a subscriber but want to sign up in time to receive next month’s selection, all the information you need is over on our official Book Club page. Meanwhile, subscribers are more than welcome to join the online discussion via our facebook group.

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