Posts filed under 'communism'

Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 5, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

Literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Palestine!

This week, our editors around the world bring news as to how different literary initiatives and publications are help shaping the present. From writers who embody multiculturalism and unity, to works of solidarity and hope, read on to see how writers, readers, and artists are working to shed light on what matters.

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

“Rarely has any Macedonian poet attracted as much attention among theorists, literary historians, and philologists as [Kočo] Racin. Racin was . . . a pioneer in the artistic expression of the mother tongue, . . . an example of an ideal revolutionary and, in the end, a victim. He was the most honorable and most honored thing that the Macedonians had in the period between the two wars,” writes Goran Kalogjera, a prominent Croatian comparatist and scholar of Macedonian studies in his book, Pogled otstrana. Racin (1908 – 1943) (Side view. Racin (1908 – 1943)). Recently, this important biography was translated into Macedonian by Slavčo Koviloski, and published by Makedonika Litera Press.

Kosta Apostolov Solev is a canonical figure in Macedonian literature, hailed by some as the founder of modern Macedonian poetry. He is best known under his penname, Kočo Racin, which was derived from the name of his lover, Rahilka Firfova-Raca—a gesture indicative of his support for the socialist women’s movement. He himself was a political activist, participating in the translation of the Communist Manifesto into Macedonian, and acting as editor for several communist magazines. His political leanings had contributed to his mysterious and untimely death; mortally shot by a printing-house entrance guard in June 1943, some speculate that Racin had been purposefully targeted by the communist party, having fallen out of favor with them around 1940. However, his activism effectuated his ties to other cultures, enriching his literary oeuvre. Aside from his mother tongue, he wrote texts in Bulgarian and Serbian, and was published all over the Balkans. Kalogjera stresses this multilingual, multicultural aspect of Racin’s output in Pogled otstrana, noting his importance to Croatian culture. READ MORE…

The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and the Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

October 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Landau

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023 

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation. 

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Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung

April 27, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Fact and fiction are irrelevant.

Amidst the mysterious, intricate narrative of The Specters of Algeria, there is another elusive, shrouded text: the only play that Karl Marx had ever written. This absurdist work, which gives the novel its name, goes on to inflict immense violence onto a circle of close friends, initiated by the hotheaded crackdowns of a censorious regime. In her generation-spanning, multi-threaded debut, Hwan Yeo Jung spins a fascinating inquest into authorship, aesthetics, authoritarianism, and how such things resonate into our intimate relationships. As the arrival of an exciting new voice in Korean writing, we are thrilled to introduce this fascinating inquest into political and human nature as our Book Club selection of April.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung, tr. from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Honford Star, 2023

In her theorizing of anti-neocolonial translation, Don Mee Choi has described the experience of speaking as a twin—in the context of a Korea divided by colonial powers in twain, existing inside a language that has been colonized and recolonized by invasion and annexation, Choi describes the act of translation from between two nations that have never technically stopped being at war. This twinning across history is an idea that came to me again and again as I read The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung, translated by Yewon Jung. Hwang Yeo Jung’s first novel, released in Korean in 2017, takes an incredibly cerebral dive into the minds of two childhood friends who do not quite understand the circumstances of their own upbringing. In seeking answers to the dissolutions of their families and friendships, Yul and Jing (who are also Eunjo and Hyeonga, and maybe also Yeonghee and Cheosul, and maybe also Lily and Marx) sink deep into the fog of memory and a historical era, whose sins are often swept under the rug.

This labyrinthine novel bears rereading, as moments that were baffling on first readthrough settle into clarity when revisited. In the first chapter, for instance, we learn that Yul’s father, Han Jiseop, is terrified of books and paper, burning every scrap he discovers in Yul’s secret keepsake box of Jing’s letters. As a child, Yul does not understand her father’s fear. It is only later in life that Yul learns her father was once a playwright who, along with the rest of his theatre troop (including Jing’s parents), was arrested for producing “seditious materials” about communism. The resulting violence against Jiseop and his fellows ripped their friendships, and in some cases even their minds, apart. When Yul comes upon Jing’s mother Baek Soi on Jeju Island, Soi’s mind has crumbled completely, able to remember only her son and nothing else. But inside her backpack is the titular play that caused them all so much anguish—The Specters of Algeria.

This play resurfaces in Soi’s broken mind, haunting her with memories of times before the break, and pointing to one of the key concepts of this novel—the importance of naming. In her mind’s eye, Soi travels back to recitations at gatherings when Yul was a child:

“What on earth does it mean for someone to feel something about something?” Jing’s mom asked.

“Do you want to be human?” my dad asked in return.

“Tell me a secret,” she said.

“A secret about what?”

“About anything.”

“Find a contradiction.”

“If I do, will you give me a name?”

“Why do you need a name?”

“Because I need courage.”

“Then I will.”

“What is my name?”

“Hammonia.”

“And who are you?”

“Who am I?”

“Fred.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and MARGENTO

The latest from Romania and the Philippines!

In this week’s literary round-up, we’re bringing coverage from the myriad intrigues of world literature, from storybooks highlighting Indigenous narratives to diasporic Romanian writers, romance writing to exiled heroes. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania 

As the Romanian literary scene is gearing up for the twenty-ninth edition of Gaudeamus book fair, organized by Radio Romania in Bucharest from December 7 through the 11, the literary diaspora is both very active and a hot topic in and of itself. A one-day seminar, entitled “European Cultural Representations of Romanian Migration and Exiles” took place at the Romanian Centre, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) last week. Presentations and roundtables on highlights from the Romanian diaspora across the Western world—such as religious studies international icon and fiction writer Mircea Eliade, Romanian-Spanish comparative literature pioneer Alexandre [Alejandro] Cioranescu, and former Asymptote contributor Matéi Visniec—were complemented by excursuses into the work and lives of personalities relevant to both Romanian and Spanish literatures. Former Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, Director of the Romanian Centre and Romanian Language and Literature Lecturer, gave a talk about Alexandru Busuioceanu: a poet, art historian, and essayist credited for establishing Romanian as an academic subject at UCM back in the mid-twentieth century, after founding the UCM Romanian Centre in 1943.

Another major name of the diaspora is Paul Goma, renowned opponent of Ceaușescu’s regime and dissident fiction writer forced into exile (to Paris, France) in the late 1970s, after having survived numerous attempts on his life staged by the Romanian communist secret police or their accessories—only to die from COVID in 2020. A hot-off-the-press book dedicated to the dissident hero by historian, poet, essayist, and Goma scholar Flori Balanescu, Paul Goma: Conștiință istorică și conștiință literară [Historical Conscience, Literary Conscience], is to be launched at Gaudeamus in a week’s time, and it has already grabbed considerable attention on social media. Awarded poet and fiction writer O. Nimigean, himself a Parisian exile, commented on the text as a breakthrough release and expressed his impatience to read the sequel—an already planned book he indirectly disclosed as having insider knowledge on. Such updates can only further stir interest—if not inevitable kerfuffle—since the (albeit rare) publications about Goma expose, just as the author’s own novels did, the collaborationism under communism of certain established literati or public figures: an implication to which the latter usually retort with accusations of anti-semitism. READ MORE…

Political Mythmaking: On Barricade by Utpal Dutt

November 3, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

...in his attempt at creating a political myth, Dutt does not lose sight of his characters’ humanity.

Barricade by Utpal Dutt, translated from the Bengali by Ananda Lal, Seagull Books, 2022

The Indian playwright Utpal Dutt wrote that myth is one of the most crucial forms of political storytelling because of its ability to transcend time and space, becoming relevant over and over again in new contexts. In Towards A Revolutionary Theatre, which is simultaneously a memoir of staging radical plays amidst the tense politics of his native Indian state of West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s, and a manifesto about the necessity of leftist theatre, he cites William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as an example of a literary work that has “freed itself of the trappings of its own age and has become a gigantic myth,” continually reinventing itself for new political circumstances. This is seen in productions set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which form a critique of the tyranny, demagoguery, and mob rule that make such regimes possible. 

Dutt’s play Barricade, which has been translated from the Bengali original by Indian theatre critic Ananda Lal and published by Seagull Books, is an attempt at such mythmaking. Set in the period just before the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany, the text is ostensibly about the party’s attempts to scapegoat their Communist rivals for the murder of an elderly political leader, but Dutt suggests throughout that the actual subject is the turbulent political situation then prevailing in West Bengal; the play was written in 1972, when the Congress-ruled government in Bengal was actively suppressing all forms of direct dissent. 

However, as Lal said in a recent interview, “The fact that he set Barricade in 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, didn’t make his viewers think that it was remote from their lives. On the contrary, they connected with it viscerally, sympathised and cheered at the right moments.” This speaks to Barricade’s power as political myth, one which is increasingly relevant in the contemporary Indian context exactly fifty years after it was written, especially for its narration of how various democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, and the media are slowly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling party. 

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Only I Could Come Up With That: Thuận on Chinatown

May 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Phuong Anh

My characters and stories are often considered too complicated, following neither moral nor cultural standards.

In the finest of fictions, many worlds converge. All the maps the writer has walked through, all the sights seen and tasted, all that was heard and spoken. The work of lauded Vietnamese author Thuận exists in this potent amalgam of experience, bringing the poetry of hidden meanings to the surface with her singular perspective. In her Anglophone debut, Chinatown, translated by Nguyễn An Lý and soon to be published by Tilted Axis, Thuận paints a thinking portrait from the Paris metro to the streets of Chợ Lớn, a love story of trespasses and reimagined borders—fictions residing in fictions, life nestled in life. In this following interview, the author speaks to Phương Anh about Chinatown’s unique structure, how her work in French translation has informed her writing, and the complex political relationships informing her narratives.

Phương Anh (PA): Based on your previous interviews, it seems that rhythm is very important to you. When I was reading your writing, I was easily swept away by its cadence—could you speak to your process and style?

Thuận (T): I wanted this book to have one single rhythm, cut into three steady parts with two short breaks entitled “I’m Yellow”; I did this to both challenge and encourage the reader’s patience. I think my novels’ rhythms should attack the reader, confront them, suck them in. And when I’m feeling out the rhythm, I like to think of myself as trying to compose a piece of music.

Also, I wanted to find words that are concise and clear, with no hidden meanings, few adjectives, and generally without many embellishments. I use short sentences, one following another, utilizing space so the words may gain more strength. And then I would repeat—like small waves that come in every now and again, disappearing into the rock and sand. That’s how I approached writing Chinatown. The cadence, for the most part, is created by repetition—of a word group, a sentence, or even a whole passage. It could also be an action, a saying, a name.

PA: I feel that you really have a meticulous and, one could say, impersonal approach towards writing. For instance, in an interview with BBC Vietnam, you said that you don’t write to confess. What did you mean by that exactly?

T: I didn’t want the novel to become a memoir, but rather a direct experience of consciousness, taken from the disordered and persistent thoughts of the main character. For many people, writing is about opening up about oneself. At twenty-six, after ten years being away from home, I began to write. But not for the purpose of talking about my life. My first thought was to serve a desire, a fantasy, a need to escape from myself, from my life.

Here, the need to write informs the responsibility of writing. In other words, a writer becomes professional only when they can express, defend, and prove their attitude towards reality. For me, writing is difficult. Writing long is even more difficult. With novels, the number of pages itself is already a challenge. Not to mention the structure, style, rhythm, characters. . . I think of writing a novel as a dangerous adventure—the most dangerous thing being not knowing where it’s going to go.

PA: Besides being an author, you are also a translator, and a ruthless one at that. When editing the French translation of Thư gửi Mina, you cut out almost one fourth of the text, feeling that there was too much excess. Could you tell me why you decided to do so?

T: Thư gửi Mina is a novel with thirteen chapters, composed of letters written to Mina—a girl from the main character’s time in Soviet Russia. When writing that particular novel, I tried to write longer, sort of drifting from one story to another. In Vietnamese, I guess the result wasn’t too bad. But when I was editing the French translation, the language of Descartes helped me to realize that there were too many words—that it was an overkill. After editing out around twenty thousand words in the French edition, I took out the Vietnamese one again and revised it. Hopefully, Thư gửi Mina will be re-published with a different spirit: short and succinct, strong and direct, following the economical literary art that I’m pursuing.

PA: You also said that translation helped you to see your work more clearly, which I find quite refreshing in a way, because people tend to focus on what is “lost in translation”.

T: Whenever I have doubts about a sentence I’ve just written, I double-check it by translating it into French and immediately, anything illogical or superfluous will come out. If translation takes one thing from us, it makes up for it in other ways. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 6, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Asa Chen Zhang, Peera Songkünnatham, and Suhasini Patni

Prizes, poetry contests, and new works from India, Thailand, and China!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on publishing trends in India, the memorialization of the author Wat Wanlayangkoon in Thailand, and an exciting new development in Chinese to English interpretive translation, led by the Accent Society. Read on to find out more!

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

Temperatures are soaring and the country is experiencing grueling heatwaves. Indians have taken to social media to critique the Modi government’s negligent response to the climate crisis. Many are also sharing their memories of the devastating and nightmarish second wave of the coronavirus that led to numerous deaths in the country this time last year.

The pro-Hindutva, right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party is known to instigate violence, especially against Muslims, in the name of the Hindu religion. In the latest reform to eradicate voices of dissent, verses by Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been dropped from the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) class 10 textbook. Faiz, one of the most celebrated Urdu poets and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, addressed the issues of military dictatorships and tyranny in Pakistan. According to Scroll.in, “the verses were part of the ‘Religion, Communalism and Politics—Communalism, Secular State’ segment of the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s textbook called “Democratic Politics II.” The two poems are “Let Us Walk in the Market in Shackles” and “Upon Returning from Dhaka.”

In 2021, the New India Foundation (NIF) announced its inaugural grant for writing books relating to India’s history. The three winners of the NIF Translation Fellowship were chosen from ten Indian languages and each awarded a stipend of INR 6 lakhs for a period of six months with mentorship opportunities as well as publishing and editorial support. The three winners are Venkateswar Ramaswamy (literary translator) and Amlan Biswas (statistician) who will translate Nirmal Bose’s Diaries 1946-47 from Bangla; NS Gundur (academician and literary historian) who will translate DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from Kannada; and Rahul Sarwate (academician and historian) who will translate Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad from Marathi. More can be read about the winners here.

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Strange and Stranger: On Leylâ Erbil’s A Strange Woman

April 14, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Carol Khoury

[Erbil] transcribes the coming-of-age of the protagonist—but also in many ways of the country.

A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil, translated from the Turkish by Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler, Deep Vellum, 2022

Before jumping to conclusions and judgments stemming from the title of Leylâ Erbil’s debut novel, I consulted Deep Vellum’s take on the book—hoping, or perhaps wishing, that the original Turkish title would give more to go on. Tuhaf Bir Kadın, of which the English title is a direct translation, caused quite a stir in Turkey upon its publi­cation in 1971. Since then, over half a decade has passed—a considerably long time for such a seminal and vital text to appear for the first time in English, by way of Amy Spangler and Nermin Menemencioğlu’s sinuous translation. This is also the first novel by a Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel, furthering the case for the Anglophone to take notice of this singular author, Leylâ Erbil—or as Amy Marie Spangler calls her, Leylâ Hanım.

A Strange Woman was originally translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu in the early 1970s; herself a scholar and an acclaimed translator of Turkish poetry, Menemencioğlu worked impassionedly to introduce A Strange Woman to a wider audience. However, despite receiving encouraging responses, no publisher was willing to commit. When Amy Marie Spangler stepped in almost half a century later, her contributions to the original translation further advanced the efforts towards publication—although Spangler admits in her preface that “world literature would have been all the richer” if it were published in its original form.

Further complicating the timeline is the fact that over the years, Erbil—in her signature defiance of convention—had “updated” the novel as further editions were released. Spangler worked on incorporating the new passages, only to discover that Erbil had also made additional edits and changes throughout the text. Naturally, these different versions had to be cohered, and one thing led to the other; Spangler found that “the English had been stylistically “smoothed out” in many ways.” The more she put one version against another, the more interventions she made. With both Erbil and Menemencioğlu no longer alive, Spangler and the publisher had to face and continually interrogate the ever-torturing question of how much authority the translator “could justifiably exercise.” She explains:

I decided to attach my name to the translation because the revisions were so substantial that I did not think it right to attri­bute it only to Menemencioğlu. I did not completely retrans­late the book, but neither was the translation Menemencioğlu’s alone. My name, the publisher and I agreed, should be added so that I might bear the brunt of any criticism. I wish only that Erbil and Menemencioğlu were still with us so that we might have collaborated on the text together in real time. […] It seems to me fitting that this translation process was, like its author, rather unconventional.‎

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Why Living Is Not the Same as Life: Yan Lianke’s Village Memoir

June 4, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty.

Three Brothers by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Grove Press, 2020

One of the most translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yan Lianke, has become quite the celebrity: he is featured in interviews in global media, invited to international literary festivals, and quoted on the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, despite this fame and international image, he remains fiercely loyal to his roots—the Chinese village where backbreaking hardship was the common lot until the 1990s. As he admits in his latest book to be translated into English: “I grew up in a household full of poverty and warmth.”

In this piece of non-fiction called 我与父辈 (first published in China in 2009) and rendered as Three Brothers in English through Carlos Rojas’ faithful and vivid translation, Yan pays tribute to the generation of his father, who survived an era of famine, political upheavals, social discrimination, and self-reliance in the 1960s and ’70s. By remaining faithful to their rock-solid values of decency, sacrifice, and stoic acceptance of life’s unfairness, this generation was able to provide better lives for their children. Yan, who belongs to the bridge generation, still remembers his early life of “吃苦” (chi ku, or literally, “eating bitterness”), whilst he has also directly experienced the benefits of China’s economic and social reforms that started in the 1980s but affected life in villages much later, around the late 1990s.

The book, which is subtitled Memories of My Family, describes the lives of three men: Yan’s father, Yan’s father’s second brother (called Second Uncle), and his cousin (called Fourth Uncle). All of them share similar characteristics: they are illiterate, extremely hard-working, and they all die as a result of the physical abuse that their bodies experienced in order to meet their most important obligations towards their families.

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty. In this world of harsh masculinity—there are very few mentions of women in the book—life consists of the most important stations in life: giving birth, building houses, feeding and marrying off one’s many children (this was before China’s one-child policy started being implemented in 1979), providing education for the happy few, and ensuring a decent funeral. This is all accomplished through a philosophy that Yan describes as the difference between living in the village and in the city:

“ ‘Living’ suggests a process of enduring day after day, with each day being the same, and implies a kind of monotony, boredom, hopelessness, and idleness. ‘Life,’ on the other hand, conveys a sense of richness, of progress and the future. It has color and vitality and calls to mind the act of walking down a broad road illuminated by bright lights.”

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“The long journey into darkness”: I.D. Sîrbu, an Unusual Case

May 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

He called himself “a leper,” and had the courage to remain so for his entire, unlucky life, in the interest of us future readers.

Writing has always been a refuge of resistance for those living under oppressive political regimes, such as under the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Often, such writing creates a movement, a group whose literature has much in common, emblematic of the particular circumstances of its birth. In Romania, this was “desk drawer literature.” Yet, of course, writers within such movements also retain their individuality—and some more so than others. Whilst many authors of Romanian dissident literature exiled themselves in other European countries or the USA, I.D. Sîrbu remained in his native country. Little known in the English-speaking world, Sîrbu was a prolific, versatile, and unique writer of plays, short stories, and novels. In the following essay, Andreea Scridon, whose translations of Sîrbu’s selected short stories are forthcoming with AB Press, discusses his life, work, and fascinating singularity.

The phenomenon of subversive literature, either containing subversive content or written in subversive circumstances, is characteristic of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. In a nightmare that nobody predicted would ever end, writing continued to represent a flame in the cavern, a stubborn desire to keep actively participating in life, despite the forced degradation of the spirit by the regime in power. Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, astutely aware of literature’s power of influence, issued a statement summarizing the attitude of the time: “It is to be understood, comrades, that we are the partisans, from the beginning to the end, of a MILITANT literature and we do not even conceive another kind of literature.”

It was in this context that “desk drawer literature” was born: literary work that was written for its “integrity,” as Solzhenitsyn puts it, and not for the ego boost of being published. Names that have now become iconic are those of writers lucky enough to publish in “the Free World”: Solzhenitsyn himself, Pasternak, and Milosz, to name a few. In Romania, too, those who wrote in exile had the great luck of enjoying freedom to publish successfully, in France and the USA, like Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade, respectively. Other important names of Romanian dissident literature are Nicolae Steinhardt, Constantin Noica, and Paul Goma (who died just a few weeks ago from COVID-19 in Paris). All of these writers spent the majority of their lives either in jail or outside the borders of their home country, and stand out as mirific models in comparison to those that disappointed in reality: the many authors who claimed to have produced subversive writing and ultimately ended up not publishing anything well after the 1989 Revolution, or, similarly, those who only wrote against the communist regime after it had fallen and therefore no longer represented concrete danger. It must be noted that some suggest this perception is a myth intended to continue the work of marginalizing authors. It is difficult to define a figure that would suffice as “enough,” given the circumstances and various adjacent factors. READ MORE…

Open Secrets: An Interview with Phan Nhiên Hạo

April 15, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

To be published in Vietnam, however, one must accept censorship, and this is the price that I refuse to pay.

In a poem titled “Wash Your Hands,” Phan Nhiên Hạo writes “Gentlemen, this is no trivial matter / another story about art for art’s sake, or art for life / this is the story about a cut the length of decades.” The poem, written in 2009, seems to disrupt time, speaking as much to our harrowing present as it does to Phan’s own complex past. Indeed, much of Phan Nhiên Hạo’s latest collection, Paper Bells, appears to confirm Diana Khoi Nguyen’s view that Phan is a poet “gifted with the ability to be present in multiple planes of existence.”

Meticulously translated from the Vietnamese by Hai-Dang Phan, Paper Bells was recently published by Brooklyn-based press, The Song Cave. As the world contended with the rampant spread of COVID-19 and millions of people were struggling to adjust to a frightening new reality, Phan Nhiên Hạo graciously agreed to correspond with me. We emailed about Paper Bells and balancing the lockdown with writing and family. And Phan shared his thoughts on censorship, writing in exile and the vital importance of personal narratives when it comes to (re)writing history.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, March 2020

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): We find ourselves corresponding at a very strange and challenging time. You’re in Illinois, I’m in New York, and both of us are at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. I hope that you and your loved ones are well. How are you isolating and spending your time? Do you feel compelled and able to write?

Phan Nhiên Hạo (PNH): I work for a university library, and the university has been closed due to the coronavirus—yet, we are expected to work from home. Interestingly, we now have more meetings than ever before, but they are virtual meetings. I feel I am mentally well-equipped to be socially distant. Most poets are introverted people, I guess, and that helps a lot in this situation. I want to write, but I need time to absorb the current situation. The pandemic is so surreal, so absurd, so impactful to life at an unimaginable magnitude. It looks like I will stay home for a while, so hopefully, I will be able to write more eventually. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part I)

February 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work . . . but this was something survivable.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.

Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?

Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 11, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Filip Noubel, Julia Sherwood, Poupeh Missaghi, and Xiao Yue Shan

On Terezín, censorship in Iran, thrilling new Uzbek titles, and the long-awaited Nobel Prize for Literature announcement.

This week is an exciting one in the world of literature, and our editors are bringing you dispatches from the ground. Xiao Yue Shan discusses the winners of the 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Julia Sherwood reports on a march from Prague to Terezín, a concentration camp established by the Nazis during their occupation of the Czech Republic. Poupeh Missaghi gives an account of literary podcasts in Iran, as well as the government’s role in quality control and censorship. Filip Noubel brings us an introduction of several new titles from the established authors of Uzbekistan. 

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting on the Nobel Prize for Literature

The long-awaited Nobel Prize in Literature announcement of 2019 was prefaced by the usual barrage of news and predictions—some cynical, some vaguely hopeful, and most of which hedged their bets on women writers and/or authors who did not write predominantly in English. After the controversy of last year’s award (or the lack thereof), it followed a natural trajectory that our current politics lead us to search for brilliant literary representation that breaches the limits of our accepted canon of well-celebrated white men, and the Swedish Academy had seemed eager to prove themselves to be advocates for social progress, as they once again took on the role of alighting the flames of literary luminaries that will forever be enshrined as embodiments of success in the world of letters.

In a case of half-fulfillment, the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Asymptote contributor Olga Tokarczuk, and the 2019 Prize was awarded to the prolific Austrian writer Peter Handke. The latter aroused quite the maelstrom of negative responses, even with most still acknowledging his significant contributions and his fearlessly bold oeuvre, while the former is being hailed as a well-deserving, original, feminist voice, standing in the exact spot of where the spotlight should be shone.

READ MORE…