Posts filed under 'community'

What’s New in Translation: August 2024

August 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Matilde Ribeiro, and Sofija Popovska

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

In this month’s compilation of newly released titles, our editors take a close look at three works that cohere stylistic invention with unconstrained probings into reality. In a bold collection of psychogeography, Daniel Saldaña París vivifies the urban space as a transformative intersection of image and imagination. From Aimé Cesaire, one of the founders of négritude, an early dramatic work provides further insight into his potent discourse against colonial violence. And in the English-language debut of one of Latin America’s most vital political thinkers, a volume combining dialogue and essay introduces the essentiality of communal resistance in the thinking of Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar.

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Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, Catapult, 2024

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. . . It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them. . .” writes Michel de Certeau in his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life. I thought of these words immediately as I immersed myself in the shifting landscapes of Planes Flying Over a Monster, a collection of ten essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. In writing about (and moving through) Montreal, Havana, Mexico City, Madrid, and other places, Saldaña París engages in a transformative cartography, rearranging bits of metropolises in turn into a tangle of ruelles frequented by a secret writer; a map of zones where different types of drugs can be purchased; a junction between “three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza”; and a stretch of space-time existing only momentarily within a locked gaze between a shy, adolescent cult member and his adult self. Tracing the connections between places, people, and events, Saldaña París creates a sense of communion with the world that is at times uneasy, yet always shot through with radical tenderness and a rare species of honesty—the kind that doesn’t confuse itself with the truth. This self-awareness, rooted in the memoir aspect of the collection, intensifies the realism that the genre of nonfiction always purports to provide, yet only occasionally delivers.

The collection’s closing essay, “Assistants of the Sun,” is also the beginning of the story—chronologically speaking. In it, we meet a young Saldaña París, dragged into joining a cult by his father and uncle. The sect’s activities happen during nature retreats, and include rituals of varying extremity—anything from walking in a neat line to a live burial. Saldaña París is forced to confront these memories years later, watching footage of these events while sitting with his partner Catherine in a borrowed Brooklyn apartment—an arrangement he mentions multiple times throughout the essay, as though attempting to anchor himself amidst the flood of disturbing recollections. He faces the past with striking empathy—remembering his father as “softness personified, mildly alcoholic, holding down three jobs . . . and a radical advocate of tenderness,” despite his having roped his son into a scam. This compassionate clarity, spanning all ten essays, is consonant with the author’s mission—relayed to him by an extra-terrestrial during a cult activity—to “help the sun to illuminate the world.” READ MORE…

“My-selves” in My Languages: A Discussion with Paloma Chen

August 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Conner

. . . sometimes “you” are “me,” and there is no distinction, and we are a “we,” but other times I am not even “me,” I am just void, 空.

Born in Alicante, Valencia, poet, researcher, and journalist Paloma Chen dedicates herself to advancing migrant justice in Spain. Her first collection of poetry, Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Calling On All Silent Majorities, Letraversal, 2022), explores the depths and diversity of the Chinese diasporic experience in Spain through a kaleidoscope of voices, encompassing mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers, while at the same time always challenging the suppositions of language. “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” published as an app in 2023 and translated by Paloma and her colleagues into Catalan, Mandarin, and English, renews the form of 山水诗, or “poetry of mountains and waters,” by pairing pixel art depicting scenes from China and the Chinese diaspora with poems that deepen the speaker’s relationships with their multiple and ceaselessly transforming selves. In the following interview, I spoke with Paloma about the importance of orality and quotidian language in her poetry, writing in community, and the multiplicity of the self.

Julia Conner (JC): In your essay “No tengo más que una literatura y no es la mía.” you mention how you envision Invocación embodying a Chinese diaspora collection of poetry, much like Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus being an Asian American poetry collection. When writing Invocación, how did you imagine your work in conversation with previously published literary works, both from Spain and abroad?

Paloma Chen (PC): I really like Asian-American poets like Sally Wen Mao, Marilyn Chin, Franny Choi, and Li-Young Lee, so their poetry was a great inspiration for me, as I wanted to write in Spanish, for readers in Spain, but taking into account my Chinese roots. Most of their works were truly enlightening and helped me build my own poetic language. I was trying to carve out a little space, one in which I can also find poets like Berna Wang, Minke Wang, Ale Oseguera, or Gio Collazos, that I could find liberating, one in which I could express the complexities regarding identity that I was all these years reflecting about. There is no me without all those before me, and all those walking with me right now. There is no Invocación without all the amazing books and artwork I had the privilege to encounter, without hundreds of fruitful conversations and lived experiences. I was writing for my friends, the amazing community of artists and activists, not only from the Chinese community, but from the anti-racist, feminist, Queer movements present in many places. I did not know if my book, which I thought was a very specific work by a Spanish-Chinese girl talking about her reality growing up in a little restaurant in rural Spain, could have the potential to connect with readers abroad, but I am happy to know that maybe it has.

JC: Many of your poems from Invocación center on speech and communication, fluency, disfluency, and the function of language. “Pero habla,” for example, repeats the visually interrupted line “pala/bras part/idas que hi/eren.” Your work also has powerful oral and rhythmic qualities to it. How do you see the relationship between the themes of your work and your poetry’s orality and visual form on the page?

PC: I guess that for a writer and a poet, reflecting about language itself is quite common. In my specific case, reflecting about identity inevitably leads me to reflect about language, as identities, languages, and cultures are so closely interrelated. Also, I do not think poetic language is that different from the quotidian tool we use to communicate daily. Our every-day interactions are full of poetry. The fact that in my normal life I am used to thinking about communication, fluency, and disfluency doubtless permeates my writing. I have always struggled to communicate, to express myself in the way that society demands me to. I studied journalism at university because I was truly worried about it back then. Some people think of me as being quite shy sometimes but, in a huge contrast, quite expressive in my poetry. For me, writing poetry is establishing a conversation with another true self, a self empowered by voice, body, presence, rhythm, a self that is connected with the environment and less in its own head. Because I value orality, I like to experiment also with the visual form of the verses in the page, so the reader can also have some visual clues of tones, silences, vibrations, etc.

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European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part II

May 29, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Joaquín Gavilano, Stine An, and Stoyan Tchaprazov

I still remember the joy and hope in learning new words and how that does expand, if not the world, a word.

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Stine An grows the vocabulary of her world; Stoyan Tchaprazov wrestles with a complex, multilingual diction; and Joaquín Gavilano translates his way back home.   

Stine An on Yoo Heekyung:

I was initially drawn to Yoo Heekyung’s work because of both his poetic lineage and breadth of contributions as a cultural worker. Having studied poetry with Kim Hyesoon, Yoo is most known for his poetry; however, he also writes plays and essays and frequently collaborates with other poets and artists on video content, podcasts, and events. Additionally, he runs wit n cynical, a one-of-a-kind poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. I started translating his poems back in 2019 for a literary translation workshop with Sawako Nakayasu during my final year of MFA studies at Brown University; there, she not only inspired me to explore literary translation as a meaningful way to connect with my Korean heritage as a poet, but also as an exciting and potentially life-changing activity. I take invitations to change my life seriously. I started writing poetry because I wanted to change my life, and it’s for the same reason that I continue my work as a translator. The possibility to change my life. How exciting is that? What does it mean to grow the vocabulary of your world?

Sawako introduced me to the poet and translator Don Mee Choi, who in turn introduced me to Yoo’s work. One of the earliest pieces of feedback I received from Don Mee and other early readers for my translations was that I had nailed the tone for Yoo’s work, so I took that as a sign to continue. During my ALTA translation mentorship with Joyelle McSweeney, she invited me to reflect on my relationship to tone, and I realized that tone was something I deeply cared about in my own work—both as a poet and a stand-up comedian. So, I’ve been prioritizing tone, mood, and voice when translating Yoo’s poems. For inspiration, I’ve been revisiting Joachim Neugroschel’s translations of Franz Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms; I remember being utterly bewildered and enchanted by Kafka’s words through those translations—the humor, grief and wonder.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 12, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, José García Escobar, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Hong Kong, Central America, Kenya, and Nairobi!

In this week’s dispatches on world literature our editors-at-large bring news of secondhand book sales, prize winners, and self-published writers. From a conversations on freedom and creativity in Nairobi to a date with a book store in Hong Kong, read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

The closing of UK-based online bookstore Book Depository in April was shocking news to book lovers across the world, including regular customers from Hong Kong. Despite the convenient availability of digital books, many readers still prefer print books for both practical reasons and tactile feelings. Besides the satisfaction of turning real pages, the circulation of books is also part of the cultural scene of a city. The annual charity secondhand book sale “Books for Love @ $10” campaign was held in late April at Taikoo Place this year. A wide range of books, from arts and literature to bestsellers and manga, were on sale for HKD$10 each. The House of Hong Kong Literature also organised a secondhand book bazaar from 2 to 5 May as a way of fundraising to promote Hong Kong literature. The secondhand books were donated by local writers and scholars, covering subject areas of literature, philosophy, history, arts, and social sciences.

But in the digital age, brick-and-mortar bookstores struggle to sustain themselves, especially in a city like Hong Kong that constantly faces high rent and inflation. For three consecutive weekends beginning 29 April, independent local bookshop Hong Kong Book Era is hosting the event “A Date with Bookstores”, in which representatives from different independent bookstores are invited to set up their tables in Hong Kong Book Era to introduce their styles and thematic recommendations to readers. Participants include local bookstores such as HKReaders, Humming Publishing, and Little Little Books, as well as independent publisher Typesetter Publishing. Meanwhile, two talks—one on independent publishing and one on the history of Hong Kong independent bookstores—were also held, on 6 May and 7 May respectively, in connection with the event. The speakers discussed the mutual reliance between independent publishing and bookstores, as well as the vicissitudes of the struggles of Hong Kong’s bookstores. READ MORE…

Writing in Organic Formation: Federico Falco and Jennifer Croft on A Perfect Cemetery

May 20, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

I always thought about what else a short story could be beyond the usual. What would happen if I mixed short stories and poetry?

In our Book Club selection for the month of April, A Perfect Cemetery, Federico Falco’s writings do not tell so much as unfold, gently and masterfully, to elucidate the relationships between the human, the non-human, and the spaces in which such meetings take place. In precise and rich evocations, Falco plumbs the rich vocabularies and intrigues of landscape to lend delicacy, sensuality, and vividity to his prose, bringing his protagonists to life with a knowing rootedness. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo, Falco and translator Jennifer Croft share their thoughts on the cinematic aspects of A Perfect Cemetery, the relationships between the body and the land, and the pervading theme of isolation.

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, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Shawn Hoo (SH): I thought we could begin with the question of place. I read this book in Singapore, a dense city, and noted how A Perfect Cemetery has a distinct sense of place; Federico, you conjure a landscape of sierras, rivers, and forests across disparate short stories that belong to this very single novelistic world. In an interview with The Paris Review, Jennifer, you emphasize the importance of translators visiting the country they are translating from. How does your sense of place affect your approach to these stories?

Federico Falco (FF): Landscape transforms us and makes us different people; the people who live in big cities have one kind of experience of life and the people who live in different landscapes have another. There is an Argentinian writer, Juan José Saer—one of my favorites—who says that the poor who live in cities near the ocean, they have a heaviness; they become used to strange, different people arriving and leaving all the time. And the people who live in the mountains always think that there’s another place beyond the mountains. They can change their point of view because they can see things from a different point of view. The people who live in the plains here in Argentina, the Pampas, they see the same landscape all the time. They can walk ten kilometers, and the whole scene shifts ten kilometers.

So when I write, I try to think about where the character lives, where they grew up, what they need, where they differ, what was new for them—if they grew up in the plains and now live in the mountains. I used to live in the city, now I’m living in the mountains, and there are some things that you can feel in the body. Your body starts to change. The air is different. The muscles change because you’re climbing all the time. The way you relate to people in the city is really different from the way you relate to people here in the mountains. If I meet a stranger here in the street, I say hello, which I never do in the city.

Jennifer Croft (JC): I really loved listening to Fede talk about place. Obviously, translating these stories influenced me as well, and I have been thinking a lot about place in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a book of creative nonfiction called Notes on Postcards, and part of the question of this text is: why does it matter where we are when we’re communicating with someone? Or why does it matter where we are in general? I started thinking about this question in 2020, when all of my travel plans were cancelled. I felt really cut off from all of the places that I care about—first and foremost among those is Buenos Aires. I feel very panicked that I’m not allowed to enter Argentina right now because of my US passport. I’m currently in upstate New York at a writing residency called Yaddo, and I’ve had a hard time working on my project, but thanks to these conversations with Fede over the last week or so, I’ve been relaxing into it.

I like comparing my obsession with places to Fede’s, because mine is less about landscape and more about cities and cultures. Even though culture is such an extremely fluid thing, it is much more about how one feels in the context of other human beings. I’m more of a flaneur kind of writer, and it’s great for me to be able to incorporate these landscapes into my thinking too. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 25, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Daniel Hahn

Suspending sight and clarity, abdicating control: closing eyes.

For the fourth instalment of our Saturday column, In This Together, we present three diary entries from renowned Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn. Below, Hahn introduces us to Tavares’ work and the background behind his stream-of-consciousness diary that, written like a prose poem, records the daily changes of the pandemic experience:

The novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares is, like most of us, stuck at home. He is in Portugal, from where since March 23 he’s been writing a daily “Plague Diary.” As each piece is finished, it gets translated—sometimes overnight—into several languages for publication around the world. I have the good fortune of being one of the translators. To date he has written (and I’ve translated) thirty-two pieces, including the three that you can read below.

Gonçalo is one of the Portuguese world’s most critically acclaimed writers. José Saramago tipped him as the next Lusophone winner of the Nobel, saying, “Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. This, combined with a language entirely his own, mingling bold invention and a mastery of the colloquial, means that it would be no exaggeration to say . . . that there is very much a before Gonçalo M. Tavares and an after.” But while he has a stellar reputation in many languages, he is as yet frustratingly underappreciated in English. So if he’s new to you, I should say, perhaps, that this writing project is not typical of Gonçalo’s work—but then, I don’t know whether any one piece of his work is typical of his work, come to that. All are extraordinary, as I think this one is.

Each entry seems to take you through a single day’s experience—stepping-stone by stepping-stone—an observation, a piece of news, a thought that gets followed down a rabbit-hole, a bit of culture consumed, a recurring, niggling worry—in a way that partly recreates the peculiarly time-adrift days so many of us are experiencing; unstructured days filled with tiny moments (another news alert, an e-mail from a friend, stop to pat the dog, time perhaps for another coffee), but threaded together with some really subtle, almost invisible artfulness. Each day reads alone, but the best effect is cumulative, each piece slightly developing and illuminating what’s gone before. The writer is looking far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global as well as intimate; its ingredients include utter banality, yet even that banality is woven into something weirdly engrossing, sometimes distressing, sometimes strangely comforting.

One day we will be living in a place where this whole project can be published all together as a book, to be read for its artistry and its thoughtfulness and as a reminder of who we were in the spring of 2020; but in the meantime, while we are still living in the present that it describes, I have felt its entries gradually becoming one of the richest ways I daily connect with the rest of the world (absent any of the old possibilities). I hope readers can find those connections for themselves here, too.

Extracts from “Plague Diary”

by Gonçalo M. Tavares

6 April

Human number 486 died in a Madrid hospital.

Lists of the dead.

Lists of chosen books.

A list of places to visit after the plague, when it is the anxiety that is driven away and not the bodies.

Ten pages in the newspaper with pictures of people with two dates.

Jacob Steinberg, Israeli poet: “we look tonight like a city in flames.”

I need gauze for the wounds of humans and animals and I consult a link.

“https://www.mifarma.pt/gasas-suaves-hansaplast-10-uds-85m-x-5cm.”

In the details, the link says the following:

“For looking, mole suggestion to clean and collect wounds.”

Later: “Individuals sterile wrapping.”

Then, the clincher. How to use it:

“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”

“Use or cure the Hansaplast look to fix a look on nowhere.”

“Apply a new one, I think that less hair daily.”

All instructions should be like this.

Instructions from a lunatic for other lunatics.

I like automatic translators that move into high aesthetics without knowing it.

“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”

Clean the surface of an animal’s leg or a human arm well.

Carefully clean and then apply the look.

With a certain strength.

I try this on Roma’s leg.

Medicine that carefully cleans the surrounding area and then applies the look.

The ancients were men who applied the look.

It didn’t work.

My Greek friend tells me that a few days ago, at the refugee camp in Ritsona, a woman tested positive for coronavirus when she went to give birth in a public hospital.

Only then did they realise that many in the camp were infected.

Quarantine. The baby reveals things.

The good soldier Svejk and the description of the lunatic asylum:

“one very educated inventor . . . who spent his life picking his nose and only said once a day: I’ve just invented electricity.”

The raving and badly translated ad for the gauze reminded me of that madman who invented electricity once a day.

When this is over, the outside world is going to be full of crazy people, daily inventors of electricity.

In Italy the government has given approval for all students to pass their year.

In Sweden there are fears of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

Somebody asks: If you lose your desire, would you go looking for it?

Where?

Alexander Kluge talks about a doll “where the eyes” tell you the time.

Seeing the right time in the eyes of the doll.

Seeing the right time in the eyes of some old men on television.

At certain moments, clocks seem to stop working.

All that work are human eyes.

In Italy, everybody who goes out onto the street has the right time in their eyes.

In Spain too.

And in other places. In the United States.

I receive a link: click on a year and the most listened-to songs of that time will come up.

It’s called “nostalgia machine.”

A collective nostalgia machine.

Jung, explicit in do re mi.

I click on 1986.

The choices are terrible.

From Phil Collins to Samantha Fox.

Sometimes it’s better to lose our memory: memory 0.0

Two days ago in India: “Thousands of people flee to escape hunger.”

The factories are closed, almost everything quarantined.

Thousands quit the capital and return to their village.

There aren’t enough buses.

Reports in the Guardian. Many had to return on foot.

200 kilometres from New Delhi.

“The road seemed endless . . . and my children just took short breaks sleeping on the ground,” Mamta explained.

The only thing that kept us moving was that we had nowhere else to go, said Mamta.

The only thing.

“Each day a deeper rebirth,” the painter used to say, quoting a master.

The following day, in the same place, but sunk deeper.

With just your head out.

That’s how you learn: with just your head out.

Boris Johnson has been put into intensive care.

The Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will take his place.

They’re talking about 15 million new unemployed people in the United States.

I return to my book.

“Take five steps forward and five steps back,” says a doctor at the asylum of the good soldier Svejk.

It is a test to see whether the man is crazy or not.

I try to do this.

We should all do this.

Five steps forward and five steps back to see if we stay in the same place.

We don’t stay in the same place.

It’s no longer possible to stay in the same place.

*

8 April

All Mexican women are in love with the undersecretary of health, Hugo López-Gatell.

From a friend of mine in Mexico City, she was the one who verified this.

He speaks every evening at 7:00 p.m.

All the women, of all ages, are in love.

Married, single, widows.

He’s charming and intelligent, they say.

He’s a combo, they add. He has everything all in one.

There are photos of him all over Mexico and circulating on the internet, in different poses and suits.

And with the caption:

“I’ll protect you”

“I’m telling you to stay home”

“I’d be happy to explain it to you”

And another one, with a mean (“but very lovely”) expression, with the caption: “I saw you went out!”, as if Hugo López-Gatell were reproaching a citizen for not staying home.

Many men are also in love with him, says my friend from Mexico.

“He’s so supergorgeous our doctor.”

“I fell in love with him from the start of Covid-19 and since then I’ve done what Hugo López-Gatell says.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese city of Wuhan reopened this Wednesday. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 28, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

This week's latest literary news from China and the United Kingdom!

This week our writers report on the impact of coronavirus on writers and readers in China, as well as the release of the International Booker Prize longlist. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer. . .” The words of José Saramago hover in the virus-stricken towns and cities of China: illness, the great equalizer. The streets freed of people, the antiseptic taste of disinfectant wafting, mask-ridden faces—outside China, the news grow its own, furious legends. Reports of the dead waver between hundreds and thousands, there is panic and disillusion and boredom and most of all, uncertainty.

So it is through this continual trajectory of doubt, compounded by fear, that Saramago’s renowned novel Blindness (published in China as 失明症漫记) has surged amidst the Chinese literary community as a compass towards what directions human nature may turn in times of encompassing hardship. In the growing scope of a blindness epidemic, Saramago unites fiction and ideology into a profound portrayal into how disease can infiltrate and dismantle the lattice of moral order, as well as how we may comfort one another, how the degradation of societal norms does not definitively mean the regression of one’s humanity. It is, albeit dark, a story of triumph, and triumph—even in books—is solace. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

February 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured 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. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

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 Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” 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.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Comfort Is Expensive” by Mlenge Mgendi

August 6, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Nathalie S. Koenings

Standing up alone in a nearly empty daladala, every passenger could see me. Those majambozi rascals had turned me into a public one-man show!

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the Swahili-language writer Mlenge Mgendi. “Comfort Is Expensive” comes from Mlenge Mgendi’s self-published collection Mama wa Jey: Hadithi za Uswahilini (Jey’s Mother: Stories of Swahili Life). Nathalie S. Koening’s nuanced translation captures the different registers of speech in this scatological tale, which weaves indispensable Swahili terms with well-timed slang that, in some ways, feels universal. The speaker captures the anxiety of youth squeezed under community expectations and bureaucratic pressure. Sober, infused with wry humor, and laced with charming off-beat metaphor, “Comfort is Expensive” shows a slice of life that points to the atmosphere of a place and the dispositions that form under specific pressures there.

That day, I was coming from school. My stomach, jeopardizing the love, unity and cooperation that had reigned in my bowels for centuries, was causing me real trouble. I had no choice but to hurl myself into a daladala bus and get home in a hurry. Don’t you know? Since our schools have no money for healing all that ails us, students get a “discount” when they ride the bus?

When I got to the stop, a daladala was waiting. It was totally empty, having been outsmarted by another bus that, zipping past like a toothbrush, had plucked up all the fares. As I was climbing in, the konda boy grabbed hold of me. “Hey, you! Stoo-denty! You taking up an actual seat coz you’re gonna pay full price?” The bus pulled away brush-empty, but even then, he wouldn’t let me sit. READ MORE…

Don’t Look Back in Anger: Virginie Despentes and Modern France

November 12, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Despentes shows that evil is all too human.

Following our recently published review of Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things, Barbara Halla takes on the Vernon Subutex Trilogy. In this essay, Despentes’ most recent work is seen to interrogate female anger, everyday life, and the power of community in new, thought-provoking ways.

In a 2017 profile of Virginie Despentes, Le Monde eschewed Despentes’ name, preferring to refer to her simply as Le Phénomène, The Phenomenon, throughout the piece. This epithet is no exaggeration: Despentes has held the French literary scene in her grip since the mid-nineties when she published her first book, Baise-moi (translated into English as Rape me, by Bruce Benderson), and then directed its 2001 movie adaptation, featuring two porn actresses in the lead. Manu and Nadine, the main characters and both victims of violence of some kind, embark upon a road trip where they lure, sexually exploit and kill off men. It wasn’t just the violent acts that made Baise-moi feel radical. It was the lustful pleasure the protagonists took in this violence that stunned audiences, leading to a temporary ban of the film in France. As Lauren Elkin points out in The Paris Review, when the movie came out, there was nothing else to compare it to, so critics fell back on Thelma & Louise, another feminist road film about two women on the run. But Despentes’ nihilistic and sadistic story has little in common with Thelma and Louise.

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What’s New in Translation: April 2018

April 9, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Belshaw, Diána Vonnák, Josefina Massot, and Norman Erikson

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

It’s spring, the days are (hopefully) sunny, and this month we’re back to shine a light on some of the most exciting books to come in April, including works in translation spanning Colombia, Lithuania, Martinique, and Spain (Catalonia). 

tundra

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas, Peirene Press

Reviewed by Josefina Massot, Assistant Editor

In his Afterword to Shadows on the Tundra, Lithuanian writer Tomas Venclova draws a parallel by way of praise: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s account of the Gulag ranks with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s and Varlam Shalamov’s. Those acquainted with Gulag survivor literature know that’s high praise indeed: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are paragons of the genre. And yet, I venture, Shadows on the Tundra transcends them both.

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Translation Tuesday: “Surface Effects” by Francesc Serés

March 6, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Lawrence Venuti

The ivy recovered. It spent two years fighting off that ochre evil until it returned to its formerly exultant state.

This week the eminent Lawrence Venuti brings us a curious story from Catalonia about a house consumed by ivy. The existence and appearance of this menacing plant dominates this rural community and the people who inhabit it.

The house came with a garden—like all the others in the promotion. It was large, three floors, and had a slate roof. Not till Cinta and Pere bought the thing did it change. Ivy began to envelop the ochre façade. They had planted it after falling out with the neighborhood. The houses were painted in a bright earth tone, an ochre that possessed a concrete reference. The only distinguishing feature was the uneven discoloration that the sun caused to the paint. At community meetings, Cinta and Pere would dig in their heels against their next door neighbors on either side and, finally, against everybody else. They (she, and he too, although not as much) wanted the ivy.

And so they planted it and installed an American mailbox, which wasn’t permitted either. That broke the perpetual peace that reigned over urbanization in the countryside. They contracted a gardening firm to fertilize the grounds and plant ivy all around the house. The ivy liked the place: it grew like a shot. From my house, just beyond the development, the ivy on the east wall seemed quite like a hand or paw clinging to it. Time passed quickly for the neighboring houses, and the hand continued to grow nonstop till its entwining tentacles reached the nearby façades.

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There is Nothing Anymore: Auden in the Saint Lucian Countryside

February 8, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Lucien

No end also to loss, yes, but no end to our tragic struggle against despair.

In this personal essay, a young poet attends a funeral in his native Saint Lucia, where a spontaneous funeral chant puts him in mind of a poem by Auden. To Vladimir Lucien, the funeral chant and the Auden poem constitute different approaches to the finality of death. In their juxtaposition, we learn something not only about the language and customs in the Saint Lucian countryside, but about the universal human yearning for the transcendence of our finitude.

Alloy’s funeral was packed. It had to be. In the village of Mon Repos, Saint Lucia, he had been everything: head of the local “friendly society,” choir member, bus driver, community organiser and activist, folk singer. The church, however, was an unusually small and claustrophobic Catholic Church with a low ceiling; it felt like a house converted into a church and hurriedly sacralised. Alloy’s daughter—who was a lecturer, my colleague—delivered the eulogy.

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