Posts filed under 'diary'

A Metaphysical Mistake: On Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death

June 13, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Death, to Cannetti, is not one part of what we might call a life-cycle, but rather a metaphysical mistake.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, Fitzcarraldo/New Directions, 2024

The fact that the twentieth century saw the greatest number of conflict-related deaths in human history might be considered fundamental in explaining the over two-thousand pages Elias Canetti wrote in preparation for his book against death. However, reading the abridged version—published by Fitzcarraldo (UK) and New Directions (US)—one will find that Canetti would object strenuously to this causal explanation. This relation between factuality and literature, Canetti would say, concedes far too much to death in two ways. Firstly, it allows death quantity: by remarking on the sheer numbers, we suggest that the tragedy of death is quantifiable; that the more death there is, the greater the tragedy. Secondly, it allows death quality: by remarking on the specific kind of death—those caused by conflict—we suggest that its calamity is measured in part by the nature of the dying. To Canetti, a lone Don Quixote who ceaselessly struggled for life in a century of death, all death is singular and its tragedy is infinite. In order to better understand this, we must turn to one death: his mother’s.

June 15, 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. . . I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

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We Stand With Ukraine: “Mother Says” by Andrii Krasnyashchikh

April 23, 2022  |  in We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Andrii Krasnyashchikh and Matthew Hyde

Every morning in the faculty chatroom they do a headcount: ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’, ‘Alive’.

This piece, a war diary by Kharkiv native Andrii Krasnyashchikh translated from the Russian by Matthew Hyde, marks the conclusion of Asymptote‘s We Stand With Ukraine Series. Over the course of the series’s run, we have brought together translations and original English-language compositions from around the world. Collectively, these pieces report on the war from the ground and examine the voyeuristic feeling of following it from afar; they comment on the latest developments and put them in dialogue with other conflicts from history. Above all else, they are an expression of solidarity with the victims of this war and a call for an end to the violence.

Mother Says

Translator’s note: Andrii Krasnyashchikh writes from his hometown of Kharkiv, a town of literary renown, as Russian bombs fall. The added tragedy of the situation is that history is repeating itself, in a distorted form. Much of Kharkiv was reduced to rubble in World War II; now Andrii’s mother says: ‘they’re worse than the fascists.’ The other bitter irony is that Andrii is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, a representative of the ‘Russian World’, whom Russia has supposedly come to liberate. In his sparse, tense style, Andrii documents the reality of life in a town under bombardment, everyday mundanities offset against the ever-present, terrifying backdrop of war. But hope is not yet lost, and humour is one of the coping mechanisms; Andrii’s daughter finds an anecdote on the internet in which Putin returns to earth from hell, only to find that wherever he goes he is charged in the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia; the whole world is Ukrainian now.  

—Matthew Hyde

Kharkiv, March 2022.

Mother says: they’re worse than the fascists.

She was born in 1946, she doesn’t remember the war. My father remembers, he was born in 1940. He talks about the missile which hit their house, how he and his brother fled through a field, how a bomb fell right next to them. He remembers plenty from the war.

Mother talks about her granddaughter, about when she was little, how she’d say ‘tyup’ instead of ‘soup’. Her granddaughter’s not so little now—ten years old already, she’s sure to remember this war.

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Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

March 31, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life.

As war cruelly rages on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one searches for elucidation amidst madness from the country’s writers. As pivotal statements of witness, hope, persistence, and humanity, such texts will undoubtedly go down in history as bright sparks of intelligence and endurance in the dark obfuscations of violence. In Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’s stunning documentation of daily life in eastern Ukraine, the author expertly renders stories of women struggling to reconcile their existence with the broken infrastructure of their country, weaving oratory and textuality with an expert balance of surrealism and sobriety. Testifying simultaneously to Ukraine’s tumultuous history and its uncertain present, Belorusets’s timely work speaks, necessarily, to what survival means, as it is happening.

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 interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, 2022

More than a month now since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the crisis for Ukrainians continues to have no end in sight. For those of us spectating from afar, the internet has burst into a deluge of breaking news: images of aerial attacks, fleeing citizens, and pulverised buildings circulate and refresh, drawing us into the eye of the conflict. As for the heart, how much of this goes into cultivating real empathy and solidarity, and how much into encouraging a lethargy towards the bits of violence we witness daily through the screen? Literature and translation have risen up almost instinctively to defy this impersonal onslaught: from readings organised by The Guardian to Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s advocacy of Ukrainian poetry. Asymptote, too, has launched a new column in support of Ukraine, and as Translation Tuesdays editor, I published Oksana Rosenblum’s translation of Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s “Galileo,” which, while published a week before the invasion, eerily voiced the fate of small states: “I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,/ I am so easily unnoticed.”

The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon. Amidst this media torrent, however, the daily war diary of Ukrainian photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets stands apart for her ability to document the war in both its pedestrian and surreal registers. On the third day, for example, Belorusets writes about meeting a woman in the park who, while carrying two huge shopping bags, admits happily to her: “When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.” Two weeks later, she hears two students speak outdoors about what it means to teach as air raid alarms sound. Occasionally, she includes photographs: friends walking their dogs after curfew; a woman holding two bouquets of flowers. Often, the moments she records are ordinary, allowing the mingling of fragile, contradictory truths—that of people living in a simultaneously exceptional and quotidian time and place. Receiving these daily dispatches in my inbox, they come across as disciplined, tender, and urgent.

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Melancholic Leftover(s): Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City

November 24, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Ka Man Chung

It is a timeless work of watching life flow past.

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City tells the deceptively simple story of a young man drifting through life, searching for romance and success amidst the urban swelter. Newly employed at a medical-literary magazine, narrator Leo Gazzara moves from Milan to Rome—only to be fired a year later due to the publication’s imminent bankruptcy. As he bounces around various jobs and other heartless endeavors, brooding resignation and lethargy permeate Leo’s world; his life, utterly devoid of excitement, becomes simply a series of events to be accepted and passed through in their procession. For the most part, he is a drifter—a flâneur without the poetic possibilities of transcendence. Unambitious and apathetic as he might appear to be, however, the story of Leo is nevertheless one of delicate beauty that imparts the prevalent, existential angst that defined a generation of young men amidst the Italy of the 70s.

In the vein of postwar Italian neorealism, Calligarich spends much of the text on bringing texture and illustration to the humble details of everyday life, and the resulting cinematic effect can likely be referred back to the author’s experience as a screenwriter. Leo’s story counteracts the adulation of glamour and happiness in Fascist propaganda, which holds little to no concern for the personal difficulties of everyday life—boredom, failure, or grief. Instead of telling the simple, customary story of a powerful and desirable man amidst a cosmopolitan enchantment, Last Summer in the City presents a marginalized individual’s quotidian, melancholic tale in a provincial setting. The quiet, understated prose emanates an almost diaristic intimacy into the narrator’s mind, providing an avenue to access his inner vacuum of emptiness, and the terrible simplicity of his apathy.

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What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska

September 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?

Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.

What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]

Friday, April 3

With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw.  We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?

The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.

Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.

The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…

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

May 30, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

We spend days between four walls, but nobody said anything about nights.

Bringing you translated literature from around the world during troubling times, this week’s In This Together presents a selection of Spanish writer Jordi Doce’s journals. Translator Lawrence Schimel introduces this work and its significance below:

These entries come from Spanish poet, translator, and critic Jordi Doce’s careful attention to and recording of the minutiae of life under quarantine, his looking inward (while at the same time observing the world around him) just as Madrid began that explosive & expansive flourishing that is Springtime.

Originally published on his blog, forty entries (the literal “forty days” of the Italian “quarantena” that ships suspected of carrying disease were required to be isolated before passengers and crew were allowed to disembark) spanning eight weeks—Sunday, March 15th through Monday, May 11—are about to be published in book form under the title La vida en suspenso (Life on Hold), by Fórcola, in June 2020.

Jordi has been a steady if intermittent diarist since the Spring of 1997, as he notes in La puerta del año. Enero-febrero 2004 (The Year’s Gate: January-February 2004), the first of his diaries to be published in book form. He continues to write his diaries, first and foremost “out of a need to order my thoughts, to soothe them, but also with a will of lightness, almost weightlessness, as if wanting to remove the thorns of reality.” Sometimes (as in the case of these entries) he also shares them online or in book format, when the observations can stand on their own or make a sort of thematic sense or unity.

I began translating these entries into English while Jordi was still writing them—a curious twist which perhaps helped him at a dark moment. As he noted, “the tone has grown darker and even bitter with the days. I guess it was inevitable, but I resist. I don’t want to turn these notes into an account of aggravations and laments.”

He wrote: “If these notes brought a bit of serenity to friends, a bit of patience and good humor, I’d be satisfied.” Hopefully, his satisfaction is even greater as these notes and observations are now available to an even broader audience, in English translation.

Confinement Notebook

by Jordi Doce

Confinement Notebook 8
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The midday sun (a clean sun, like one between storms) warms the large cauldron of the patio. One can see clothes hung out to dry at the rears of buildings and people (few) working on their balconies. Others simply emerge to get some air or smoke a cigarette. The light falls directly on the window and dazzles me. I’ve had to lower the blind. In the street it’s cool, but here I note how the studio heats up in just a few minutes. I feel the urge to greet the sun, like in Frank O’Hara’s poem, but I don’t yet have the necessary level of intimacy. I prefer to celebrate it with words. READ MORE…

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

May 23, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Teodora Gandeva

Sweeping up the dust everywhere. Life accumulates dust. So does death, they say . . .

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a text from the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. Translator Teodora Gandeva, introduces the piece:

In the cruelest month of April, under the sky of Berlin, acclaimed Bulgarian poet, writer, and playwright, Georgi Gospodinov (who gained world recognition for his novel The Physics of Sorrow) wrote about the things that save us during the personal and collective pandemic experience of anxiety and grief.

In the chaos and uncertainty, “Only simple things can save us” . . . The poem is reminiscent of one of his first texts about COVID-19, written as a note on the fridge, a list of the things we shouldn’t forget when we get out of our isolation and current state of “islands entire of ourselves”:

“When we get out of here, the only thing we should carry with us will be an invisible survival suitcase with the most important personal belongings, small enough not to accumulate unnecessary rubbish. А small first aid kit for after the end of a world, which we will have to compose again.”

Where do we find shelter and consolation from the constant reminders of our sudden mortality? When the future and the present have been cancelled, as Gospodinov wrote, we are left with our past. But are we welcome there? These are also the questions he asks in his third novel. A few weeks ago, during this unprecedented crisis, the novel was published in Bulgarian under the title Time Shelter. Just in time. When I wrote to Georgi Gospodinov about this series in Asymptote’s blog, he was already following it and was glad to ask me to translate one of his last poems, written especially for In This Together.

What Is the World Doing While Waiting For the End?

by Georgi Gospodinov

Cleaning its windows. To see more clearly what it is losing.
Arranging books in the library. Taking them out one by one. Starting to read. Then putting them back again.
Sweeping up the dust everywhere. Life accumulates dust. So does death, they say . . . dust to dust, and so on.
Turning on the vacuum cleaner—while it is wailing, you can let loose and wail, too. Just clean and cry, like my mother used to do.
What else is the world doing . . . READ MORE…

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

May 9, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Carolina Orloff and Fionn Petch

With this new condition, intimacy can be created. A fertile kind of intimacy that, perhaps, opens up a path towards unexpected doors.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a fiction text from the award-winning Buenos Aires based author and poet, Jorge Consiglio, whose novel FATE was recently published by Charco Press. Carolina Orloff, Consiglio’s translator and editor at Charco Press, introduces the piece:

It is not new to hear that Argentina is undergoing yet another crisis, be it financial, social, or political. This time, however, it’s different. Not just because the crisis is affecting the entire world, but also because the man running things in the country—Alberto Fernández, who only came into power in December 2019—is miraculously showing that, in the face of these unprecedented times, he is one of the most lucid politicians in the world—certainly more so than Argentina could have hoped for, especially in exceptionally challenging times.

Jorge Consiglio is one of the most talented and sensitive authors (and thinkers) publishing in Argentina today. He is also the master of detail. Perhaps because he is a poet as well as a narrator, his prose style is able to capture a world of philosophical meanings and a whirlwind of emotions and possibilities in a single object, a fleeting gesture, the description of how light enters the room. It is that mastery that makes his literature so engrossing and beautiful, and at the same time, injects his stories with refreshing freedom.

In his text today, written during the first days of a strict lockdown, Consiglio thinks about the resignification of the details around us, of the possibility to reformulate the space that now contains us, inviting us to pause and realise that what may seem irrelevant acts of survival may actually also be heroic deeds.   

Confinement

by Jorge Consiglio

The first thing confinement brings about is a paradigm shift. It is no longer possible to circulate freely, and this situation alters our relationship with our surroundings. From this newly cloistered perspective, public space has changed, yet private space has been reshaped too.

Four weeks have passed. I am confined. I head outside every two or three days. I buy provisions, smell the air in the way that deer do, and return home. In Argentina, the lockdown is strict. We are aware that if the virus is not contained, our health system would simply collapse. We are careful; we comply with what is required. It’s about preserving integrity, but also about showing solidarity. We are isolated and we are trying to keep our spirits up. It is a form of resistance; at least that is how a part of the population understands it.

The first few days I had the illusion that I was going to be productive. I’d make the most of this time to read and write. The period of isolation would be fruitful, I thought. I soon confirmed that this idea was a pipe dream. The seclusion—like the cold or the damp—had permeated my body without me realising. It snuck into my brain cells (it was a negative charge on my dendrites) and began to tenderise them—an immediate effect that translated into anxiety and worry. Outside, the virus was wiping out humanity, while I was at home, fighting my demons. I thought about how I was going to survive the pandemic, and about my financial situation, which was looking ricketier every minute. My concern for those close to me was also getting deeper: my loved ones, given the situation, remained far away. 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…

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

April 18, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

A week ago, I couldn’t have imagined this feeling, passing the Spring Festival in Wuhan locked-down like this.

For this week’s edition of In This Together, we present a non-fiction text from the prolific Wuhan-based writer, Fei Wo Si Cun 匪我思存 (psudonym of Ai Jingjing 艾晶晶), who has been publishing a series of texts, collected under the title The Wuhan Battle Diaries, since the first day of the city’s lockdown. Xiao Yue Shan, the translator of this text, explains the significance of these diaries:

The news in China came at the end of the lunar year; a particularly ill-fated time, as the holiday season piques the highest rate of travel both within and outside of the country. We did not know then what we know now—how quickly the virus would spread, how drastic its impact would be on our daily lives, and how, in a brief few weeks, the whole world would come to experience the same fear, trepidation, uncertainty, and weariness that the people of Wuhan awoke to in the thick of its winter.

Fei Wo Si Cun is an incredibly popular writer; her works, largely tales of love and desire, have made her a household name and launched her into screenwriting as well as media production. When the lockdown was first announced, her’s was one of the first voices sounding in response, and it has since persisted in its accounts. Her intimate, informal language charted the city’s tragedies—sometimes pragmatically, sometimes despairingly, yet always indelible with the sense of survival, and interwoven with a sense of intimate locality.

There are cities that become synonymous with their devastation—Wuhan, which had previously occupied a low tier in the global consciousness, will likely be bound to the COVID-19 pandemic for the enduring future. Yet, in Fei’s tender depictions of the city, we become privy to its actualities; there is a redemptive grace that even the most devastated places may persist as a home, as somewhere precious. Many of us around the world are finding ourselves suddenly estranged from our localities, which have been cleared of their familiarities and comforts, but it is my wish, in translating this, that a Wuhan woman’s love for her city may remind us of what we cherished of these places, of what we wish now to save.

Awaiting Spring Under Quarantine

by Fei Wo Si Cun 匪我思存

These days, I’ve been staying up late. Yesterday, at around two in the morning, when suddenly news came online that Wuhan would halt all forms of public transportation—subways, airports, train stations, and any other method of leaving the city—my chest thudded. First arrived the knowledge that these measures indicated the severity of this epidemic, then came the disbelief, that I would actually witness a lockdown like this in my lifetime. READ MORE…

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

April 4, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moore

Defeating lockdown with what makes us human. The shared word—Ariadne's thread that allowed Theseus to find his way.

As COVID-19 continues to leave devastation in its wake, one is reminded of the importance of bearing witness. As Paul Celan said: “It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything.” In our new Saturday column, In This Together, we at Asymptote are gathering a series of texts from writers around the world—poetry, journals, essays, and all the other tools language gives us to see beyond the surface of things. Today, in our inaugural post, we present diary entries from French theatre director Wajdi Mouawad, translated by assistant blog editor Sarah Moore. Below, Moore gives us an introduction and context to Mouawad’s life and work:

Wajdi Mouawad has been the director of La Colline theatre in Paris since 2016. One of five national theatres in France, La Colline is renowned for its mission to stage contemporary works. Since taking up this role, Mouawad has programmed work by writers such as Édouard Louis, Vincent Macaigne, Elfriede Jelinek, and Angélica Liddell. Last month, I went to see Anne-Marie la Beauté (Anne-Marie the Beauty), a nostalgic, bittersweet monologue written by Yasmina Reza, one of France’s most successful contemporary playwrights. The following week, Friday March 13, I had tickets to see the new play by Peter Handke, Les Innocents, Moi, et l’Inconnue au bord de la route départementale (The Innocents, I, and the Stranger on the side of the departmental road). Handke, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a contentious figure, and I was curious to see what I’d make of this new text. However, hours before the performance was due to start, the French government limited gatherings to fewer than one hundred people in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus. And since March 17, the country has been on a strict lockdown. Now, beside each listing for Reza and Handke’s plays reads “—annulé.” Mouawad, like everyone else, is on lockdown, with life on pause. How does a playwright and director respond when his theatre must close its doors to the public? Since the first day of this lockdown, Mouawad has been keeping an audio diary, published on the website of La Colline. Through his diary, Mouawad reflects on this unprecedented situation, on how he can continue to write and engage with communities, and as he says, “how to turn the time of lockdown into a time that’s alive.”

Excerpts from “Lockdown Diary — Day One”

by Wajdi Mouawad

Washing them twice an hour and for thirty seconds each time. I’ve never had such clean hands as during these days of solitude. And yet, despite the cleanliness of my hands, I must be responsible for something. Lady Macbeth, unwittingly. But then, what is this stain which won’t go and which I can’t stop scrubbing? What crime have I committed? What king have I slain? Unless, reflecting my own era, I’m nothing more than one of the thousands of Pontius Pilates (another character obsessed by the cleanliness of their ten fingers,) who is wondering what all this has to do with them. In this case, what is it about washing my hands that today carries the risk of being put to death? Which Christ am I sending to his crucifixion? What is sublime and who dies? What departs? What spirit of the forest is deserting the world? What must I, from now on, mourn? Carefreeness. It’s been two weeks since I can say I’ve been feeling carefree: climate, fire, violence against women, liberalism. If the world I’m giving up through lockdown was that one, why wish this lockdown to end as quickly as possible? To return to what kind of world? Between a world that crushes me, and one that turns me today into a statue, how to prevent a state of shock, without a reply to this question: what to do with this lockdown? I open my eyes this morning after wandering all night long in the bois de Vincennes. What is happening to us? On this first day of lockdown, taking stock of the situation is impossible. It’s like writing yourself in reverse. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know where the measure of everything is. I don’t know if my lucidity is panic. In the evening, I go to bed and tell myself that without even knowing, I perhaps won’t see summer. So many of us won’t see it. Overwhelming and collective sorrow. I can’t reassure myself with the idea, increasingly fragile, that this only affects the elderly. And even if that were true, how can the death of others be reassuring? And anyway, how could we live in a world without the elderly if all the elderly were to disappear? For an hour, I’m overcome by unease and everything comes back to me. A civil war won’t stop the epidemic and misfortune doesn’t wait its turn. The gods don’t exist. No logic, other than nature and her disruption. Confused thoughts. Feelings in disarray. Multiple sensations. Like so many pieces of a puzzle, of no precise image except a fog, none of which fit perfectly together. Fear, sadness, anxiety, and memories. READ MORE…

“Unintentional Unity”: Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini on translating Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary

September 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Translating Rosselli’s prose is not different from translating her poetry. Her language is equally challenging, her syntax equally subversive.

Amelia Rosselli’s work is deeply marked by her family and personal history. Born in 1930 to a British activist and a martyred Italian-Jewish antifascist, she lived as an eternal outsider in France, the US, the UK, and Italy. A polyglot with persistent depression, her poetry challenges. It challenges the confines of genre and conventional syntax, it challenges the society with which she was ever at odds, and it challenges the reader to accompany her through her brave literary wanderings. Rosselli ended her own life by jumping out the window of her fifth-floor apartment in Rome in 1996.

Obtuse Diary, published by Entre Rios Books in late 2018, is the first and only collection of Rosselli’s prose. The writing spans a number of years and is organized into three sections and two illuminating afterwords, one by the author and one by one of the translators. Asymptote’s Lindsay Semel spoke with Deborah Woodard and Roberta Antognini, two of the collection’s three translators, about the joys and challenges of rendering Rosselli’s stunning and difficult Italian into English.

Lindsay Semel (LS): Tell me about the origin of this project. How did you come to translate this text together? What was the collaboration process like?

Deborah Woodard (DW): Translating Amelia Rosselli’s Diario Ottuso into Obtuse Diary was quite the saga. It’s a little book, but it took forever to translate. Giuseppe Leporace, my first co-translator, and I brought out some sections of the Diary in The Dragonfly, a selection of Rosselli’s poetry, back in 2009. After we finished The Dragonfly and brought it out through Chelsea Editions, I decided to rework Obtuse Diary and publish it in its entirety.  When Giuseppe became too busy to review it with me, he graciously stepped down from the project. On Giuseppe’s suggestion, I worked on the Diary with Vanja Skoric Paquin, a talented young linguist with a particular gift for unraveling snarled syntax. When Vanja gave birth to her daughter she, in turn, stepped down. A year or so passed, and then I recommenced with Dario De Pasquale. Dario and I tore the earlier translation apart, sentence by sentence. When Dario became too busy to continue to translate with me (do we see a pattern here?), I was extremely fortunate to join forces with Roberta, my current—and from here on out, sole—co-translator on the final version. READ MORE…