Posts filed under 'Drama'

The Dastardly Things a Translator Might Do: An Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega

November 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Willem Marx

My advice is to simply get started. Pick up anything from the region and go.

The enormously prolific Uzbek writer, Hamid Ismailov, is one of the vanishingly small number of Central Asian authors to crack the code of being translated into English. He experiments in virtually every literary form and genre—from the novel to the play, from translation to poetry; has lived in exile from Uzbekistan since 1992; and continues to build on the wealth of Central Asian culture and memory.

The breadth of history that informs his work can be felt in “Trinity”—a dramatic scene excerpted from a sprawling, six-book novel (Russian Matryoshka) that follows a peasant as he harvests a field of wheat only to have the yield stolen, again and again, when the wider world forces its way into his life. Published in Asymptote’s Summer 2024 issue, “Trinity” is a fragment of a fragmented text, a scene from an unfinished play embedded within an unpublished novel. In many ways, it is emblematic of the whole, knotted process that is translation. The short, dramatic scene is ripe with pungent symbols of the past, yet also exhibits a linguistic dexterity such that each word seems to impose its own gravity on the text. Longtime Ismailov collaborator Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s sensitive translation of “Trinity” achieves an exquisite balance between intimacy and distance, accessibility and mystery. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her about staging this piece, the influence translators exert on a text (and each other), and much more.

Willem Marx (WM): Your translations of Hamid Ismailov’s writing have introduced him to many English readers, myself included, so I’d like to start off by asking: how did you discover his work? And what set you on the path to become one of his principal English translators? 

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): Willem, that might be the most gratifying thing a translator can hear, that our work introduced a reader to a great author they might not have discovered otherwise. I’m so happy to hear it.

The story of my collaboration with Hamid Ismailov began more than a decade ago, when he happened across a pro bono translation I did of an essay by an Uzbek political prisoner. He contacted me through the organization who published that translation, looking to add to his very small list of people who could translate from Uzbek to English. Within a short time, he had convinced me to try translating his short story, “Tosh mehmoni,” which Words Without Borders published as “The Stone Guest” in September 2014. That story is so sad and powerful, and working with the author was such a good experience, that I was instantly, permanently hooked. So, you could say I also discovered Ismailov through my translations. You and I have that in common.

After translating several more of Ismailov’s short stories and essays, and now four of his novels, I’m nowhere near tired of his work and will always jump at the chance to translate it—but I do have competition, especially in the UK where he was first published in English, and where American translators sometimes aren’t eligible for the funding Ismailov applies for. A forthcoming short story collection combines work translated by me and several others. Ismailov did a very good job building that collection of translators.

WM: It’s telling to hear how tenacious an author must be in order to have their work translated into English. To shift slightly, I wonder if you ever find that your work is influenced by the way other translators have approached his writing. Do you notice different emphases or ways of tackling an aspect of voice among your fellow Ismailov translators?   READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

July 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Hilary Ilkay, Julia Maria, Marguerite Alley, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sofija Popovska

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 6, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Marina García Pardavila, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya!

In this round of weekly updates from our Editors-at-Large, we hear about literary festivals, awards, and the latest translations from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya! From a festival themed “Air. Wind. Breathing.” to a recently completed translation of the Bible, read on to learn more!

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

The first weeks of autumn in North Macedonia brought exciting developments to the literary scene: the third installment of the Skopje Poetry Festival took place from September 24–28. The event spanned several venues, including the historic movie theater “Frosina”, the Skopje city library, and the bookshop-cafe “Bukva”. The festival opened with a performance entitled “Air. Wind. Breathing.”—a theme that was maintained throughout, as some of the readings were accompanied by musical improvisations with wind instruments. 

Represented at the Skopje Poetry Festival was a diverse range of cultures; Danish, Serbian, French-Syrian, Maltese, and Croatian poets gave readings alongside local authors. Aside from readings, there were screenings of several movies based on the poetry of Aco Šopov. One of the adapted poems was Horrordeath, which was featured in the Winter 2023 issue of Asymptote Journal in Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer’s translation. The screenings were followed by a musical concert, a creative writing workshop headed by Immanuel Mifsud (a Maltese author and recipient of the European Union Prize for Literature), a panel discussion on increasing the visibility of Macedonian literature abroad, and a yoga session in nature. Young Macedonian poets also had a chance to make their voices heard, during the “Springboard” event on September 24 dedicated to poets between the ages of 16 and 25.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

READ MORE…

When Woe Means No: Translating Women’s Survival as Resistance 

July 13, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Hilary Ilkay

Carson grants her Trojan women agency, even if it seems that hostile men and unfeeling gods control their lives.

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. Here, Hilary Ilkay considers the contemporary rendition of an ancient tragedy by Euripedes, as told by poet Anne Carson and artist Rosanno Bruno in the acclaimed The Trojan Women: A Comic.

Thanks to cinematic blockbusters like Troy and Emily Wilson’s bestselling translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War has established itself within the cultural mainstream. However, its continual revival is not just a contemporary phenomenon; as early as 5th century BCE, the mythical war had already taken on legendary status, and was ripe for adaptation and retelling.

Arguably the most tragic of the ancient Greek tragedians, Euripides’s plays are infamous for their bleak explorations of human hubris and divine cruelty. In his lifetime, as Athens was embroiled in the Peloponnesian War, a violent 27-year conflict with rival city-state Sparta, Euripides drew on the Trojan War specifically to reflect on the uncertainty of his time, making a connection between Athenian imperialism and the Greeks’ pretense of invading Troy for the sake of a single woman. Taking its cue from the ending of the Iliad, which features funeral laments from three women characters, Euripides’s play The Trojan Women casts a spotlight on the fates of the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the male heroes—who typically occupied center stage in narratives of war. As a focused treatment of women’s suffering rarely seen in ancient Greek tragedy, the play is a brutal exploration of the commodification of women’s lives and bodies, as well as the ambivalence of “surviving” a tragedy when those remaining have lost all sense of meaning, stability, and security.

Given Euripides’ interest in the experience of women and the retelling of myths, it’s no surprise that his legacy continues through the work of poet and translator Anne Carson, who has received much acclaim for her rewritings of Greek classics. Carson constantly stretches the boundaries of translation in her work, dramatizing how every translation is necessarily its own “version” of the source material and not necessarily a “faithful” replica. In 2006, she published her loose translations of Euripides’s lesser known tragedies under the title Grief Lessons; in 2019, she adapted his infamously bizarre play, Helen, into Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, which interweaves the stories of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Julia Sherwood, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Slovakia, Czechia, Kenya, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors are providing coverage of headlining events featuring intercultural dialogues, book launches of groundbreaking texts, and political corruption. In Slovakia and Czechia, the two countries discuss the ramifications of Czechoslovakia’s breakup on the two nations’ respective literatures. In Kenya, a collection featuring the stories of women hawkers—a burgeoning national economy—is released to the public. And in Bulgaria, a beloved theatre director takes aim at the National Theatre’s “moral degradation.” Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

The thirtieth anniversary of the breakup of Czechoslovakia prompted reflections in both the Slovak and the Czech press on the legacy of the common state, and how the cultural links between the two nations have evolved since the countries went their separate ways. Summing up the literary developments in a recent episode of Knižná revue, an excellent podcast produced by the Slovak Literature Centre, the Czech literature scholar and translator of Slovak literature Lubomír Machala suggested that there are now more differences than parallels between the two literatures—although what has not changed is that the Czech reading public shows less interest in Slovak literature than vice versa. The Slovak literature scholar Magdalena Bystrzak also sees this relationship as asymmetrical, as does her colleague Radoslav Passia, who points out that the ties between the two literatures are, nevertheless, much stronger than those between either nation and any other literature, as reflected in numerous bilateral literary projects, such as a Czech/Slovak poetry competition, or the Month of Authors’ Readings.

The end of January marked the 105th birthday of Leopold Lahola (1918-1968): playwright, film director, screenwriter, poet, and essayist, whose short stories reflect his harrowing wartime experiences. Lahola’s promising postwar literary career was cut short when his plays were denounced as “existentialist” in 1948, upon which he emigrated to Israel, where he helped to launch the country’s burgeoning  film industry, before moving to Austria and Germany. Although he spent nearly half of his life in exile, Lahola never stopped writing in Slovak. In the late 1960s, Lahola began to visit his native country again but, sadly, died of a heart attack in January 1968, shortly before his fiftieth birthday. It is a pity that so far, only one of his short stories is available in English.

The 2022 recipients of one of Slovakia’s major awards, the Tatra Banka Foundation’s Arts Prize, were announced at the end of January. The prize for a debut work of literature went to Nicol Hochholczerová for Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room is Too Much to Swallow, as reported here) and the poet Mila Haugová added to her many previous accolades the main prize for literature, for her collection Z rastlinstva (From Flora). And although not strictly speaking a literary prize, it is  worth mentioning  the bank’s Special Prize, awarded to Gabriela Garlatyová for her monograph on the extraordinary visual Slovak artist Mária Bartuszová. Garlatyová was a consultant on a major exhibition of Bartuszová’s work at London’s Tate Modern, which has just been extended to June 25, and which I urge everyone to visit. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2022

April 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

Introducing our favorites from the latest issue!

Featuring work from thirty-four countries, the Spring 2022 issue is once again charting new territory across the landscape of world literature. From Hermann Hesse to Kim Hyesoon, as well as coverage of Ukrainian poetry and exceptional Swedish works in our Special Feature, these wonderful inductions into the English language are full of discoveries. Not sure where to begin? Read on for our blog editors’ curated selections!

Through the brutal scorchings and flighty erasures of passed time, Greek tragedies have endured—as though stone, and not words, were their material. Near as our own stories, ancient as storytelling itself, and inextricable from the passions they depict, the characters that had suffused the fifth-century Athenian air with their spectacle defy temporality, continuing to walk and rage within the immediate theatre of our world. In the betrayal of fathers and the names of flowers, in funerals and weddings, in any force that could be mistaken for fate. By the logic of the tragic’s pervasive mutability, their untimely timeliness, one is made to think of the ways cycles are kept and broken, if whether the knowledge of something coming has ever been enough to stop it.

On the mitigative potential of the tragedies, Brian Doerries (the founder of Theatre of War, a production company which stages performances for communities confronting urgent social issues) had posed a question: “What if tragedy is a form of storytelling that was designed . . . to wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late? What if tragedy is as refined of an advancement as architecture or the sculpture, law, government of 5th century BCE . . . a form of storytelling that arose out of a necessity of nearly eighty years of war, to communalise trauma, give citizens permission to access and express their emotions, and help heal the city?” To conceive the life of these plays as not to instruct but to change, what emerges is how the devastation of tragedy offers us, by way of its lapidary endings, the opportunity for transcendence. In José Watanabe’s Antígona, translated with an impeccable ear by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Sophocles’ Antigone is given fluid, elemental form, a series of poetic rooms built for one actress to walk through, inhabiting their rhythm as she inhabits time. Written beneath the dense terror of civil conflict in Peru, Watanabe’s distilling of chorus into a single rivulet of speaking is to run a thin-wire sieve through the voracious appetite of mass violence and statistic, provoking the wide overarch of trauma into open intimacy, into something that is suffered individually, in bodies united by the likeness of experience but ruthlessly alone in bearing it. The voice is torn with the tension between thinking and knowing, between feeling and narration, spreading itself amidst the leaves of time:

The sacred eye of daylight does not penetrate that far
nor the cries of friends and relatives. In that silence,
death, laborious, enfolds the girl
in a dense cocoon of shadows.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, Peera Songkünnatham, and Thuy Dinh

News this week from Vietnam, Japan, and Southeast Asia!

This week, our editors from around the world present reimaginings of Sophocles in Hanoi, memorials and debuts from Japan, and witness writing from Southeast Asia. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Since November 2021, The Goethe Institute in Hanoi has been in collaboration with the Youth Theatre of Vietnam (Nhà Hát Tuổi Trẻ) to produce six interpretations of Sophocles’s Antigone, exploring a variety of salient themes—fate versus freewill, the family versus the state, moral integrity and political order, feminism versus patriarchy, reason and emotion, loyalty and disobedience. While most of the productions were performed live in Hanoi after the gradual easing of COVID-19 restrictions, “Portrait” (“Bức Chân Dung”)—Antigone’s fifth iteration—is shown online from February 19 through February 26, 2022.

Directed by Lê An of Ho Chi Minh City’s Saigon Theatreland, “Portrait” shifts the first act of Antigone into 1970s wartime South Vietnam, where An (Huỳnh Ly)—whose name means peace and contentment—must forge her identity out of her family’s traumatic past. Creon, Antigone’s uncle in Sophocles’s play, is transposed into her emotionally repressed father, Đắc (Công Danh), a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Đắc forbids An to bring home Kỳ’s dead body—his son and An’s brother—an enemy soldier who fought and died for the Communist cause. Despite the obvious ideological landmines evoked by this premise, director Lê An, in a pre-performance podcast, sidestepped politics by discussing her heroine’s psychological quest “to find herself”— possibly to detract from the production’s more provocative implications.

While ideological heresy still cannot be addressed explicitly in modern adaptations of Antigone within Vietnam (despite the heroine’s Greek name which can mean “one who resists/is of the opposite bend”), this theme plays a central role in Vũ Thư Hiên’s oeuvre—including his newest story collection, Confessions at Midnight (Lời Xưng Tội Lúc Nửa Đêm) (California: Văn Học Press, 2022). A well-known dissident writer and translator, Vũ Thư Hiên has become Vietnam’s persona non grata since the 1997 publication of Night at Midday (“Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày)—a memoir, inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which recounts the nine years (1967-1976) he spent in various North Vietnamese prisons after being charged with “anti-Party, anti-State, spying and revisionist conduct.” READ MORE…

Rosa Chávez: “Poetry is my spine.”

February 9, 2022  |  in Essays, Profile  |  by José García Escobar

"Poetry has always moved me, but I’ve also been moved by history, by my people’s history."

Rosa Chávez is La Poeta here, but she defies definition. The Mayan artist and writer has walked a variegation of paths and left her indelible mark on scores of people and places, ensuring that her legacy will be a monument to curiosity, surprise, and multiplicity. In the following profile, Editor-at-Large José García Escobar speaks to the Guatemalan La Poeta and her ever-widening world of poetics, which trespass the page—and language—to take on other numinous forms.

La Poeta walks towards a small table. She lays a sonaja, a tiny drum, some colorful ronrones, and a few whistles made of clay upon it, as the electric sounds of a turntable fill the room. Soon, from the speakers, the voice of Berta Cáceres comes: “We are fighting to protect the rights of indigenous people,” and her speech echoes across the small room of a school in rural El Salvador. “We have struggled for more than five hundred years,” Berta goes on. “We have always lived as a community,” steps in the voice of the indigenous leader Lolita Chávez, “and our community includes mankind, but also plants, birds, fish too, and all the animals.” Wearing a shirt and a pair of small glasses, the DJ turns the knobs to move the musical landscape, which carries the activists’ voices.

“I remember that children had decorated the classroom using bits of paper, mimicking the lush fields outside, the green mountains,” says Rosa Chávez, La Poeta.

La Poeta takes then the microphone.

“Pick it up. Take what’s yours,” she says, she recites, she conjures. “Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let them take it from you. Pick it up. Leave it under the sun. Let it dry. Pick the weevils off it,” La Poeta says, and a tiny whistle and a pair of soft cymbals hiss across the room. “One by one, remove the kernels. Look how it shines: red, yellow, white, black. Undo its body. Grind its body. Cook its body. Don’t toss it aside, though. Don’t give it a bad look. Never forget to grow more.”

That’s how one of Selva y Cerror’s first shows occurred—August of 2017, during the Festival Mundial de Poesía Cien Voces, in El Salvador; the song I’m describing is called La Abuela y el Maíz. Selva y Cerro is a Guatemalan musical duo consisting of DJ and producer Teko (Andrés Azmitia)—best known as Sonido Quilete—and Rosa Chávez. It is also the latest project of Chávez, out of her wide-ranging roles as poet, mother, performer, actress, teacher, artisan, cultural manager, screenwriter, filmmaker, bisexual, Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel.

Rosa contains multitudes. She insists, however, that she’s a poet—an interesting fact considering that she never sought publication. She says that even today when she writes, she’s not thinking of “putting together a book,” despite having published five. Urges move her, motivate her. The multitudes inside Rosa talk to each other. Poetry took her to performance. Performance to the theatre. Theatre to community work and human rights. Poetry is the thread that weaved, and still today weaves, the urges of Rosa’s career. For Rosa Chávez, poetry has no end.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2021

May 10, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, Lindsay Semel, and Sarah Moore

New work from Iceland, Chile, France, and Argentina!

We take our jobs of bringing you the best new releases from the realm of world literature very seriously, and this week, we have four astounding texts from authors notorious for their intelligence, their variousness, and their ability to captivate. From Iceland, Sjón explores the banality of evil in a charged, probing character study. In Argentina, the legendary Norah Lange comes to new light as she evolves beyond her reputation as a literary muse, and tells her story in her own, singular language. The latest from French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is a poignant meditation, guided by oratory, on selfhood, aging, and human frailties. And lastly, Chile’s award-winning Lina Meruane comes out with an exploration of illness and intergenerational trauma that is at once dreamy and deeply grounded in physicality. Read on to find out more!

red milk

Red Milk by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Sceptre, 2021

 Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Sjón, one of Iceland’s most internationally recognizable literary figures, is a lifelong cultural miscegenationist. Since his earliest days as a neo-surrealist poet and musician, he has drawn proudly and liberally from global artistic lineages. In Red Milk, his latest collaboration with long-time translator Victoria Cribb, he employs an intentional, methodical restraint to examine the survival of Nazism post-World War II through the life and early death of Gunnar Kampen, a fictionalized version of a real, small-time Icelandic neo-Nazi. Sjón’s policy of omission—of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind—results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting.

More than anything, we want Gunnar to either damn or to redeem himself, but he refuses to be anything more than a tempest in a teacup—a chess piece carved in ivory rather than ebony. He passes his brief life engaged in the mundane building of a movement that never comes to fruition. He stumbles into nationalist socialism the same way any young person stumbles into their solidified adult identity. This is not a psychoanalytic assessment of what draws him to Nazism so as much as a collection of images, inputs, choices, and feedback that nudge him there. One such curious image comes from a party he attended with his parents as a child. Bored with the adults, he wanders through the house until he encounters “a human figure, sitting in the shadow thrown by the curved back of the armchair,” in the library. He marvels at her brown skin and colorful clothing.

Without releasing her grip on his left hand, she raises his right hand and pulls it under the lampshade, holding it up to the strong bulb until the light shines red through the child’s flesh, revealing the silhouettes of the bones inside.

            ‘Only possible with such a hand.’

The woman nods at him. The filigree brooch on her shoulder gleams, exposing the pattern from which it is made: a myriad tiny swastikas that differ from the hated one only in that they stand upright rather than tilted on their side.

            ‘Only white people let the light into themselves.’

The imagery is not attributed any meaning besides its own aesthetic potency. The woman’s exoticism is a neutral source of intrigue for Gunnar, unrelated to his blossoming racial beliefs. The woman—as an ideologically educated Gunnar discovers later—might well have been Savitri Devi, the all too real mother figure of contemporary neo-Nazism, but Gunnar’s brush with history is told with the same tone as if she had simply been Reykjavik’s witchy spinster. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 21, 2019  |  in News  |  by Andrea Blatz, Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Another issue, another record broken: Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue features work from an unprecedented thirty-six countries. Looking for a point of entry? Consider our blog editors your guides. Their selections here, which range from Korean poetry to Russian drama, will set you off on the right foot. 

“Why do I think October is beautiful? / It is not, is not beautiful.” So goes a poem by the late Bill Berkson. It is not—as we know when the grey settles and looks to stay—a particularly delightful month, but if all the poems featuring October attests to something, it is that this time, its late and sedate arrival, is one that enamors poets. So it is that a vein of poetics runs through our Fall 2019 issue, and the poetry section itself is one of tremendous artistry and vitality. From the stoic and enduring lines of Osip Mandelstam to a brilliant translation of Sun Tzu-Ping’s strikingly visual language, Asymptote has once again gathered the great poets from far reaches. 

READ MORE…

Winter 2016: Gifts

September 20, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Lindsay Semel

Set against the highest quality control standards, Asymptote weighs equally the stumbling, daring hunches of experimentation.

Daniel Hahn’s Ask a Translator column, in which he fields questions about his craft posed by Asymptote readers, kicks off at the blog. What should have been a happy occasion (our fifth anniversary, celebrated in New York, London, Hong Kong, Ottawa, Chicago, and Belgrade) is marred somewhat by a quarrel with one of our partner institutions. I should first note that the success of the past year (2015) has been a true double-edged sword: although it has bestowed greater visibility (which has in turn brought us partnerships with hitherto-undreamt-of international reach—all the better, I suppose, to catalyse the transmission of literature), our own team members are more coveted by other organizations as a result. Since these are paying organizations (either non-profits with institutional backing or for-profit companies with commercial viability), Asymptote can’t compete. With success also comes assumption that our coffers are being filled to the brim by sponsors and we should be spreading the wealth around. Yet, we are essentially still going it alone; I’m still working full-time without pay and channelling funds raised into web development costs, translation contests, and marketing the work that we’ve been entrusted with. Someone from a partner organization turns down an invitation to moderate our New York event for fear of being interpreted as endorsing our policy of not paying contributors; he demands that we start doing so. Should implies can, but the reality isn’t so. Still, it’s wonderful that translators have such a fierce advocate in this person; I wish editors at publications like ours also had organizations and movements behind them too. Here to introduce the Winter 2016 issue is Assistant Editor Lindsay Semel.

I was recruited as one of Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistants in January of 2016, just around the time this issue launched. What I want to share now is a story about my first weeks with the journal and my reckoning with the Winter 2016 issue that is ultimately a defense of inefficiency and the impostor syndrome.

Even two-and-a-half years later, I still know this issue more intimately than any other, because when I came aboard as a recent undergrad (it’s not atypical for Asymptote team members to be a bit green) I felt I’d been given two unique gifts. The first, bafflingly, was the complete confidence of our editor-in-chief, Lee Yew Leong. As far as the Educational Arm was concerned, I was free to take on whatever naïve dreams I could imagine—as long as the final product met the standards of the journal. My first spicy taste of impostor syndrome—now a familiar one when negotiating Asymptote assignments—came from the simple fact that I wasn’t a teacher. I could identify with Yann Martel when he said in his interview: READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2018

July 25, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Henry Ace Knight, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2018 issue!

The brand new Summer 2018 edition of Asymptote is almost one week old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from 31 countries gathered therein. Today, our section editors share highlights from their respective sections: 

“2501 Migrants by Alejandro Santiago” is a powerful meditation on the US-Mexico border, compellingly written by Cristina Rivera Garza, and beautifully translated by Sarah Booker. Rivera Garza writes gracefully about sculptures made by Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago and his team. Each of these clay vessels contains the spirit of a migrant who, having tried their luck at crossing the border, now stands in mute testimony to the absences and deaths that striate both America and Mexico. In this essay, Rivera Garza explores the multi-faceted meanings of these sculptures and uses them to explore the intricacies of the border-condition—the nostalgia of those who leave Mexico, and the melancholy of those who remain. At this juncture in American history, I can think of no more valuable essay to read today than this one.

—Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Editor

The King of Insomnia, who first appeared as graffiti on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, has now become a central character in the fictional world of the Insomnia people, a creation of artist Tomaz Viana—known as Toz. Life-size three-dimensional Insomnia figures, with a history and traditions drawn from Brazilian and African sources, inhabited the Chácara do Cée Museum and its grounds in 2017. Lara Norgaard, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large in Brazil, introduces the imaginary culture of Insomnia and interviews the artist who discusses his influences, including the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé, and explains the evolution of these “fictional people with connections to the night, to the big city, but also to the jungle and the forest.”

—Eva Heisler, Visual Editor

READ MORE…