Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2023

July 24, 2023 | in News | by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

Taking a closer look at pieces on landscape’s multiplicity, unrequited love, and memory amidst grief.

Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!

Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.

There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.

In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:

Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.

Translating Whale-Song into Human Speech

May 18, 2023 | in Essays | by Charlie Ng

The light created by human beings symbolises reason and civilization . . . yet at the same time, we are living under a shadow of our own making.

A role of literature has always been to draw a voice out of the unspoken; in our Spring 2023 issue, we acted on this mandate to collect a variety of texts that place the non-human at their centre. This consideration of our planetary cohabitants is not only a powerful expression of imagination, but also an exercise of ethical care, exemplified by these chosen writers as a way to not only instill wonder, but also to facilitate deeper consideration of our role in protecting and honouring these lifeforms. To further elucidate the educational power of this ecologically-oriented literature, we present a three-part series in which Charlie Ng, co-editor of the feature, discuss in depth the context and the activism innate in these texts.

“Song of the Whale-road”, one of the pieces in the animal-themed feature of Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, consists of excerpts taken from Yolanda González’s recent novel Oceánica. Mesmerising in its lyrical tone, the text reveals the primordial unity of the human and nature, which has eventually dissociated as mankind developed their own civilization, and life and death—originally stages of a natural cycle—came to be laden with anthropogenic threats and massacres. The novel opens with an epigraph that consists of three quotations: from the Genesis book of the Bible, Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia, and Raúl Zurita’s poem “Las cataratas del Pacifico”, revealing the novel’s environmentalism immediately to the reader.

As was written in Genesis, God’s command of procreation and the passing over of Earth’s dominion to Man reminds us of our stewardship of nature—but the irony is that the multiplication of mankind has brought catastrophe to the other lifeforms sharing the planet with us. The whale, often regarded as an environmental symbol, embodies the image of endangered animals and the importance of protecting keystone species for the purposes of biodiversity and combating climate change. They also appeal to our imagination for both their massive size and their biological significance as mammals living in the depths of the ocean, making them all at once mysterious, fearful, and attractive. In Western culture, whales are sometimes known as “leviathans”, sea monsters mentioned in the Bible that represent the uncontrollable power of nature. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is arguably the most well-known work of oceanic literature that makes use of such a profound, epic, human-whale relationship, while in contemporary literature, cetacean narratives such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider and Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller play a crucial role in offering localised perspectives that contrast mainstream Western environmentalism.

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.