Posts filed under 'environmentalism'

Having Become the Sky’s Tongue: Leeladhar Jagoori on Nature Poetry in Hindi Literature

August 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I consider a poet’s job to consist of three things: writing about the society, the time, and the country.

Limned as an enmeshing of “lyrical ecopoetics with subtle political critique,” Leeladhar Jagoori’s 1977 Hindi poetry collection Bachi hui prithvi (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan) has been translated into English by Matt Reeck as What of the Earth Was Saved—now out from World Poetry Books. His avant-garde poetic and political positioning is evidenced by this book, which was published in the last year of Indira Gandhi’s the Emergency. In the words of translator Matt Reeck, Bachi hui prithvi (1977), the Hindi original of What of the Earth Was Saved, is a testament to the fact that Leeladhar was ahead of his time, writing around “regional consciousness and environmentalism,” a literary forefather to today’s Hindi-language and Indian writings on nature and ecology.

In this interview, I spoke with Leeladhar, who is currently in Dehradun (with translator Matt Reeck translating my questions from English to Hindi, and Leeladhar’s answers from Hindi to English), on his trailblazing poetry collection—the first full volume of his poems to be translated into English—and modern Hindi verse, especially poetry on prakŗti (nature).

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your poetry collection What of the Earth Was Saved is now out from World Poetry Books—translated by Matt Reeck from the Hindi original Bachi hui prithvi, which was published in 1977 by New Delhi-based Rajkamal Prakashan. Could you take us back to 1977 and before that: what was your creative process like and what were the poetic underpinnings to the poems in this collection?

Leeladhar Jagoori (LJ): In school, I practiced everything. I wrote songs and ghazals. I wrote anuṣṭubh verse, a traditional poetic form in Hindi poetry, like it was conversational—like talking.

My first volume was published when I was a student at Banaras Hindu University. I had come back from the army and I went to Banaras to earn an MA. I was invited to read at a poetry event, and a publisher heard me and asked to publish my work, and I said fine. Those poems are about mountain life. I finally came around to seeing that it was a young person’s poetry. It was immature in a sense. It’s usually read as nature poetry. Then my second volume, Now Things Have Begun (Natak jari hai, 1971) was published from the standpoint of a young unemployed man looking for work. It’s spare, unsparing, tough-minded poetry. Its images are new, rough, not polished. In the 70s, poetic language sought to dig down to the very core of experience. Instead of ornamentation, it went in for bare language. Now Things Have Begun is full of these things, the things that young people then were thinking about.

Then my third volume was On This Journey (Is yatra men, 1974). Its poems are more tender, dreamy and full of love. Agyeya, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, and Dhumil all praised it. Manglesh Dabral, Trinetr Joshi, Prabhati Nautiyal, Madan Kashyap, and Avadhesh Preet, Prem Sahil, and Om Thanvi said the book ushered in a new direction in Hindi poetry. In the May 1975 issue of the magazine Dinman, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena wrote a review that featured the book on the magazine’s cover. It was my good fortune that Agyeya praised it, and that Nirmal Verma was taken by the poems as well.

READ MORE…

Recurring Conflicts between Tradition and Modernity: An Interview with Czech author Bianca Bellová

July 17, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

When I look back at my childhood, it feels like a thousand years ago.

Bianca Bellová‘s astonishing novel, The Lake, was originally published in 2017 as Jezero; it has since been translated into two dozen languages, and Parthian came out with Alex Zucker’s compelling English translation in 2022. From the get-go, it was met with an enthusiastic reception, receiving first the Magnesia Litera in 2016, then the European Prize for Literature in 2017, and the EBRD Literature Prize in 2023. Toby Lichtig, chair of the judges for the EBRD prize, describes it as: “utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, [it] deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come.” 

The story unfolds in a small town on the shores of an extremely polluted lake in an unidentified (but possibly) Central Asian country, of an unidentified (but probably) post-Soviet time. The local population is beset by pollution-related cancers and eczema, and hemmed in by outposts of Russian engineers and soldiers. The protagonist, a boy named Nami, is raised by his grandparents, and he sets off across the lake and into a near-by city to find his mother. There are occasional fantastical elements to the story, and, humming with a fusion of Bellová’s ingenuity and Zucker’s playful and electric English, The Lake sets off all sorts of environmental alarm bells. It brings us such an unusual setting and characters that I was eager to learn more about Bellová’s work. Intrigued by Sal Robinson’s excellent interview with the author on Words Without Borders, I was grateful when Bellová kindly agreed to respond to a few questions.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): I find that the label “dystopian”—frequently applied to The Lake—feels both apt and inapt. The story plays out on the shores of a polluted, shrinking lake, somewhere on the border between the plausible reality of the world as we know it and a dystopian future. Do you feel that the story you tell is dystopian, or is it more about today’s world?

Bianca Bellová (BB): I am a big fan of readers interpreting my books in any way they wish, and I often do find that they discover contexts and meanings I never intended. And that is perfectly fine—it is the way I believe art should work, as a conversation between the piece and the receiving party that should trigger something in the reader/viewer/listener. Something that is already there, but that the creator was never aware of. So when some say “dystopian,” who am I to argue with it? I never thought about a dystopia when writing it; to me it was a struggle of a boy in a harsh world with the little weapons he had. The lake was a backdrop to it, even if a very important one.

There is a lake called the Aral Sea that is very similar to the lake from my book, and it is in a state so much worse than the fictitious one that it simply beats any utopian fiction writing, hands down. 

READ MORE…

Compound Vision: In Conversation with Catherine Xinxin Yu on Translating Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland”

July 31, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

Blurring this boundary [between speech and thought] almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. . .

Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story, “Cloudland”, makes use of grief’s overwhelming ranges to set out a narrative of exploration, dream-making, and the multiplicity of life. After the death of his wife, the bereaved Shutter begins a journey to write the ending of a tale that she had not be able to finish, and on his way, he finds the wondrous methods that landscape and animals have long used to express and communicate, offering a way of thinking and feeling that his technologically dense, hurried world does not allow. A gorgeous, lush story that introduces Wu’s sensitive ecowriting, “Cloudland” merges the richness of language with the richness of the natural world. In this interview, Alex Tan talks to the translator of “Cloudland”, Catherine Xinxin Yu, about the operation of images in her methodology, the trick of incorporating definitions into the prose, and making use of a textual reality.

Alex Tan (AT): Technologies of perception populate this excerpt from “Cloudland”: the night-vision cameras placed in the forest by Shutter, the Rift in the Cloud constituting a virtual catalogue of a life, the mediatised footage of the train bombing, and most fundamentally, the unfinished story of Shutter’s wife—which of course precipitates his grief and the quest for the elusive clouded leopard. There’s such an ambivalence to some of these forms of knowledge-making, as Wu also seems to be commenting on the ubiquity—and the risks—of digital surveillance. I wonder how you navigated the interplay between the visual and the textual, when you approached this work as a translator. Did it stylistically inflect your translation in any way?

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): I remember interviewing Wu Ming-yi for my MA dissertation, which included a translation and commentary on “Cloudland”, focusing on eco-conscious ways to translate nature-oriented writing. I asked him why he decided to stop using Facebook and other social media from 2019 onwards, upon which he talked about his apprehension exactly of the ubiquity of digital surveillance that you mentioned.

Both in real life and in the collection that “Cloudland” is from (Kuyuzhidi 苦雨之地, which I tentatively translated as Where Rain Falls Amiss), digital traces are so fine-grained and invasive that they can piece together the most secret aspects of individuals. According to Wu, it is both frightening and cruel to be forced to see a loved one’s dark depths; I think that is a crucial part of the pain that pervades “Cloudland”: not only losing a spouse and a wild species, but also discovering how little one knew about them: seeing that “rift’’ and realising there is no way to remedy it.

Many of his works contain a multiplicity of perspectives, where vision functions as a means and a metaphor for perceiving, conceiving, and knowing. Reality (or its shadow) shapeshifts from the visual to the textual. As a photographer myself, I identify with this and I know how an entire narrative can be encapsulated in one gaze. Short of actually visiting and seeing the landscape where the story is set, I looked at a lot of images and videos while translating Cloudland, so it wasn’t just a text-to-text translation, but also image-to-text. Visualisation allowed me to embody the text and then perform it in English. I suppose the result is that, by describing the visual rather than simply transferring words from one language to the other, the translation ends up being more vivid and immediate. Or so I hope. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2023

July 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu and Heloisa Selles

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

READ MORE…

A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

READ MORE…

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.

READ MORE…

Di Antara Akses dan Penolakan / In Between Access and Refusal: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka

January 5, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the more people are made to forget the names of our relatives who are flora, fauna, sea, earth, and sky.

Much has been said about Khairani Barokka’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary body of work, spanning literature—spoken word poetry, dystopian fiction, scholarly texts—and media—textual, visual, performance. In the journal Research in Drama Education, she is an academic exploring “the limits of access and the framing of disabled performers from non-Western backgrounds in Western contexts.” According to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, however, she is a poet of “ecocritical agenda advancing environment justice against deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, pollution, further revaluing indigeneity to the more-than-human.” 

In this interview, I asked Barokka about Modern Poetry in Translation, the London-based magazine where she serves as editor; her movement between genres; and translating from the languages of her homeland, Indonesia—including BISINDO or Indonesian Sign Language. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In your Catapult essay “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words,” you made a case for maintaining an “active ethos of not italicizing supposedly foreign words,” with the hope that those in the publishing industry would follow suit. Can you speak more on how publications in the North Atlantic, and even Anglophone ones within the Global South, perpetuate a myth of “cultural purity” through linguistic gatekeeping? 

Khairani Barokka (KB): It’s been really heartening to receive the kind responses people and publications have had to that article over the past two years, and it even caused Massachusetts Review to change their house style, which was very encouraging. It’s the best feeling when colleagues say that they’ve changed the minds of editors by sending them the piece, which I hope has saved the significant amount of time we writers can spend arguing these points. 

I think the perception of certain words or names as ‘foreign’ does have to do with some publications’ regulations of house style, in which the word ‘foreign’ is not put in quotation marks, i.e., ‘Be careful with foreign words.’ And there have been some people who respond positively to my article, but still don’t put ‘foreign’ in quotation marks, when those quotation marks say a lot about gatekeeping. The ‘Other’ is fixed in many imaginations, which is interesting when you work in a country like the United Kingdom—where names and words come from so many corners of the globe, yet foreignising them is still de rigueur in many minds. Someone can be part of British society, and their name can still be regarded as ‘foreign,’ even if they’re a British citizen or born here (and of course, we can get into the hierarchies of bureaucracy and migration status!).

This has much to do with a certain ‘mythical English reader,’ which is usually assumed to be white, middle class, and monoglot; colleagues like Anton Hur have really been pushing back against this. Why can’t we, as supposed outsiders, be the idealised English reader for translations? Why isn’t the responsibility of a translation tied back to the linguistic communities it’s translated from, many members of which shouldn’t be forced to make literature ‘understandable’ to a very narrow demographic? The more we recognise these dynamics, the more we can unpack and minimise colonial tendencies in the literary arts. God knows it was assumed we as Indonesian children knew all the references in translated Enid Blyton books, for instance. It’s about cultural dominance, and the assumptions that go with that. READ MORE…

Chile’s Millennial Revolution: Bruno Lloret’s Nancy Faces Forward

March 24, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

The novel heralds a vanguard in Chilean letters and, despite its local roots, belongs to a burgeoning international literature of shared crises.

Nancy by Bruno Lloret, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, Two Lines Press, 2021

Death haunts the pages of Nancy, Chilean author Bruno Lloret’s 2015 debut. When we meet her, the eponymous heroine is dying of cancer, a painful end to a painful life. The novel—structured as a series of recollections with verses from the Old Testament prefacing most chapters—is written sparely, subdued in tone if not in depth of feeling. Scattered across each page are bold X’s, a mark of punctuation that carries more weight than the period. They don’t impair comprehension of the narrative but rather cast a subtle shadow, calling to mind a graveyard of nameless crosses, or marks on a map—death as the ultimate destination. The first and final pages of the novel feature these marks in a half-hourglass and hourglass pattern, and the shape of each individual X, as they stalk the story and linger between thoughts, echoes the notion of convergence and divergence, time left and time lost. (For a sense of how the marks function in the text, read an excerpt of Nancy in Words Without Borders.)

For Nancy, the point of convergence—the moment of irretrievable loss from which everything then diverges—is when her brother goes missing. Nancy’s childhood in northern Chile, in a coastal town between the desert and the sea, has not been happy. Her mother resents her existence, and Nancy’s girlhood becomes carefully choreographed to avoid inevitable blame and brutal abuse. Her older brother, Pato, is an ally, a friend, a “superhero.” When Nancy turns fourteen, he leaves home to find work at the port in a nearby city. Two years later, he disappears outside a nightclub.

Nancy’s troubles neither begin nor end with Pato’s disappearance, but the family’s grief and misery seem to radiate from this point. The loss doesn’t have the finality of death, and Nancy and her parents find various ways to cope with the pain of knowing he’s gone, but not knowing where. Her mom flees to the port city, ostensibly to look for Pato, and finds instead a way out of her old life and into an abusive relationship. Back in Ch, Nancy and her dad quietly care for each other, Nancy assuming the role of homemaker while her dad works. When he eventually loses his job, he finds solace in Mormonism as the life he built collapses around him—and Nancy.

Nancy heralds a future-facing vanguard in Chilean letters (the novel is set a few years in the future, and Lloret doesn’t overtly grapple with the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship) and, despite its deep local roots, belongs to a burgeoning international literature of shared crises. Born in 1990, Lloret belongs to a generation that must confront rampant environmental destruction and the climate crisis, and contemporary fiction has increasingly taken on apocalyptic motifs. (See, for example, Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, which takes place during a society-shattering pandemic.) Nancy is not an apocalypse novel, but the environment characterizes the narrative to a striking extent in this story of one northern Chilean woman’s life. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2021

March 15, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alice Banks, Carol Khoury, Maddy Robinson, and Rachel Farmer

The best in world literature from Iceland, Palestine, Algeria, and Japan!

This month, our selection of excellent new publications are representative of literature’s capacity for translating worldly phenomenon into language, converting the lived into the understood. From Iceland, a passionate and intimate call to response on the tragedies of environmental destruction; from Palestine, a monumental work of love and resistance from “the Virginia Woolf of Palestine,” Sahar Kalifeh; from Algeria, a sensual novel that treads the tenuous territory of colonialism’s aftereffects; and from Japan, the English-language debut of Akutagawa-winner Kikuko Tsumura, who with graceful humour and intrigue tackles the toxic concept of labour in the thrive of capitalism.  

on time and water

On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant

When Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Summit in September 2019, she choked back tears as she uttered the now infamous words: “How dare you?” Reactions to this display of emotion were mixed to say the least. Some showed discomfort, others concern for her wellbeing; some dismissed her outburst as manipulative, others ridiculed her. Her face and words were even immortalised in meme format. In displaying her anguish and rage so plainly, Thunberg violated the unspoken rule that seems to underpin much of the communication and discussion around climate change, wherein impassivity, stoicism, and detachment reign supreme.

In On Time and Water—part memoir, part interview, part impassioned treatise on the future of our planet—Andri Snær Magnason follows the young Swedish activist’s example, casting aside convention and delving into the emotional side of the climate crisis. In doing so, he embarks on a deeply humane and vulnerable exploration of what manmade climate change truly means for the planet—and for us. In this compelling hybrid of a book, translated sensitively by Lytton Smith, he explains how, a few years ago, he was called upon to defend a region in his country’s highlands from being destroyed in the name of energy production. Despite his deep admiration for the spiritual fervour with which Helgi Valtýsson, another Icelandic writer, wrote about the region in 1945, Magnason found himself unable to infuse the same passion into his defence. Bringing emotions into the discussion would have risked his arguments being dismissed as hysterical, doommongering, or hopelessly idealistic.

I’d found myself overwhelmed by melancholy at the unruly devastation that washed out this peerless region, yet I chose words that seemed moderate and inviting to readers. I used the prevailing language of liberalism, innovation, utilitarianism, and marketing. I discussed the area’s importance for Iceland’s image, its potential tourist income, the area’s research value, how the highlands were a magnet for foreign currency as a filming location for movies or commercials. [. . .] We live in times when money is the measure of reality. I couldn’t argue nature’s right to exist, its essential value, by saying that we might find God’s all-encompassing expanse there. READ MORE…

Beyond Human Subjectivity: An Interview with Jon Pitt

December 2, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Mary Hillis

There’s a kind of alchemy in the act of translation, especially with writers like Itō who explore the in-between spaces of cultures and language.

Itō Hiromi is one of the most well-known figures in contemporary Japanese literature, having made her mark with sensational and unabashed poetry, widely ranging essays, and award-winning novellas. In the essay published in our Fall 2020 issue, “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” she brings the reader from California to Kumamoto and back again, observing the changes of her life and nature in tandem—the distinction of which are rendered, at times, indistinguishable.

The most recent edition of the Asymptote Educator’s Guide features a lesson plan for “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” which encourages students to engage with this work in distinguishing intercultural patterns, identifying literary forms, and discussing translation and migration. Educator’s Guides are published alongside each issue of Asymptote, and include teaching ideas for educators who want to bring world literature to their classrooms; each Asymptote piece introduced in the guide is accompanied with contextual information. possible discussion questions, and writing prompts.

Jon Pitt, the translator of “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” is a professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities, and has long studied the intersections between literature and ecology. In the following interview, Asymptote Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis speaks with him about the resonances of environmentalism and migration in both Itō’s work and Japanese literature overall, as well as the increasing entwinement between ecology and art in the Anthropocene.

Mary Hillis (MH): I understand that in addition to working on a translation of Itō Hiromi’s Kodama Kusadama (Tree Sprits Grass Spirits), from which “Living Trees and Dying Trees” is excerpted, you are a professor of environmental humanities. How did you initially become interested in the environmental humanities? And how does this field relate specifically to Japanese literature, film, and sound?

Jon Pitt (JP): I became interested in the environmental humanities while I was pursuing my Ph.D. I entered graduate school with the intention of researching representations of city life in Japanese literature, but along the way I discovered that representations of the “natural” were just as compelling and complex. I started thinking about trees and how they appeared in so many of the novels I was reading, wondering what would happen if I took them seriously—as more than mere scenery or background to human action. When reading scientific texts about trees and forests, it struck me how new readings of literature might be possible if put into dialogue with scientific writing. I gradually learned that this kind of interdisciplinary approach was one of the key tenants of the environmental humanities, and that there was a growing number of scholars looking for ways to approach the study of literature or film by decentralizing the human.

Engaging with Japanese literature (or film or sound media) through an environmental lens helps address a paradox that many critics have pointed out over the years: namely that there exists a persistent myth of Japanese culture stemming from a unique, “harmonious,” relationship to the natural world, in spite of serious environmental degradation and resource extraction that stretches back centuries. How can both of these things be true? How have artists helped to promote a certain relationship with nature that may hide darker histories of violence against the natural world? I think the environmental humanities help us better understand these kinds of questions.  READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 26, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia and Eva Wissting

Literary news from Brazil and Sweden!

As countries around the world are grappling around the walls of our new reality, their literatures respond in turn to the urgency of contemporary matters and the necessity of recognizing history. In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on publishers in Sweden taking on climate change and the world welcomes new translations of a canonical Brazilian author, among other noteworthy news. Read on to keep up!

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

Publisher Natur & Kultur announced in their most recent sustainability report that they aim to become Sweden’s first climate neutral book publisher. The goal is to become climate neutral within 2020, which means that firstly, they will do what they can to minimize climate changing emissions, and secondly, they will compensate for any emissions from their activities or production. Their printing house, located in Estonia, will switch to ecofriendly electricity and they are investigating how to minimize transportation within the publisher’s business. Authors published by Natur & Kultur include historian and former Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Peter Englund (The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War) and writer, columnist and August Prize winner Lena Andersson (Wilful Disregard and Acts of Infidelity).

Another reminder of the importance of action on climate change arrived recently with the fall edition of the triennial book catalogue from the Swedish book industry organization Svensk Bokhandel. This fall, Sweden’s most prominent environmental activist, and possibly most well-known person overall right now, Greta Thunberg, is having another book published by Polaris Publishing. Last year, photographer Roger Turesson and journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto travelled with Thunberg through Europe and the United States and the book is their depiction of the young environmentalist. Previously published works by Thunberg includes Our House is on Fire, written together with her parents and sister, and No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her speeches.

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

As Brazil continues to grapple with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, its literary community perseveres. With the recent cancelation of the 26th International Book Fair of São Paulo, originally slated for October 30 to November 8, 2020, publishers, writers, and reviewers have carried the conversation to online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook Live, and Instagram. Despite current flight restrictions and limitations on travel, Brazilian literature continues to cross new frontiers, garnering new readers across the globe. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 17, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, Eva Wissting, Poupeh Missaghi, and Sarah Moore

Bringing you the latest in literary news from Sweden, Iran, the UK, and Spain!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Sweden, Iran, and the UK. In Sweden, a new translation of Albert Camus’s The Plague is on its way, and the annual children’s book award ALMA has announced Baek Heena as its winner; in Iran, sales of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree have surged after its nomination for The International Man Booker Prize, and readers have welcomed a Persian translation of Italian writer Paolo Giordano’s new non-fiction work about contagion; in the UK, authors and publishers are proving resourceful after the cancellation of key literary festivals; finally, people around the world have been mourning the death of best-selling Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who sadly passed away this week in Spain.  

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

Easter in Sweden is usually a time when people have a few days off and either go skiing or open up the country cottage after the winter. This year, however, like in a lot of other places around the world, people have had to alter their plans as traveling was discouraged, even within the country. Unlike most of its neighboring countries, Sweden still allows bookstores as well as most other stores to remain open. Nevertheless, changed habits in a time of social and economic uncertainty has led to a decrease in sales of physical books by 35%. Although sales of e-books have increased by over 10%, bookstores have started plans to lay off employees and renegotiate rent costs, in order to manage a possible prolonged decline in book sales.

One book that nonetheless sells like never before in Sweden at this time, is French Algerian author Albert Camus’s The Plague from 1947. Swedish readers have the book today in a translation by Elsa Thulin from 1948, but a new translation is on the way, by Jan Stolpe, and will be available in stores by the end of April. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2017  |  in Weekly Roundup  |  by José García, Noah Ross, and Norman Erikson

The latest in literary news around the globe, all in one place.

If, like us, you can’t start the weekend without knowing what the literary world’s been up to this past week, we’ve got your back. We have dispatches from Central America, the United States and Indonesia with a real tasting board of talks, events and new publications. Wherever you’re based, we’re here to provide you with news that stays news. 

Editor-At-Large for Guatemala, José García, reports on events in Central America: 

Today Costa Rica’s book fair, the twentieth Feria del Libro 2017, kicked off in San José. During its nine days, CR’s fair will offer concerts, book readings, release events, and seminars. This year’s Feria will have the participation of writers like Juan Villoro (Mexico), Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica), Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner Rita Dove (United States), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Mayra Santos-Febres (Puerto Rico), among others.

Some of the books to be presented or discussed during the fair are Larisa Quesada’s En Piel de Cuervos, Alfonso Chase’s Piélagos, Carlos Francisco Monge’s Nada de todo aquello, Isidora Chacón’s Yo Bruja, and Luis Cháves’ Vamos a tocar el agua. Also, the renown Costa Rican writer Carlos Fonseca, famous for his first novel Coronel Lágrimas that was translated into English by Megan McDowell and published by Restless Books, will talk about his sophomore book, Museo Animal on September 2.

In Guatemala, the indie press Magna Terra continued the promotion of many of its titles released during this year’s Guatemalan Book Fair. On August 17 they officially presented Pablo Sigüenza Ramírez’s Ana es la luna y otros cuentos cotidianos. Also, they continue to push Pedro Pablo Palma’s Habana Hilton, about the most personal side of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, during his time in Guatemala and his early years in Cuba.

Fellow Guatemalan indie press, Catafixia Editorial recently finished a local tour that included their participation in FILGUA, the international poetry festival of Quetzaltenango FIPQ, and a quick visit to Comalapa, for the presentation of Oyonïk, by the twenty-two-year-old poet, Julio Cúmez. Additionally, Catafixia is preparing for their participation in the IV Encuentro de Pensamiento y Creación Joven en las Américas in Habana Cuba next month. And recently they announced the inclusion of writer, poet, and guerrilla leader Mario Payeras to their already impressive roster; they have yet to share which of Mario’s books they will republish.

Finally, Guatemalan writer, Eduardo Halfon, has a new book coming out August 28 titled Duelo (Libros Asteroide).

READ MORE…