Posts filed under 'fate'

Translation Tuesday: “Mirror” by Blagoja Ivanov

September 19, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Pavlina Manavska

An earthquake is an indescribable event.

This Translation Tuesday, we present a short story from Macedonian author Blagoja Ivanov, about the niggling twists of fate in the wake of the earthquake that flattened Skopje in 1963. A young couple buy an antique mirror from a family about to leave for a holiday. The earthquake happens; the family’s apartment is leveled; miraculously, the mirror survives. The catastrophe is too enormous, too terrible for words, and it blurs accordingly in the memory, but its suddenness sharpens and sweetens the memories of the times before. We see the old Skopje in a hot summer, a city of “comfortable homes” and people with happy aspirations, heedless of the disaster.

“The summer of 1962 began with intense heatwaves. Everything was melting from the heat, acquiring a gray color, occasionally interspersed with the shades of dried grass. And yet,” says Martin, “for me and my wife, it was the start of a beautiful season. So, after a few years, in collaboration with a few friends, we built small houses at the foot of Gazi-baba, thus replacing the damp rented rooms with comfortable homes. After so many years since getting married, we still hadn’t had children, and today it seems funny that we were so unhappy wandering around the old neighborhoods of Skopje, searching for a more comfortable room, which, at a minimum, wouldn’t be in the basement and would have some sunlight. No matter how much our memory may have betrayed us, those difficulties are forgotten, just as we forget many unpleasant things from our youth.

“At first, we stayed at my parents’ place, not worrying about work, food, or clothing, but a person still feels constrained in such moments, struggling to reconcile their needs with those of the community they have lived in for so many years. It is, perhaps, the urge we know from birds — as soon as they hatch, they fly away from the nest. My wife and I were very happy in our new apartment,” says Martin. “Around the little house, there was a small garden or rather a place that still needed to be transformed into a garden. We were completely drained of money, two rooms remained empty, and the garden also required some funds, but the easy part was already ahead of us after we had passed the tricky part. We marveled at the view we had from the balcony — in front of us, below, the city extended towards the fortress Kale and the French cemeteries, while on the left, distant high-rise buildings showed us where the river Vardar was.

“When a person is young, there are so many trivial things that make life difficult. For example, arranging the apartment. We somehow arranged the few objects and furniture we had in the kitchen and two rooms, while the others remained empty. During the first winter, in one room, we pondered earnestly about what to do next. Ideas were born and multiplied. To be this way or that way. In any case, it would be best if it happened immediately. If not immediately, at least by tomorrow. Those conversations were, in fact, essentially wonderful. We constantly drew sketches of furniture pieces and rearranged parts of the apartment. We knew by heart all the measurements of the rooms, all the angles and uneven spots. Sometimes there would be disagreements between my wife and me, but they passed quickly. Nervousness and impatience would sometimes take hold, then pass like a spring breeze, with one side always giving in… which one? It doesn’t matter,” says Martin, smiling, as he takes a bite of the mezze and sips on the rakija.

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Lucid Silence: An Interview with Fiona Sze-Lorrain

September 18, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tsering Yangzom Lama

The phrase I know is an illusion to me.

Dear Chrysanthemums is a haunting debut novel by celebrated poet and translator, Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Covering an interconnected web of women, the novel begins during the tumult of early twentieth-century China and spans decades of displacement and exile across the world. At once brutal and tender, this novel of women’s lives has the power to move and complicate our understanding of the long shadow cast by revolution as well as the inextinguishable longing every person has for beauty, love, art, and selfhood. This spring, I had the opportunity to interview Sze-Lorrain about her powerful novel.

Tsering Yangzom Lama (TYL): There’s a dark irony and melancholy to your work. Symbols of beauty and luck frame stories of profound ugliness and misfortune. For instance, the title of your novel references a celebrated flower in China, but one of your characters, Mei, is tasked with picking chrysanthemums for Mao Zedong as part of her reform labor. Tell us about the juxtaposition between such auspicious symbols and the unsettled lives of the women in your novel.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (FSL): I don’t believe in absolutes or polarities. There is no joy without sadness and vice versa. Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez: “I live in shadow, filled with light.” Chrysanthemums are symbolic flowers in Asia. I view them as both auspicious and ominous. A florist friend in Hong Kong once told me how she saved her freshest pink, white, and yellow chrysanthemums for a funeral wreath every other day.

In Chinese traditional ink wash, chrysanthemums are one of the “four noble gentlemen.” I’ve been painting chrysanthemums since I was a student yet find them the most elusive. How to make these flowers less figurative? That’s the question. At the same time they seem so perfect and delicious in each detail . . . If only they could speak.

I grow, cook, read chrysanthemums. I think of their psychic wholes. I too live with orchids and floral essences. Years ago, I came across a witchy chrysanthemum in a mokuhanga art by an old woman artist from northern Japan. I asked her how this larger-than-usual chrysanthemum might taste in a medicinal soup. She shook her head. The creature-like image followed me home. Those petals resembled fingers and squid tentacles. So erotic. How knotty. They pulled me in, then disquieted me. That distance—the vulnerability to the plant rendered its inner strength even more unyielding. This tension conjured in itself a story of survival. When I began to work on the heroines in my novel, I pictured them allegorically as chrysanthemums, each of a kind and from different seasons. And how they heal, apologize, or make amends when something goes wrong in life. READ MORE…

Tapestry of Coincidence: An Interview with Fate Author Jorge Consiglio

July 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

If you look at the quotidian under a microscope, the most mundane things become unrecognizable.

Jorge Consiglio’s novel Fate (Charco Press, 2021) charts a tangle of crossroads, both literal and figurative. A taxidermist, an oboist, and a meteorologist do their best to direct their destinies against the background of Buenos Aires’s frenetic streets. Their worlds tilt and collide, and the sum of their experiences poses an eternal question about whether our everyday lives—and the incidents that jolt us out of them—are the work of fate or chance. Here, Asymptote Assistant Blog Editor Allison Braden talks with Consiglio about how a befuddled immigrant, a surfeit of street names, and a relentless colony of ants propel the plot, and why English—and Charco Press—was the perfect home away from home for the Argentinian author’s fifth award-winning novel. This interview, translated from Spanish, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Allison Braden (AB): You begin Fate with an author’s note that explains your central question: “fate or chance?” What was it about this novel that inspired you to include the preface? How do you think the note shapes readers’ experience of the story?

Jorge Consiglio (JC): I included the preface at the suggestion of Charco Press. The introduction is part of the collection’s design, and I was delighted at the suggestion. In Argentina, there used to be excellent publisher called Centro Editor de América Latina which had a collection that used the same idea. I remember I used to buy the CEAL books and always enjoyed reading the author’s reflections. They were useful for situating myself within the context in which the work had been produced, and it offered a window into the author’s aesthetics and point of view. It felt like I was allowed to attend the rehearsals before seeing a play. I think in this case, in addition to that, Charco Press takes care to allow the authors to introduce themselves in their own words in countries where readers probably have never heard of them. That’s a big plus.

AB: Philosophers have grappled with the question of fate versus chance for millennia, and they’ve proposed various approaches for dealing with the vicissitudes of an unpredictable life. (The Stoics’ recommendation to face everyday frustrations and furies with grace and patience certainly would have benefited a couple of the short-tempered characters in Fate.) How did philosophy shape your approach to the novel’s central theme?

JC: When I was struck with the idea to write Fate, I didn’t think about philosophy or anything like it. What came to me first was a scene in which two characters whose destinies had been tapping on each other missed the chance to exchange a glance of recognition only by a few seconds. That was the trigger for the text, but as I made progress in the writing, I suspect because of the evolution of the plot, I was presented with the question of fate versus chance. I’m not the first to arrive at this question, of course. There were—and are—many writers who create their fiction out of this counterpoint. I guess it’s inevitable that, by dint of our ephemeral nature, we’ll stumble into these existential issues at some point. It’s true that philosophy seeks to reflect on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable. Religion and magical thinking, too. The characters in Fate aren’t thinking about these questions. They act without much reflection, but the plot development, like a poor imitation of life, embodies these questions that will never be resolved.

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The Shrouded Force of Fate: Anja Kampmann’s High as the Waters Rise

December 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

High as the Waters Rise fills the great blank canvas of loss with a precision that nourishes the fine contours of emotion.

High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, translated from the German by Anne Posten, Catapult, 2020

In the rich silt into which Titusville, Pennsylvania sinks its foundations, there was only one spot where it was possible to strike oil at the extraordinarily shallow depth of sixty-nine feet. On August 27, 1859, a small group of men, at the last-ditch orders of one Edwin Laurentine Drake, sank their pipes into the ground—guided by that unknown intuition which, in retrospect, looks terribly similar to fate—and black gold flowed forth. It is how the world flows forth from a single life, from one man’s fortune to a new forever, a radically altered world.

The idea of fate, its shrouded force, is perhaps the only abiding salve for the more devastating consequences of self-awareness. We look back on our times to construct an architecture of experiences, arranging fragments by our available logic to see what structure rises from the flood—what materializes in the aftermath to become that one reference by which we can define, or justify, our lives. For some reason, we always urge towards a singular narrative, despite sharing in the overarching suspicion that the life one leads is not one, but always many. The salvaging of this steadfast, solitary lesson is a comfort—that it indeed has all been for something. Without it, there would be only darkness, that eternal torrent, that deafening collapse.

Because Anja Kampmann begins High as the Waters Rise with an ending, we arrive at the temporary space between the shock of happening and the proceedings of salvage. Waclaw and Mátyás are longtime companions working on an oil rig, sharing in a rare and profound intimacy that dissipates the customary subscriptions of male camaraderie. When Mátyás vanishes from the ship in an incident so abrupt and absurd that it seems almost mystical, Waclaw is stirred into a potent, hypnotic grief—a grief that necessitates the sea, the infinity it conjures, which Kampmann calls upon in the vignette that opens the text: “There would only be sea, piling up and up. There would be no north or south. The water would swallow even the cries of the storm, which no ear would hear.” In the midst of these tides—which overwhelm the daily rituals of work, care, and thought—is the solitary island of memories, visions in which Mátyás is frayed at the edges by recall. Only these mirages anchor Waclaw: these small footholds of before, in the vast midnight of after.

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Misshapen Shards: Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station in Review

March 11, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Ben Saff

Yū Miri brings the periphery of tragedy into focus in dreamy, kaleidoscopic visions.

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yū Miri, translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles, Tilted Axis Press, 2019

Tokyo Ueno Station, originally published in Japanese in 2014, is Yū Miri’s latest novel to arrive in English via the efforts of translator Morgan Giles and publisher Tilted Axis Press. Yū Miri was born in Yokohama, Japan, as a Zainichi, or a Korean living permanently in Japan. In 1997, she was awarded Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her semi-autobiographical novel Kazoku Shinema (Family Cinema). Her past writing has explored damaging family relationships and outsider identity in a predominantly homogenous Japanese society.1

In Ueno Park, one of Tokyo’s most famous public grounds, the blue tents of homeless communities, or “squatters,” have become an unfortunate icon. A simple Google search of “homeless Ueno Park” will return videos, articles, and even tourist reviews of the park, detailing the homeless camps found there. In Tokyo Ueno Station, Miri tells the story of a homeless man named Kazu who lives in one of these camps. Told from Kazu’s perspective, the novel reflects on the tragic events that landed him finally under the blue tents of Ueno Park. But no story can exist or be told in isolation: Yū Miri brings the periphery of tragedy into focus in dreamy, kaleidoscopic visions, intertwining Kazu’s past, the history of Ueno Park, and the state of modern Japanese society. Tokyo Ueno Station is a shattered mirror of prose, made of misshapen shards that don’t always connect but together reflect an image of a lost life and inevitable misfortune.

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