Posts filed under 'gender'

What’s New in Translation: July 2024

July 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel and Samantha Siefert

New publications from Chile and Iran!

This month, we introduce two extraordinary novels erecting vivid, immersive narratives upon the intricate sociopolitical histories of their respective nations. From Chile, Carlos Labbé builds an intricate match of class warfare and collective action against the backdrop of professional soccer; and from Iran, Ghazi Rabihavi tells the tragic story of two queer lovers as they navigate the repressions and tumults of pre- and post-Revolution Iran.  

the murmuration

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter, 2024

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration begins like a monologue from The Twilight Zone: a robust voice draws you aboard the night train from Temuco to Santiago, and a conspiracy of uncertainty and intrigue quickly follows. Cigarettes smolder, nail polish glistens, and a retired sports commentator’s hot cup of matico tea steams into the noir-film night. Suddenly, you find yourself hurtling through the darkness on Schrödinger’s train, where a director of the Chilean national soccer team may or may not be asleep in her first-class train car—or perhaps she is in the dining car, having a drink with the sports commentator. Furtive eyes dart about, noting every detail, but Labbé’s experimental style calls reality itself into question, letting linguistic artistry lead the way in an investigation of Chilean identity, representation, and collective memory. 

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “To see a woman . . .” by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

June 25, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Natalie Mariko

we were meant to meet one another at the stranger’s threshold, along this obscure and melancholic borderline of awareness

This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Pride Month, we present a fiction excerpt from the desk of Swiss novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, written ninety-four years ago and now translated by Natalie Mariko. In these impressionistic scenes, the nameless, genderless narrator (a thinly-veiled insert for Schwarzenbach herself) is drawn continually to the thought of Ena Bernstein, their unseen fellow guest at an alpine ski-lodge. In Schwarzenbach’s hands, the gossipy high-society atmosphere of the ski-lodge gives way to a quasi-mystical perception of the natural world, which is reinforced by the ineluctable “oceanic unknown” of the narrator’s desire for women. “The ardent love which had always tethered me to this landscape grew in a violent way,” Schwarzenbach writes, as the narrator’s longing for Ena refracts the mundanity of everyday life into something beautiful and strange––a powerful reminder of how our desires can enrich the world. Read on!

To see a woman: just for a second, just in the short space of a look, and then to lose her again somewhere in the dark of a hall, behind a door I’m not allowed to open—but to see a woman and in the same moment to feel that she also saw me, that her eyes hung puzzled, as if we were meant to meet one another at the stranger’s threshold, along this obscure and melancholic borderline of awareness . . .

Yes, to feel in that moment how she also faltered, almost painfully halted in the hall of her thoughts, as if her nerves contracted, being touched by mine. And if I wasn’t tired then I wouldn’t have been bewildered by the day’s memories: still, I saw fields of snow, and thereupon the long evening shadows; saw the bar throngs, girls passing by to be sloughed like puppets from their partners, carelessly laughing back over their thin shoulders, the blustering jazz starting alongside their laughter. And before it blew again I took refuge in a small corner, Li waving there, her little face quivering white under high, shaved brows. She slid her glass back to me—stubbornly forcing me to drink the whole thing—and laid her slender hands on the Norwegian’s neck. She floated past dancing, and he hung with his eyes at her lips.

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Deanna Cachoian-Schanz on the Mania of Translation

November 20, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I felt the dance between author and translator: each disentangling the other as she tried to understand her(self).

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz was awarded one of the prestigious PEN Translates grants earlier this year for her work on Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernakir: a rich, experimental novel that speaks to repressions, literary legacy, and the expansive collisions between disparate writings, voices, times, and lives. Soon to be released as A Book, Untitled through Tilted Axis, Avagyan’s work is emblematic of literature as an act of congregation and communality in giving voice to the silenced, and in this following interview, Cachoian-Schanz speaks on how translation furthers that textual power.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Shushan Avagyan is also a translator; did this affect the way you worked with the text, and were there conversations between you two about how this translation should be approached?

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (DCS): Of course! As I intimated in the Translator’s Afterword, my translation style tends to keep as close to the text as possible, prioritizing the words on the page and not what I imagine as the “author’s intent.” As Barthes famously declared in 1967, “the author is dead!” However, when working with contemporary literature, the elephant in the room is that the author is still speaking! How can we not, as responsible translators, take the authors’ voices into consideration, especially when they are fluent in the target language?

In the final instances of the English-language text, Shushan and I were in close and caring contact to make the final touches, together. When I first started to translate the book back in 2010, it was a way for me to work on my Armenian—to carefully improve my vocabulary and language skills through a text I was invested in knowing deeply. However, because Book is in part a translator’s diary, sometimes I felt as if the author was already telling me how to translate her work, or even trolling me, her future translator. It’s hard to not take certain lines to heart when you’re that deep into the text; when you’re translating, you really get into that mindset, as if the author is speaking directly to you, for you. Perhaps translation is in part some kind of mania. . . READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: H-A-N-N-A by Hanna Riisager

August 29, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Kristina Andersson Bicher

Blissfully mute, / infatuated babbling / from a marble mouth.

An entrancing poem on babyhood commands our devotion this Translation Tuesday–a fitting muse for poet and critic Hanna Riisager, whose first collection wields overtly feminine symbols to subvert gender norms. In H-A-N-N-A, precisely translated from the Swedish by Kristina Andersson Bicher, a small subject wields a gravitational pull, overwhelming us in equal parts bewilderment and wonderment.

You are a plank you
are a bridge you are a bronze
railing. You are a
landing you are a
nook. You are a ramp
for baby carriages.
Head down feet up
Child’s position.
Perpendicular dominance
trimmed in lead. An
H in the heart.
Think: the scope
of this walk!

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The Seyavash Cycle and Ritual as Translation

August 3, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Claire Jacobson

If the rituals as such are the bridge from one story to the other, we can view this transformation as an act of translation . . .

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Claire Jacobson covers the path of the Seyavash cycle through time and cultures, its adoptions and adaptations. 

In Khurasani poet Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh, symbol of innocence and hero-prince Seyavash undergoes a false rape accusation, a martyr’s death, and a symbolic resurrection. This tale—the pure hero is falsely accused of rape and suffers either a literal or symbolic death and resurrection as a result—is found across cultures and time, often beginning with the hero’s virtuous rejection of a lustful woman: the incorrupt Seyavash recoils from his stepmother Sudabeh’s declarations of love, as does the Khotanese version of the Mauryan prince Kunala from Queen Tishyaraksha; the righteous Joseph (Yusuf) flees Potiphar’s wife, Zulaikha; the chaste Hippolytus rejects Phaedra’s advances; the honorable Bata refuses to betray his brother Anpu by sleeping with his sister-in-law. Much like Seyavash, each of these men are then written into the cycle of accusation, death, and resurrection. 

Many of these myths coexisted in a shared discursive space, but not all of them continued to develop and change as living stories. After the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau, several began to converge. By the early Islamic period, the tale of Yusuf and Zulaikha was considered by literary critics to be the same story as Seyavash and Sudabeh but in a more appropriately Islamic format, and many of the rituals that had long been practiced to celebrate Seyavash were repurposed to commemorate the death of Husayn at Karbala. In this case, ritual (by which I mean the popular practice of religion) seems to act as a medium of translation, carrying the shape of the re-enacted story forward even though the language, notions of gender, and cultural landscape were all slowly changing as the millennia passed.

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States of Alienation: Dana Shem-Ur and Yardenne Greenspan on Where I Am

July 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s a major part of translation: to make sure that it’s still the original book.

Our June Book Club selection, Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, is a novel that looks intensely at the dissonances of daily life in the aftermath of migrancy, profoundly reaching below the surface of superficial comfort to read the disassociations and discontents that stem from being not quite in-place. Reaching into the mind of an Israeli translator named Reut who has settled in France, Shem-Ur constructs a map of navigations amidst cultural codes, languages, and physical agitations, drawing out the anxiety of belonging. In this interview, we speak to Shem-Ur and translator Yardenne Greenspan about this novel’s simmering frustrations and the new Israeli diaspora, and how they have both used language to reflect the confounding boundaries of our social fabric.

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. 

Laurel Taylor (LT): Dana, I’d like to ask you about what sparked the creation of this novel—particularly as you’re already a translator and scholar. How did Where I Am come about?

Dana Shem-Ur (DS): I come from a family of a female authors. My mom is a poet, and my grandma wrote over thirty books, so I always was involved in this world. In fact, when I was little, I didn’t even read a lot. I just wrote fiction, and even published a small novella of one hundred pages when I was about twelve.

Then I dropped it because I was engaged in studying history, and I channeled my life of writing into other domains. It was only later on, when I was in Paris for three years for my master’s degree in philosophy, that I just came home one summer and wrote the first few pages.

I think what generated this novel was my certainty that I would remain in France, and I would have a life there. I began writing this story about a woman who is twenty years older than me and lives in Paris, but she’s unhappy, and I think part of it was just a reflection of my fears. What will become of me? Will I become Reut?

LT: It’s almost like speculative autofiction?

DS: Yeah. I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it, but it was also inspired by a lot of characters that I met. No character in Where I Am is a real person, but the salon of people at the Jean-Claude household are all inspired by people I met and by these talks and these Parisian intellects, who I always found very fascinating; they are my friends, but throughout the period I lived there, I felt there was a barrier between us. I was always the observer who was looking at this spectacle, not completely present, like Reut. I’m very fascinated by foreign cultures, so it felt like something I needed to write about. READ MORE…

Agitations on Fragmented Terrain: On Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s Trash

May 10, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

“Trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex.

Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny, translated from the Spanish by JD Pluecker, Deep Vellum, 2023

There’s trash in there, said the man who was cleaning our shower drain. He pulled out a rope of hair—in our household of mostly women, it collects. I thought of the specific word he used to describe our hair, that of a tangle of broken, dead, fallen hair: trash. No one in my circle, also mostly people with uteruses, has ever referred to hair as “trash.” To us, hair is hair, and we grieve its damaged pieces. It seems peculiar and disheartening that our being women (as a social construct) and people with uteruses (as an overlapping, but not coextensive, biological reality), have always been intimately associated to and related with trash. Our relationship with trash is indicative of our whole body and mind’s vicissitudes. In Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s recent novel, Trash, the fact that her three narrators all identify as women demonstrates a radical intention, revealing how certain sexual identities and wants are constructed as “bad” in order to maintain the patriarchal and ableist social order, where particular bodies and desires are rendered incapable of performing normative moral order, and are therefore unacceptable in society. When we reframe it that way, “trash” is not necessarily just the waste we can no longer consume or make use of; its entanglements prove to be far more complex, much deeper than that. The identities we align with, the politics we embody, the bodyminds we are, our presence unwanted and disturbing to the ruler’s home—when they stir up a stench which discomforts cisheterosexual (mostly) male desires, we become trash to their senses. 

In this stunning debut novel, we encounter biopolitical debilities — such as hormones for transitions, the toxins from medication, blood from menstruation — through which Zéleny wades to render the limitations of our social and biopolitical mobility. Trash, set in a municipal garbage dump, starts by familiarising us with its cycle of narrators, taking turns like a roundtable with each part written in distinct voices, pulling us into the lucid experiential timelines of each narrator’s embodied memory.  READ MORE…

Translating “Aucun homme ne t’a défendue”: A Conversation with Emily Graham

April 12, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Marina Dora Martino

I felt like the words fell into place on their own . . . They have the same brutality and intimacy, just transposed onto a different soundscape.

In Asymptote’s most recent Winter Issue, translator Emily Graham brought Linda Maria Baros’s visceral and enigmatic poem “Aucun homme ne t’a défendue” into English as “No man has defended you.” This “transitional” poem comes from Baros’s collection La nageuse désossée. Légendes métropolitaines (The Deboned Swimmer: Metropolitan Legends), which combines a folkloric atmosphere and militaristic ideas to create a resonant call to action. In the following interview, Asymptote contributor Marina Dora Martino speaks with Emily Graham on her experience bringing the “allure” of Baros’s poetry into English. 

Marina Dora Martino (MDM): “No man has defended you” is a powerful stand-alone piece, but I am curious about how it relates to the rest of The Deboned Swimmer. Can you tell us a bit more about where the poem stands in the collection?

Emily Graham (EG): “No man has defended you” is the final poem in “Tarmac,” the section that opens The Deboned Swimmer. The collection is broken up into several of these sections, all named after areas or details of an urban landscape, like “Walls,” “Roofs,” “Underground.” Each section ends with an italicised piece that is at once part of the section and apart, a moment of transition. And this is what “No man has defended you” is, though the poet decided to lose the italics once the poem was taken out of context. Each of these end-of-section transitional poems goes back to the figure of the enigmatic swimmer. In these poems, there is often a sense of strife and oppression, but there is also a yearning. These swimmers seem to have something that the narrator craves and wants to be a part of, and each italicised poem seems to add to her pursuit in reaching it. “No man has defended you” is very interesting in this sense, as the contrast between this undercurrent of violence and the narrator’s admiration for the swimmers is particularly strong. 

MDM: In your translator’s note, you talk about how there is no gender-specific word for “swimmer” in English, but the nageuses in Baros’s French original are definitely marked as female. How important is it for the swimmers in this poem to be identified as women?

EG: It is very important for the poet—the swimmer figure is explicitly gendered from the very title, La nageuse désossée. There being no English equivalent, it was a little hard to navigate this gender-specific word, and I really had to take it poem by poem and line by line. For instance, I was planning to translate “les vestiaires des nageuses” as “women’s locker room,” operating a choice on which side to bring forward in that line, but when I spoke to Baros about it, she was adamant that the swimmers had to be present in the poem, so I decided on the non-gendered “swimmer’s locker room.” It preserves a certain cohesion of sense and sound, and I thought, better to have a line that sounds right and has a little side note than to mess up with the rhythm and the imagery! 

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“. . . I am sure of it”: On Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir

February 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The readers . . . become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles.

Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, translated from the French by Alice Banks, Fum d’Estampa Press, November 2022

In Ali Zamir’s third novel, Deranged As I Am, narrator-protagonist Deranged is an impoverished man, somehow surviving on the paltry daily wages he manages to earn through hard labour at the docks from transporting goods and cargo, who keeps himself aloof from his fellow workers who make fun of him, using his clothes as a calendar: “Deranged as I am I have only seven ancient shirts in all. Seven pairs of trousers and seven pairs of shorts all pocked with holes and on each of them a day of the week so I don’t forget remaining me that I shouldn’t wear the same outfit twice you see?!” The novel itself begins intensely in medias res with Deranged trapped in a confined space, wounded and on the verge of death, his limbs tied up as flies swarm around him. His crying out, while exaggerated, highlights a jagged agony. 

The rest of the narrative recounts the incidents that led to this low point, with Deranged refusing to keep quiet and hunker down in the face of his many painful oppressions: “Let me make you understand this loud and clear as long as my heart beats your ears will bleed they will bleed until my soul is dizzy lest I disappear with a stream of tears in my charmless eyes.” Situated at the dizzy intersection of various vulnerabilities, he has minimal hope of having his voice heard or his exploitation compensated, because to the “angels of darkness,” as he calls the flies that represent his numerous tormentors, he is nothing but a speck of dirt that they can wipe away and then go about their day. The readers therefore become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles and problems. 

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The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders

June 2, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Alicia and María constantly think about the other women missing from their lives.

What makes us who we are, what shapes and defines us? Is it the country that we come from or the language we speak? Is it our sex or sexual orientation? The generation or political system into which we were born? Is it our job, the class we belong to, or the education that we are privileged with or denied? Is it our family, and, if so, as one character from Elena Medel’s The Wonders puts it, “What if genes determine your character, not just your eye colour or the shape of your mouth?” And in all this, how much is pre-ordained, what role is there for choice and free will?

Medel’s debut novel,  translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, does not presume to offer a single, clear-cut answer to these questions, but one thing is obvious right from the start through the Philip Larkin quotation she has chosen as an epigraph: “Clearly money has something to do with life.” Weaving together the stories of three generations of women from a single family over the course of half a century, from the ’50s to the death of Franco in 1975 to the 2018 Spanish Women’s Strike, the novel seems to suggest that gender clearly has something to do with it, too.

As the novel opens, Alicia (the third generation in the family), finding herself without “so much as a used tissue,” feels uncomfortable from the sense of material limbo. Even at the age of thirteen, she understands that “money tempers [mediocrity], helps to conceal it.” Although she defines her life through money, or the lack thereof, her experience has also been shaped by another great absence that is inextricably linked to financial ruin: that of her father, who feigned the life of a successful businessman while getting increasingly into debt and committed suicide after a bungled attempt at life insurance fraud. From thereon out, Alicia is denied the expensive school and new apartment she’d expected and must move back to the suburbs of Córdoba, eventually moving to Madrid and a mundane life of insecure work and an unsatisfying relationship of convenience punctuated by anonymous casual sex with men who she can approach cynically as “safe bets.”

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Unexpired Bodies: On Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast

May 4, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Vignettes, as building blocks of Moustadraf’s narrative, are wielded to strip away at illusions of respectability.

Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, The Feminist Press, 2022

More than a decade after the original publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley infamously called the book her “hideous progeny.” A whole critical tradition was born in the shadow of that phrase, obsessively sewn together by the umbilical connections between writing, motherhood and the monstrosity of autobiography; no one could forget that the complications of Shelley’s birth had literally sent her own mother—the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—to an untimely death.

Like giving birth, writing exacts an extraordinary sacrifice in order to grant the gift of life to another. It’s difficult to imagine a more tragic illustration than the story of Moroccan cult feminist icon, Malika Moustadraf. Debilitated by chronic kidney illness but dogged and uncompromising in her devotion to her craft, Moustadraf skipped rounds of essential medication to fund her first publication. This literary progeny consumed her—heart, soul, and kidney; still she insisted, “writing is a kind of sedative for the pain I live with.”

Every word she set down on the page sustained as much as it killed her, as Alice Guthrie tells us in her tender and comprehensive translator’s note, appended to her crisp rendering of Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf (issued in the UK by Saqi Books under the title Something Strange, Like Hunger). Beyond its ambitious sweep of contextual detail, Guthrie’s essay represents a loving tribute to Moustadraf’s tempestuous and painfully ephemeral existence in the karians of Casablanca—a monument to all the work she could have written if not for the overlapping violences of the systems that failed her, one after the other.

Karian, a term unique to Casablanca, is cleverly left untranslated by Guthrie and glossed as impoverished neighbourhoods—with “unregulated improvised residential structures,” “often inhabited by recent migrants to the city from rural areas.” Fringed by a context of Sufi marabouts and witchcraft, these spaces are rife with djinn and black magic curses inflicting impotence, lovesickness, and malady on the integrity of bodies. Throughout Blood Feast, Guthrie’s familiarity with the rituals, superstitions, and slang of the region are not simply evident in the cadences of her translation, but further substantiated by the specific Arabic and Darija expressions she opts not to translate. READ MORE…

Irreconcilable Truths of Our Evolution: On Stanisław Lem’s The Truth and Other Stories

November 18, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Successful science fiction, [Lem] believed, must treat problems and their solutions in a different, more earnest way.

The Truth and Other Stories by Stanisław Lem, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, MIT Press, 2021

One cannot overstate how profoundly our relationship with computers has changed since the mid-twentieth century. Once upon a time, the notion of a mechanical brain was as alien as the notion of, well, an alien. Similar to research of extraterrestrial life, there were then a few elite scientists, sequestered in institutions, who were better informed to predict what an encounter with a mechanical brain might entail than the general population, for whom such a concept was nothing more than fantasy.

Stanisław Lem was of that class. Son of a doctor, he studied medicine until his transition to literature. As a newcomer to Lem’s copious body of work, what surprised me most about this collection of previously untranslated stories was how, with very little attention to character development, he manages to render this scientific class with as much fidelity as their fields of inquiry. I expected their curiosity and ambition, even obsession, but not their yearning, inquietude, or melancholy. How disappointing that, when confronted with the other, we might not be able to communicate. But how utterly devastating that, when confronted with one of our own, we never are able to truly communicate. In The Truth and Other Stories, it is often this precise pathos that catalyzes action.

There’s inherent value in the defamiliarization of technology that comes from reading literature—especially speculative fiction—from a previous era. Lem luxuriates in the weight and texture of his machines. His favorites occupy rooms and require trips to many types of stores to build. Gels, wires, soldering . . . they are so tactile, until the moment—signaling the beginning of the end—they become more than the sum of their parts. In “The Friend,” a young member of a Short-Wave Radio Club gets caught up in the mysterious mission of a rather haunted man, Harden, who is driven to complete it for a highly secretive friend. While building the electrical structure called “the conjugator,” the boy’s affection for Harden grows as he tries to solve the mystery of the project, yet simultaneously begins to doubt the terms of Harden’s relationship with the absent friend. “The word ‘conjugator’ had come back to mind, which was what Harden had called the apparatus. Coniugo, coniugare—to join, to connect—but what did it mean? What did he want to join, and to what?” he wonders. The real possibility of friendship with Harden is constantly frustrated, ironically, by the bizarre circumstances of this connecting machine. What the technology promises of connection gets in the way of intimacy’s reality.

Harden pressed my hand to his chest with his eyes closed. In any other person it would have looked theatrical, but he really was like that. The more I cared about him—as I was fully aware by now—the more he exasperated me, most of all because of his lethargy and the cult of the ‘friend’ he nurtured. READ MORE…

Am I Really A Woman?: On Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs

November 19, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Darren Huang

Both protagonists ask with yearning and desperation, what sort of woman can I be?

Two East Asian authors, whose debut English-language translations were published this year, have been hailed for their bestselling feminist works: South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo, whose novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 tells the story of a woman that gives up her career to become a stay-at-home-mother; and  Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, whose novella Breasts and Eggs recounts the lives of three women as they all confront oppressive mores in a patriarchal environment. Both works give voice to female protagonists and explore female identity in their respective societies. In this essay, Asymptote Editor-at-Large Darren Huang considers how both of these texts offer explicit critiques of male-dominated societies and argues that these authors are ultimately concerned with the development of female selfhood. 

In Han Kang’s acclaimed 2007 South Korean novel, The Vegetarian, translated into English by Deborah Smith, Yeong-hye, a housewife who is described as completely unremarkable by her husband, refuses to eat meat after suffering recurring dreams of animal slaughter. Her abstention leads to erratic and disturbing behavior, including slitting her wrist after her father-in-law force-feeds her a piece of meat, and a severe physical and mental decline. She becomes more plant-like (refusing all nourishment except water and sunlight,) turns mute and immobile, and is eventually discovered soaking in the rain among trees in a nearby forest. Increasingly alienated from her family and society, she is committed to a remote mental hospital and supported only by her sister. Kang’s disturbing parable is characteristic of a number of South Korean feminist novels for its portrayal of a woman suffering from a form of psychosis that is incomprehensible to others, as well as its pitting of a protagonist against the oppressive mores of a rigid, patriarchal society.

Kang has disputed the characterization of her novel as a direct indictment of South Korean patriarchy and has preferred to focus on its themes of representing mental illness and the corruption of innocence. But two recent East Asian debut novels—Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by South Korean screenwriter-turned-novelist Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang, and Breasts and Eggs by the Japanese songwriter-turned-novelist Mieko Kawakami and adeptly translated into English by Sam Bett and Asymptote Editor-at-Large David Boyd—employ similarly oppressed middle-aged, female protagonists to form more explicit critiques of male-dominated, conformist societies. One of the defining qualities of both novels is that their protagonists attempt self-actualization by liberating themselves from traditional gender roles. These novels, which can both be characterized as bildungsroman, are ultimately concerned with a woman’s development of selfhood in opposition to societal conventions about motherhood and middle age. Both protagonists ask with yearning and desperation, what sort of woman can I be? READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…