Posts filed under 'in memoriam'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Sofija Popovska

Dispatches from Romania, Sweden, and North Macedonia!

In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on the continual remembrance of iconic poets, interdisciplinary festivals, and writing that draws attention to the climate crisis. Read on to find out more!

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

Sixty years after the tragic passing of Danica Ručigaj, iconic poet and pioneer of écriture féminine in North Macedonia, an anniversary edition containing the entirety of her oeuvre was published this month. The collection, entitled Srebreni nokjni igri i zarobenici na vetrot (Silver Nighttime Games and Prisoners of the Wind) was prepared by two prominent publicists and journalists working at Radio Skopje, Sveto Stamenov and Iskra Cholovikj, who have dedicated over two decades to researching Ručigaj’s reception and sustaining the vivacity of her legacy.

Ručigaj (1934–1963), sometimes referred to as the Sylvia Plath of North Macedonia for the unabashed vulnerability of her writing, studied ancient Greek, Latin, and Southern Slavic literature, and also worked for the Cultural Ministry of North Macedonia. She passed away at the age of twenty-nine in the 1963 Skopje earthquake—a devastating event that resulted in numerous casualties and left the entire city in ruins. Two poems famously discovered in the ruins of Ručigaj’s home—“Circles” and “Untitled”—will be featured in the anthology, along with essays about her work by prominent scholars and a complete bibliography of publications containing Ručigaj’s writing.

Ručigaj’s poetry, informed by her academic background and nonconformist, taboo-defying artistic attitude, occupies a prominent position in Macedonian literary history. Her refusal to comply with patriarchal norms continues to retain its relevance, as anti-equality sentiments are rising amidst the public. In one of her best-known poems, “No, Do Not Speak to Me” (“Ne, Ne Zboruvaj Mi”), a feminine voice laments the death of a bird who lived “within eyes that have now dried up”, simultaneously noting that its death might be a relief to some: “Come hither, do not fear / Those eyes no longer shine / And so, come hither.” As the poem progresses, we begin to realize that the owner of the eyes is the feminine speaker herself; without the bird—their inner songsmith—they no longer pose a threat to the Other that the poem is directed to. This poem remains an accurate image of gender relations in Macedonian society, where equality is still considered a threat to the “sanctity of the family”. READ MORE…

Come, Sisters: In Memory of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ

July 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Thuy Dinh

In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.

In this essay, Thuy Dinh, one of the translators of Vietnamese poet Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, remembers and reflects on the visual beauty, delicate music, and subtle dissonances of her work, in light of her recent passing.

On July 6, 2023, Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ, one of Vietnam’s major poets whose poetry was featured in Asymptote’s July 2013 issue, passed away in Saigon, Vietnam, due to complications from Alzheimer’s. She was 74.

An author of several acclaimed poetry collections and children’s stories, Mỹ Dạ attended the Nguyễn Du Writing School in Hà Nội in 1983 and Russia’s Maxim Gorky Institute of Advanced Studies in Literature in 1988. In 2007, she was awarded the National Prize in Literature and the Arts ⸺Vietnam’s highest literary honor ⸺ for her three poetry collections: Trái Tim Sinh Nở (The Blossoming Heart), Bài Thơ Không Năm Tháng (Poems Without Years), and Đề Tặng Một Giấc Mơ (Dedicated to a Dream). Her last two collections, Soul Brimming with Wild Chrysanthemums (Hồn Đầy Hoa Cúc Dại) and The Love Poems of Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ (Thơ Tình Lâm thị Mỹ Dạ) were also published in 2007. In the U.S., Green Rice, an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s select poems, co-translated by poet Martha Collins and myself, represents her poetic legacy in translation.

I first met Mỹ Dạ in the summer of 2000 in Boston, Massachusetts, when she came to the William Joiner Institute as part of an invited four-member delegation of writers from Vietnam. I had come to the Institute that summer to attend workshops in translation and creative nonfiction; serendipitously, Martha, who taught the translation workshop, was looking for a Vietnamese co-translator to work with her on an anthology of Mỹ Dạ’s poetry. I happily embarked on this project, sensing that this collaboration—besides being my first major translation project⸺would also give me an immersive opportunity to study an important female poet from “the other side.” As a young writer whose family had been airlifted out of Saigon by U.S. military personnel near the end of the Vietnam War, I knew very little at the time about literature from the Communist perspective. We were still in the early years of the internet, and barely five years into the normalization of U.S-Vietnam relations.

Most of all, I was drawn to the prospect of translating Mỹ Dạ’s work by the voice of the poet herself—a voice that I have found, in person and through her writing, to be artlessly nuanced. I was born in the south, years after the 1954 separation of North and South Vietnam, but have remained deeply attuned to my family’s Hà Nội accent; as such, I had to learn to decode Mỹ Da’s voice. Her melodious Central Vietnamese cadence gradually revealed a mordant sense of humor that was not too different from my late maternal grandfather’s Northern brand of sarcasm. In my memory, Mỹ Dạ’s speech takes on the resonance of wind chimes, softly rolling pebbles, and rustling waves.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 7, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Charlie Ng, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in letters from Hong Kong, Palestine, and Kenya.

This week, our editors are reporting on the intersection between literature and social movements. In Hong Kong, writers reflect on the June 4 protests at Tiananmen Square, in light of  the continual tensions between China and the island. In Palestine, a new podcast features writers orienting their own work within the \ body of Palestinian literature. And in Kenya, the country mourns the loss of revolutionary playwright Micere Mugo. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Since the National Security Law in Hong Kong came into effect in June 2020, the annual candlelight vigil for commemorating the June Fourth Tiananmen Square protests have not been organized for four years; the event’s host, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, was also dissolved in September 2021. Additionally, the event’s traditional venue, the Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, was under renovation and not available to be booked this year.

Although public commemoration was forbidden, remembrance could still be possible through writing; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal called for short submissions of reflections written about June 4, 2023—which could be directly, indirectly, or even not related to the event. The project, “Just Another Day”, also welcomed written works accompanied with photos or artwork. Fifty-four submissions were published on Cha’s blog, presenting a wide range of reflections from local and overseas writers. Translator Lucas Klein contemplates on the protest culture in Hong Kong and what he witnessed outside of the Victoria Park in his post, while Hong Kong poet Jennifer Wong contributed a prose poem on the importance of memory. Asymptote’s assistant editor of fiction Michelle Suen interweaves childhood nostalgia and postcolonial politics in her reflection, and I also tell a brief story of my personal experience of June Fourth over the years. Varied as they are, the texts testify to the unstoppable impact of the historical event, in both people’s mind and reality.

Meanwhile, as issue 72 of local bilingual poetry magazine, Voice & Verse, was just published, the magazine is organizing a reading session in collaboration with Cha, a crossover that echoes the issue’s English section theme: “Crossings”. The reading session will take place on July 12, hosted by Tammy Ho and Matthew Cheng. Local and international contributors to both journals have been invited to read their works. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Carol Khoury, and MARGENTO

The latest in literature from Spain, Mexico, Palestine, and the USA!

This week, we find the world celebrating the voices of both writers and translators. In New York City, a live reading event features the ongoing work of Latin American writers, while in Mexico City, a Chicanx poetry reading tour is inaugurated. In Palestine, the nation mourns the loss of poet and translator Salma Khadra Jayyusi, a brilliant mind who never ceased to advocate for Arabic literature and its translation. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Romanian writing sees the spotlight, and in Barcelona, the literary community proudly reminds the world to name the translator. 

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States and Mexico

April has seen many phenomenal community initiatives championing diverse and outstanding writers, both in the U.S. and Mexico.

On Saturday, April 15, I travelled to Queens in New York City to attend a reading at the independent Hispanic bookstore, Librería barco de papel. Aptly held in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood known for its extraordinary cultural diversity, the event featured the most recent work-in-progress of established and emerging Latin American writers. The lineup was a diverse assembly of nationalities, genres, and visions. It included Ruy Feben (Mexico), Margarita Drago (Argentina), Sara Malagón Llano (Colombia), and Nilton Maa (Perú). Their readings touched on pressing topics such as cultural memory and migration, sexuality and friendship, exile and language, and technology and heritage. I found them especially moving as someone from Mexico who has lived abroad for so many years. The atmosphere was joyful and engaging, vitalized by the effervescent hospitality of the event’s organizer and host: Argentinian writer, professor, and community leader Guillermo Severiche. Supported by many institutions, he runs En Construcción, a series of readings and workshops aimed at promoting New York-based Latinx and Latin American writers working in Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, Quechua, or any other languages from the continent. Severiche’s initiative has been celebrated and sponsored by several organizations, among them the magazine Poets & Writers, the Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, which recently awarded him a grant for his upcoming writing project, about birds in New York.

In Mexico City, another marvelous literary event is taking place between April 25-29: the national tour of Mexican and Chicanx poetry, “Speaking in tongues / Hablando en lenguas”, founded, organized, and directed by the internationally acclaimed Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. The groundbreaking reading series will bring Chicanx poetry to several cities across Mexico, with a lineup including Reynosa and Mexican poet Indira Isel Torres Crux, alongside the Chicanx poets Aideed Medina, Viva Padilla, Josiah Luis Alderete, and Hector Son of Hector. Together they perform a vibrant diversity of styles, perspectives, and languages. Their readings at this momentous festival challenge historical silences (ironically, Latinx poetry is not widely known or read in Mexico) and, crucially, bring people together through joy, community, and the shared passion for poetry. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Josefina Massot, and Kristina Tatarian

News this week from Argentina, Armenia, and Hong Kong!

As the scope of literature continues to take in the shifting realms of experiences and global relations, our editors from around the world report the latest updates, from festivals, activisms, and the spotlighting of vital voices both new and familiar. Read on to find out more!

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last week, we mourned the loss of the great Sergio Chejfec, whose work spanned grammars, genres, and geographies. Chejfec spent his time between his native Buenos Aires and New York City, where he lived and taught at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. During a 2018 interview with Télam, he spoke about the impact of migration on his work: “In my experience, moving from one country to another accentuates the passage of time: the gap isn’t merely geographic. Exiles are far away from their countries, but also from the network of simultaneities they were accustomed to while living there; notable among these is language.” Fortunately, gaps and absences can be bridged through translation. Chejfec’s works are available in French, German, Portuguese, and English, and US readers can delight in them via Open Letter.

Meanwhile, Other Press is on the verge of releasing Kit Maude’s rendition of Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (incidentally, Sosa Villada’s latest has just come out in Spanish). Equal parts gritty and tender, Bad Girls narrates a trans woman’s exploits at the margins of society; a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2020, it’s bound to take America by storm. The award’s previous winner, Maria Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, just out from Catapult, was also widely celebrated upon its reception. The novel, translated by Thomas Bunstead, follows an auction house employee on the trail of an elusive forger; like Gainza’s The Optic Nerve, it draws from art and literature to great effect. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

January 28, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Karen Van Dyck

After Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke passed last week, we honor her life’s work with these two poems of eerie clarity, translated by Karen Van Dyck.

When Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a year old, the celebrated writer and critic Nikos Kazantzakis stood as godfather at her baptism. When she was seventeen, he published her poem “All Alone” in an Athenian magazine with a note saying that it was the most beautiful poem he had ever read. By her early twenties she was already an established poet. During the dictatorship (1967-1974), she and a group of younger poets spearheaded a new kind of poetry that grappled with the confusion and censorship of those years. Meeting regularly with the translator Kimon Friar, they produced an anthology of six young poets, one of the first books to break the self-imposed silence initiated by the Nobel laureate poet George Seferis in response to the colonels’ press laws. Linking the women poets of the previous postwar generation (Eleni Vakalo, Kiki Dimoula) to those of the generation of the ’70s (Rhea Galanaki, Maria Laina, Jenny Mastoraki), Anghelaki-Rooke stands out for the lyrical accessibility of her work. Hers is a poetry of flesh, indiscretion, and the divine all rolled into one. For Anghelaki-Rooke the body is a passageway anchoring the abstract metaphysics of myth in the rituals of everyday life. It is through the body that everything makes sense. As she once said in an interview: “I do not distinguish the soul from the body and from all the mystery of existence . . . Everything I transform into poetry must first come through the body. My question is always how will the body react? To the weather, to aging, to sickness, to a storm, to love? The highest ideas, the loftiest concepts, depend on the morning cough . . .” In commemoration of her passing last week, here are two poems of eerie clarity from her last collection in which it is already clear she is looking at the world “with other eyes.”
—Karen Van Dyck, translator

Epilogue Wind

Each time an act ends
humans feel the need
to write an epilogue
on paper or in the heart.
What was created by the mind
like lightening wants to shine
in the heaven of creation, to last
even if only in one small corner of history.
I find myself at that time of life
where I should “epilogue”
but I feel my past disappear
leaving only faint tastes and images
with no explanation.
The wind is there, though,
sometimes wild, sometimes cool,
carrying with it storms or calm.
Yes, the wind is the right epilogue
to a complete life
which, of course, when asked why
has no answer.
READ MORE…

In Memoriam: Victor Heringer

March 29, 2018  |  in News  |  by Alice Sant'Anna, Lara Norgaard, and Rita Mattar

Borders, designed to be crossed and, whenever possible, abolished, were recurrent themes in Victor's oeuvre.

Today we bring you a reflection on the life of Brazilian writer Victor Heringer. Victor’s elegant and thought-provoking non-fiction piece “Notes for a General Theory of the Arriviste” was featured in the Summer 2017 issue of Asymptote where we have been long-time admirers of his work. Victor, who would be thirty this week, passed away on March 7, 2018. Today we celebrate his literary work.

Victor Heringer was a multi-genre, multi-faceted artist. It’s not enough to remember him as “Victor, the poet” or “Victor, the writer.” Victor drew and made films and sound installations. He wrote poetry, nonfiction, novels. It was as though the borders between genres were not so fixed or important. Indeed, borders, designed to be crossed and, whenever possible, abolished, were recurrent themes in his oeuvre.

“Being Brazilian, and especially being from Rio de Janeiro, was something I had to learn how to do,” said the writer, born in Rio in 1988, in an interview. “I spent my childhood moving between cities and countries, mostly Argentina and Chile. For a few years, I was sure I would stay in Santiago forever and become a Chilean citizen. When I came back to Brazil as a teenager, it took me a long time to lose the accent. I felt Chilean. In Chile, I’d felt Argentinian; in England, Brazilian; in Peru, where I am now, I’m starting to feel that I am nothing at all, maybe just a stateless person with documents and a few languages mixed up in my head.”

READ MORE…

RIP: Roberto “Freak” Antoni

March 17, 2014  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Antony Shugaar

"One good thing about getting sick, really sick... was that it made him give up drugs."

Roberto Freak Antoni died just short of age sixty on February 12 this year. One good thing about getting sick, really sick, he noted, was that it made him give up drugs. Antoni—or Freak, his moniker among legions of both young and aging fans—was by no means a role model, but  a rock star and poet, and above all a deeply subversive figure in Italian literature and pop culture.

READ MORE…

Long Day Away

February 24, 2014  |  in Essays, News, Translations  |  by Gábor Schein and Ottilie Mulzet

Remembering Szilárd Borbély

I just keep on repeating his name, I call out to him, I call him on the phone, as if he would answer. I have no words. The demons of death had been hovering around Szilárd for a long time. I was afraid of them at times—he certainly was not. He lived with them, but he did not feed them. READ MORE…