Posts filed under 'lesbian literature'

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.

The Double-Edged Possibility of Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Hanna Johansson

June 3, 2024 | in Interviews | by Sofija Popovska

I think this kind of [queer] isolation can be generative for an author—it provides you with this ability to see while not being seen.

In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson unleashes a rapturous, sinuous tale of desire and its reckless vehicle. After falling for an older artist, a misguided journalist follows her and her teenage daughter onto a trip to the Greek islands in an almost-instinctive sense of codependence, and soon the gorgeous shores are turned into a stage of ruins, in which a self-deluding passion lays bear the tensions between the wanting and the wanted. Shifting between the incantatory posturing of someone captivated by the forbidden and the anxious distortions of unreciprocated intimacy, Johansson deftly grows an explosive triangulation in which closeness begets isolation, and isolation begets tragedy. In the following interview, Sofija Popovska speaks to Johansson about Antiquity’s queerness, ancient Greece as a specter, and how the novel considers power.

Sofija Popovska (SP): Firstly, congratulations on your gorgeous debut novel! Before we dive into the text itself, could you tell me a little about how Antiquity came into existence?

Hanna Johansson (HJ): I started writing it seriously in 2018, and I had at that point been trying for a while to write a story about a trio of some sort. I find that kind of social structure to be very interesting and enticing—not the kind of love triangle where two people desire the same person, but a triangle where two people might belong to each other in this obvious, indisputable way, like a couple, or, as in Antiquity, a mother and her daughter, with a third person sort of looking in, desiring their bond more than anything else. I had also had a little bit of a personal crisis in 2016 and went to Ermoupoli for three months and realized pretty quickly that I would like to write something set in that city. It’s so beautiful and glamorous and strange at the same time. So, all of that had been brewing for a couple of years, and then, in the fall of 2018, I moved from Stockholm to a smaller city with my partner, who’s also a writer, while she was getting her MFA. I’m not sure I could have written it without those circumstances—the fact that she was incredibly supportive, and that we were living in a way that left me plenty of time to write.

SP: Described in its promotional materials as a “queer Lolita story” and as reminiscent of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, Antiquity is, from the outset, embedded in a specific literary tradition. Was this cultural situatedness a planned feature? Were you ‘in conversation’ with any of these works—or other texts—during the writing process, and, if so, what effect did you hope to achieve by recasting (and subverting?) their themes and elements in Antiquity?

HJ: Yes, the cultural situatedness was a planned feature, I would say. I was very preoccupied, while I was writing Antiquity, with these sorts of queer or gay tropes—the age gap love story, for instance, which is one, although maybe not very nuanced, way of describing the novels mentioned—but probably even more the story of the guest who overstays their welcome, like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I read The Line of Beauty in my late teens and it made a huge impression on me. Saltburn is another example of that trope, to mention something even more current. These are all stories of people who are obsessed with beauty, and who have a desire for luxury, but they also have this seemingly unquenchable thirst for belonging—and an equally intense conviction that they can’t belong anywhere unless they are deceptive and not themselves—and this very much informs the narrator of Antiquity.

The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

February 21, 2024 | in Interviews | by Jaeyeon Yoo

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life?

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury).

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year.

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin?

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019.

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue.

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound.