Serpentine

June 24, 2024 | in Essays, Retellings | by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

The Vertigo of Blue: On Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine

June 15, 2023 | in Reviews | by Annilee Newton

With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds. . .

Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, Héloïse Press, 2023

“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors.”

From the very first words of her short, poetic novel Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro restructures our expectations. We are entering another place where the rules of existence have changed. By challenging one of the most ingrained dichotomies of perception that we have—a person is alive or a person is dead—she begins to weave the shroud of mystery that is cast over the entirety of Ultramarine. The introduction of the sailor sketches out a third liminal space between our assumptions, destabilizing us and setting a tone of wonder and dread that will carry throughout the text. What could it possibly mean to be a sailor?

Our main character is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, her life fractured into two pieces. In one part, she lives on solid land, waiting uneasily for the moment when she will be reunited with crew and ship. The second part of her life is spent traversing the water, navigating the places between chunks of earth. Strict adherence to protocol has brought her success in a male-dominated career. She now manages a crew of twenty men and the portable world of her metal ship.

Then, one day, she briefly abandons her own protocol. The crew asks her to stop the ship for a few moments in the middle of the crossing so that they can swim naked in the deepest blue of the ocean. She doesn’t know why she agrees, but she agrees, and this one strange acquiescence sets off a chain of inexplicable events.

Translation Tuesday: “The Place of the Living-Dead” by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade

January 18, 2022 | in Translations | by Gabriela Ruivo Trindade and Victor Meadowcroft

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me . . .

This Translation Tuesday, we feature a story that treads the line between the fantastical surrealism of dreaming and the brutal reality of living under conditions of war. In award-winning writer Gabriela Ruivo Trindade’s compact and evocative story, a disoriented narrator reckons with the aftermath of having stepped on a mine, where her lost limbs visit so as to relate to her the physical and spiritual damage that had been wrecked upon her body and her family. Translated from the Portuguese by the author herself and Victor Meadowcroft, the narrator’s voice exhibits a remarkable restraint. This quietly moving story brings the reader to a psychological space where the narrator’s processing of trauma feels at once real and irreal, at once emotional and strangely muted, an always liminal place.

I don’t know my name, or where I was born, or how many years have passed since that day. Around me there is only a grey haze, through which I try in vain to peer. I’ve lost track of the days: entire evenings are condensed into minutes. I’m surrounded by many others, stretched out on countless cots like mine.

My head rests on a damp, foul-smelling straw pillow. My head is the only part of my body supporting me. The rest—my torso, my pelvis, both legs cut above the knee, and my right arm—I can barely feel. They’re entirely numb and don’t respond to my commands.

Some nights, my two legs and left arm come to visit me; the arm, poor thing, always hurrying after the other two. That’s how I used to move, always rushing from place to place. I loved dancing, I remember that well, and people even used to say I would become a great dancer. Too bad. I heard one of the women who come to feed us say I’d stepped on a mine, a mina. I don’t know what that is; I can only remember Granny Mina, who used to tell stories of witches and sprites to all the neighbourhood kids.

But I was telling you about these visits from my arm and legs; it’s through them that I hear news of my family and other things I’ve long forgotten. They turn up every night, come through the door and begin talking right away, as if I were already fully awake, awaiting their arrival. And I am, really; I don’t know if it’s some kind of presentiment. On their first visit I was startled. I awoke to a hand shaking me and, upon opening my eyes, noticed there wasn’t a body attached to the arm. I thought it was a ghost and cried out.

Relax, said a voice, nobody’s going to hurt you. Come on, don’t you recognise us anymore? READ MORE…

Contributors:

Gabriela Ruivo Trindade
Victor Meadowcroft

Language:

Portuguese

Place:

Portugal

Writer:

Gabriela Ruivo Trindade

Tags:

Poetic Childhood and Adulthood: On Charlotte Van den Broeck’s Chameleon | Nachtroer

April 29, 2020 | in Reviews | by Helena Fornells

This joint volume translation introduces the young Belgian poet to English-language audiences with . . . rich tonal and emotional range.

Chameleon | Nachtroer by Charlotte Van den Broeck, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, Bloodaxe Books, 2020

Chameleon | Nachtroer is the first English translation of Charlotte Van den Broeck’s poetry, which combines the Belgian poet’s first two books—first published in Dutch in 2015 and 2017—in one volume translated by David Colmer.

The publication allows English-language readers to follow the development of the poet’s work from her debut to her next collection. It seems important, however, to read them separately as they were intended, allowing some space to breathe between their readings so that we can fully acknowledge the tonal and thematic shifts in the poems and appreciate each collection by its emotional unity.

Chameleon opens with an epigraph from Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: ‘After nothing does the womanly desire to please strive so much as after the appearance of the naïve . . .’ Much of the collection plays around with the notion of naivety, from early childhood through to the distancing from the mother and the experience of romantic relationships; naivety becomes an unstable quality that hides both a nostalgic innocence and a darker vulnerability. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Helena Fornells

Language:

Dutch

Place:

Belgium

Writer:

Charlotte Van den Broeck

Tags:

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2018

January 24, 2018 | in Dispatches, News | by Aditi Machado, Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Henry Ace Knight, and Joshua Craze

Our editors choose their favorites from the Winter 2018 Issue.

Asymptote’s new Winter 2018 issue is replete with spectacular writing. See what our section editors have to say about the pieces closest to their hearts:

It’s a struggle to pick just one poet to highlight from this momentous issue of our journal, but perhaps I will mention the Infrarealist Mexican poet José Vicente Anaya whose work Heriberto Yépez described as “revelation, a sacred practice against brainwashing and lobotomy” (source: translator’s note). Much as each poet in this issue and the set of circumstances in which they write are distinct, I read all their works as sacred, necessary attempts to counter the forces of obliteration and oblivion against which they—and we—strive. In Anaya’s case, a core element of the ritual is híkuri (”peyote” in the indigenous language of Rarámuri), the ingestion of which makes the speaker spiral, psychedelically, inward and outward, so that nothing is quite separate from everything else. The revelation is this: we’ve overbuilt the world and left ourselves broken. Joshua Pollock’s translation recreates the visionary spirit of the hyperlingual source text to bring us the ferocity of lines such as these:

On Superhighways we hallucinate
in order to carry on living, Victor,
let’s build an anti-neutron bomb
that leaves life standing
demolishing suffocating buildings /
new machines working for everyone
so that time raises us
from joy
to Art
to joy / and
HUMANity governs without government

—Aditi Machado, Poetry Editor

“[there are also] a number of young writers who are emerging, for instance, in the Gambia, who are also catering a lot to the local market. They are to come.”— Tijan M. Sallah at an interview at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, 2012

It is impossible to think of Gambian literature without thinking of the poetry, short stories, and essays of Tijan M. Sallah. Sallah is The Gambia’s most renowned and prolific literary figure, but what makes him most remarkable is his generosity. Sallah, like many of the great Gambian writers before him, balanced his “day job” while continuing his tireless support of other writers and The Gambia’s burgeoning literary scene. For writers such as Lenrie Peters, it was being a medical doctor, while holding literary workshops for aspiring young Gambian writers; for Tijan M. Sallah, it was a successful career as an economist at the World Bank, while continuing to foster community among the Gambian diaspora’s literary voices, his early contributions to the Timbooktoo Bookstore, or even—lucky for us at Asymptote—his willingness to write this essay on some of The Gambia’s emerging poets. Sallah’s essay is both a tribute to the previous wave of Gambian writers and a passing on of the baton to the next generation of poets. In this essay, he spotlights three of the exciting new voices in the Gambian literary landscape today. It’s a must-read from this issue.

—Ah-reum Han, Writers on Writers Editor