Posts filed under 'mental illness'

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…

“. . . 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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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 29, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Julia Sherwood, and Peera Songkünnatham

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 4, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, MK Harb, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest from Japan, Taiwan, and Lebanon!

As certain places are heating up with a flurry of events, others are remaining cautious and mindful. Still, the good thing about the page is that it remains steadfast, and our work remains something that we can always turn to, celebrate, and share in. This week, our editors are once again bringing you the latest in world literature news, with a new Japanese literary translation workshop centering on heritage speakers and people of colour, a newly virtual Taipei Literature Festival, and a new winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award. 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Poet and academic Iman Mersal has won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award! Her creative non-fiction work, In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat, is part journalistic excellence, part poetic elegy, all while maintaining the sensibility of writing in the life of a complex character. It traces chronicles the late Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayat, her struggles with mental illness, and her tragic death in the 1960s.

What’s new in Arabic literature? Banipal Magazine’s Spring issue is out, and it’s dedicated to Jerusalem and the acclaimed Palestinian auteur, Mahmoud Shukair, who has penned over forty-five books and six television series. This comes at a time when the Arab literary scene has overwhelmingly expressed its solidarity with the Palestinian people. Also on the subject of Palestine—this spring, I interviewed Palestinian-French writer and researcher, Karim Kattan, over here at Asymptote where we discussed belonging, the craft of writing, and other curious things. Also, Palestinian-Chilean writer Lina Meruane has a new novel out; Nervous System, translated into English by Megan McDowell, deals with the daunting specter of writer’s block. Read a review of the acclaimed work right here on the Asymptote blog!

How about some Arab cabaret? Well-read academic and translator Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring 20’s is an engrossing retelling of vagabonds, feminists, and performers as they defied gender norms, transgressed class lines, and created iconic productions. Another beautiful and timely publication by Saqi Books is We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. Edited by British-Palestinian writer, Selma Dabbagh, the anthology celebrates and examines the tradition of erotic writing in Arabic literature and its many women pioneers. Lastly, yours truly has a short story out with The Bombay Review, dealing with censorship and artificial intelligence. READ MORE…

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?

Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.

NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?

AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Kōtarō Takamura

December 8, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Leanne Ogasawara

Chieko, who has become an element, / Is even now within my flesh, smiling at me

Master poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) candidly explores his grief and longing in these selections from the Chieko Poems, our pick for this week’s Translation Tuesday. As translator Leanne Ogasawara writes: “The Chieko Poems tell the story of the poet’s love for his wife. Reading the anthology chronologically, we begin with poems that describe the passion of their early romance and elopement against the wishes of their parents, following along as the poems become concerned with the trauma of Chieko’s mental illness and early death in 1938. Even after she is gone, Chieko remained the central figure in Kotaro’s life, and he would continue to write poem after poem about her. [. . .] The Chieko Poems are unforgettable as much for their early romance and passion as for the sense of loss and recovery expressed in the later poems. Kotaro slowly came to take comfort in this idea that through her death, Chieko returned to nature becoming imbued in all the things around him—even within his own body.” The selections below are three poems written after Chieko’s death. Kotaro’s sorrow accompanies his longing and desire as the speaker fixates on the beauty of his beloved’s physical form. With imagery that is at once reverential and abject, the speaker views his beloved’s body as something inhabiting both the natural and spiritual worlds.

A Desolate Homecoming

Chieko, who wanted to return home so badly
Has come home dead.
Late one October night, I sweep a small corner
   of the empty atelier
Cleaning, purifying
There I place Chieko.
And in front of this lifeless body
I remain standing a long time.
Someone turns the screen upside down.
Someone lights the incense.
Someone puts makeup on Chieko.
Things somehow get done.
As the sun rises and then sets
The house grows busy, buried in flowers
There is something like a funeral
Then, Chieko is gone.
And I stand alone
      in this now empty and dark atelier.
Tonight people say the full moon is beautiful READ MORE…

Not Strictly a Serial Killer: An Interview with Carlos Busqued

October 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Samuel Rutter

A “monster” is made of the very same stuff as people who are, in theory . . . normal. We’re much closer to being monsters than we’d like to admit.

In September of 1982, Ricardo Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires. The crimes happened in close physical proximity and over a short period of time, but to this day, neither the perpetrator nor the many teams of experts who have treated Melogno have been able to discern a motive. Writer Carlos Busqued spent over two years interviewing Melogno and compiling the material that would eventually become Magnetized, published in English for the first time in June 2020 by Catapult.

The novel’s translator, Samuel Rutter, exchanged a series of emails with the author that touched on the writer’s process, the singularities of Ricardo’s case, and life in Buenos Aires under quarantine.

Samuel Rutter (SR): How did you first learn about Ricardo Melogno, and is his case still well-known in Argentina today?

Carlos Busqued (CB): No, quite the opposite actually—it was quite a sensation when it first happened, but the news cycle at the time didn’t cover it for long. Ricardo committed the murders right at the end of the last military dictatorship—two months after Argentina lost the Falklands War—so his crimes were quickly buried under an avalanche of news and exposés that were even more macabre.

I was a kid at the time of the murders and never heard about them back then—I lived in Chaco, a province in the far north of Argentina, so we didn’t read the press from Buenos Aires so much, and we only got some of their TV channels. So it was many years later that I stumbled across Ricardo’s case by chance. I got to know someone who worked on his treatment team, and I noticed that on the occasions I joined the team for after-work drinks or a birthday party, they tended to speak of Ricardo with empathy and curiosity. Every now and again they’d speculate about one or another detail of the crimes, which piqued my interest right away.

SR: What drew your attention to the case as a writer? Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about it?

CB: It was the strangeness of the whole thing, the fact that there really was no motive. Even today there is very little understanding of crimes with no known motive, and barely any research on the subject. A person who commits four identical murders is not acting randomly, but even so, neither Ricardo nor the numerous teams of specialists who examined him have been able to come up with a motive. Broadly speaking, when someone kills, they do it to survive. How that applies to Ricardo’s mindset when he committed the murders remains a complete mystery. READ MORE…

Rebel Poetry: Rodrigo Lira’s Testimony of Circumstances in Review

December 17, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Garrett Phelps

Lira’s neologisms, wordplay, intertextuality, and assonance-based rhythms would cost even the best translator a pint of blood.

Testimony of Circumstances by Rodrigo Lira, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Rothe and Rodrigo Olavarría, Cardboard House Press

Latin America gave the second half of the twentieth century some of its most destructive and incendiary poetry. In Bogotá, in the 1960s, the Nadaistas threw copies of Cervantes into a bonfire and shouted from rooftops of an imminent socio-poetic revolution, and anyone who knows the name Bolaño has likely heard how Mexico’s Infrarealistas heckled the hell out of Octavio Paz. This was the period of poesía rebelde, rebel poetry, in which agitation played a big role on the street and the page. One particularly volatile poet from this milieu was Rodrigo Lira, who stuck out even at a time when this sort of counter-cultural militancy wasn’t unheard of. Testimony of Circumstances, translated into English by Rodrigo Olavarría and Thomas Rothe, secures his position as a true outsider in a world full of pretenders.

Born in 1949 into an upper middle-class family, Rodrigo Lira received a good education and spent his first fifteen years in close proximity to Chile’s elite, but as a teenager he began to veer far from bourgeois respectability. He ingested substantial amounts of weed. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had electroshock therapy at his family’s insistence. He rallied behind Salvador Allende’s socialist government until Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-backed coup turned Chile into a nationalist, ultra-capitalist nightmare. Anyone with left-wing sympathies risked persecution, and the new regime kidnapped and executed thousands of its own citizens on that very charge. Although Lira grew quiet on political matters, he was hardly mute.

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What’s New in Translation? November 2016

November 7, 2016  |  in New in Translation, News, Reviews  |  by Hanna Heiskanen, Nina Sparling, and Sam Carter

Asymptote reviews some of the best new books from French, Swedish, and German.

cabo-de-gata

Cabo de Gata, by Eugen Ruge, tr. Anthea Bell, Graywolf Press

Review: Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor, US

First published in German in 2013—when his In Times of Fading Light appeared in English—Eugen Ruge’s Cabo de Gata, out this month from Graywolf Press, might strike a familiar note for readers who have witnessed a surge in autobiographically-inflected works that frequently take the production of fiction as a subject worthy of novelistic exploration. Hailing from both the Anglophone world and beyond, such novels record the process of their creation or the struggles to even begin them, and Ruge quickly aligns himself with this approach in his tale of a writer’s attempt to get away from it all in the hope of figuring something out. “I made up this story so that I could tell it the way it was,” declares the dedication to this slender volume, and a more precise formulation arrives soon after as the narrator recalls a period in which “I was testing everything that I did or that happened to me at the same moment, or the next moment, or the moment after that, for its suitability as a subject … as I was living my life, I was beginning to describe it for the sake of experiment.”

While in Cabo de Gata, a small town on the Andalusian coast, the narrator quickly settles into routines designed to simultaneously distract him from blank pages and provide him with some inspiration to fill them. The local fishermen, whom the narrator visits on his daily stroll, can empathize with such difficulties: ¡Mucho trabajo, poco pescado! A lot of work for only a little fish—it’s a piscatory philosophy that applies just as well to the writing life. Ruge, however, proves to be an exceptionally gifted angler as he reels in catch after catch in what would seem to be difficult waters, namely a single man’s short trip to this seaside village.

Serving as a metronome marking out the rhythm of memories that constitute the novel, a refrain of “I remember” begins many of the paragraphs that have been expertly rendered by translator Anthea Bell. Far from repetitive or reductive, such a strategy instead seems somehow expansive, particularly when we are reminded that, “fundamentally memory reinvents all memories.” Both the vagaries and the vagueness of memories—“I remember all that only vaguely, however, like a film without a soundtrack,” remarks the narrator in a line that will be hard to forget—serve as the subjects of reflection that find their counterpart in the rhythms of the sea and the surrounding Spanish countryside.

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