Posts filed under 'misogyny'

For the Reader Who Cannot Be Bought: On Dubravka Ugrešić’s A Muzzle for Witches

October 10, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Eamon McGrath

. . . her writing worked to unsettle, challenge, and dismantle—a process she called “a perestroika of literary values.”

A Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Open Letter, 2024

For thirty years, Dubravka Ugrešić lived in self-imposed exile as a cultural dissident and an enduring critic, challenging the prevailing orthodoxies that fueled anti-intellectualism, oppression, inequality, and nationalism. Her prolific writing—including both fiction and essays—took on topics ranging from the rise of virtual fandoms and the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, to cultural nostalgia and the state of the publishing industry.

A Muzzle for Witches, released this year by her longtime American publisher Open Letter, was Ugrešić’s final book before her death in March 2023. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (the preeminent translator into English of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian authors, including David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, and Robert Perišić), the book is a highly polished transcript of an interview between Ugrešić and literary critic Merima Omeragić.

The book is divided into seven sections, throughout which Ugrešić expounds upon many of the key themes and ideas she addressed in her life’s work. Loosely guided by Omeragić’s brief questions, she focuses on three subjects that are her greatest concerns: the resurgence of Croatian nationalism after the breakup of Yugoslavia; the marginalization of women’s voices, particularly in literature; and the dubious future of contemporary literature itself. Cumulatively, these three areas—in no small part responsible for her extended exile—suggest a grim outlook for the future.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 13, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Carol Khoury

The latest literary news from Palestine, the United States, and the Philippines

This week, one of our editors-at-large reports from Palestine, amidst the outbreak of war. Our editors also report on new publications from the Philippines and literary festivals in New York. 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In a normal world, you would expect me to write my dispatch this week about the latest version of Palestine International Book Fair, or about Raja Shehadeh making the 2023 National Book Awards finalists list, or the just-concluded Palestine Writes Festival. But this week, Palestine is far from normal, although what we are living now is also déjà vu.

My last dispatch was about Gaza, but it was pleasant news. Little did I know what the following month would hold when I wrote “Each morning, as the sun timidly broke through the horizon, Mosab Abu Toha’s words flowed like a river, weaving tales of resilience and hope from the depths of despair.”

I will give the floor to Mosab this dispatch too:

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What’s New in Translation: July 2023

July 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu and Heloisa Selles

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

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Strangely Familiar: A Menagerie of Contemporary Thai and Indonesian Writing

August 25, 2021  |  in Dispatches  |  by Peera Songkünnatham

A comparative imagination is best guided by a “rebel consciousness” which works towards mutual emancipation from all systems of domination.

Although the Thai and Indonesian languages have no linkages and belong to quite different linguistic ancestries, both have long had a fatalistic image of a frog who lives all its life under half a coconut shell.

—Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

What can two nations mired in their own peculiar chauvinisms learn from each other? How does a country take a long, hard look at itself without losing the exercise of hard-fought internationalism? Earlier this month, the conference “Thai and Indonesian Writing in an Era of Conservative Redux” yielded certain insights to these questions via literary means. Featuring twenty-one speakers and conducted entirely bilingually in Thai and Indonesian, the conference is a colossal collaboration between the School of Political Science and Laws, Walailak University, Thailand, and the Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang, Indonesia.

Exemplifying the critical spirit of this “South-South” comparison, Indonesia’s keynote speaker Linda Christanty shared a personal anecdote: on a visit to Thailand, she went to a cinema and was prompted to stand up for the royal anthem. The Indonesian writer and journalist had then felt proud that Indonesians, in contrast, did not need to stand up to pay respects to some royalty from Java. However, this pride was nullified when, in 2019, the Indonesian Minister of Youth and Sports Affairs—enamored with the Thai monarchy—came up with a proposal: requiring moviegoers to stand up before the images of Yogyakarta Sultan Hamengkubuwono X and to sing along to the national anthem. Even though the proposal didn’t become policy, this anecdote is an important reminder that one cannot afford national smugness when authoritarianism spreads internationally, as it increasingly does.

Neither does the conference dwell on the opposite of smugness—i.e. the grass is greener syndrome—otherwise prevalent in international comparisons from the standpoint of a terrible national situation, especially vis-à-vis the West. Even if the grass on the other side is really greener, the vital point of comparison remains first and foremost to find out exactly how it has become so not-green where one is.

Thai scholar and critic Chusak Pattarakulvanit concurs with Linda Christanty that the so-called “conservative redux” may be more accurately described as a re-strengthening of something that never went away. In his diagnosis of the phenomenon where formerly leftist or pro-democracy writers enjoy a “free right turn,” Chusak identifies three structural contributors: recuperation of subversive works, institutionalization via patronage, and fetishization. The last entails the reduction of literary work—with its inherent capacity to go against convention—to a single prescribed reading, as well as the fixation on a certain “resistant” aesthetics that mutates it into a sacred thing (khong), divorced from actually existing social conditions. READ MORE…

My 2018: Chloe Lim

December 21, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Chloe Lim

There are only so many homes we can be familiar with, but allowing others to introduce their homes to us makes the world seem so much bigger.

In today’s post, Assistant Blog Editor Chloe Lim shares the books that defined her year in reading. As she moved between two cities and two phases of her life, Chloe also explored literature from Albania, Taiwan, and the Caribbean diaspora—and made some reading resolutions for 2019 along the way!

2018 has been a strange transitional year. I spent half of it in Oxford, finishing a Masters degree, and the other half in Singapore. Making sense of the world, and the daily madness of news cycles, became just a bit more bewildering working from two different cities. Recently, my days have been filled by attempts to try new things, and being open to the unexpected experiences that moving can bring. My year in reading has followed that pattern: eclectic as a whole, but generous in providing new perspectives and often respite from the chaos of world politics.

A friend gave me a copy of Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun for my birthday last year, and it became one of the first books I read this year. A slim novel in and of itself, it’s breathtaking in its pacing, and filled with Murakami’s trademark haunting prose. Arguably a great read for the winter months, Shimamoto’s melancholy, grief, and terrible loneliness are coupled with an ennui she compares to the illness hysteria siberiana. Picturing herself as a Siberian farmer, she explains:

“Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You throw your plough aside and, your head completely empty of thought, you begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun.”

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Don’t Look Back in Anger: Virginie Despentes and Modern France

November 12, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

Despentes shows that evil is all too human.

Following our recently published review of Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things, Barbara Halla takes on the Vernon Subutex Trilogy. In this essay, Despentes’ most recent work is seen to interrogate female anger, everyday life, and the power of community in new, thought-provoking ways.

In a 2017 profile of Virginie Despentes, Le Monde eschewed Despentes’ name, preferring to refer to her simply as Le Phénomène, The Phenomenon, throughout the piece. This epithet is no exaggeration: Despentes has held the French literary scene in her grip since the mid-nineties when she published her first book, Baise-moi (translated into English as Rape me, by Bruce Benderson), and then directed its 2001 movie adaptation, featuring two porn actresses in the lead. Manu and Nadine, the main characters and both victims of violence of some kind, embark upon a road trip where they lure, sexually exploit and kill off men. It wasn’t just the violent acts that made Baise-moi feel radical. It was the lustful pleasure the protagonists took in this violence that stunned audiences, leading to a temporary ban of the film in France. As Lauren Elkin points out in The Paris Review, when the movie came out, there was nothing else to compare it to, so critics fell back on Thelma & Louise, another feminist road film about two women on the run. But Despentes’ nihilistic and sadistic story has little in common with Thelma and Louise.

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Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

November 13, 2017  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Allegra Rosenbaum and Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue. 

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.

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