Posts filed under 'music and literature'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 11, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Asymptote, MARGENTO, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary updates from Ireland, Hong Kong, and a special on the Nobel laureate!

A world of news in this week’s roundup! From Ireland, discover the ambitious and innovative work of Macha Press, a collective pursuing a literature that is “international and intergenerational”; from Hong Kong and China, the fifteenth edition of the renowned International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong highlights the topic of translation; and from the Asymptote team as a whole, catch up on Han Kang, this year’s Nobel laureate in Literature.

The Asymptote Team, Reporting from our Fortnightly Airmail

And the winner of the Nobel is . . . Han Kang! After Annie Ernaux, the latest female winner in 2022, Han Kang is the eighteenth woman—and the first from South Korea—to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee’s citation commends her “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Her works confront acutely difficult subjects with a rare fearlessness and sensitivity, whether it be the personal, as in the Booker International Prize-winning The Vegetarian—a feminist classic of modern Korean literature that offers a powerful rebuke to a world that too often silences women—or the historical in Human Acts, where she depicts the Gwangju student massacre of 1980. In an exclusive essay for our Winter 2016 issue, her longtime English translator Deborah Smith describes the impenetrable potency of her style in this book: “Whenever I translate her work, I find myself arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there . . . the images themselves are so powerfully evoked by the Korean that I sometimes find myself searching the original text in vain, convinced that they were in there somewhere, as vividly explicit as they are in my head.”

After checking out our coverage of her latest novel in English translation, Greek Lessons, dive into more Korean Literature in the two Special Features we organized in partnership with LTI Korea, available for free in our Spring 2018 and the Winter 2023 editions.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland

One of the most significant events in recent Irish letters was the establishment of Macha Press in August and the subsequent announcement regarding its first two book launches, the debut already scheduled for October 17. Macha Press is a collective endeavour recently founded by seven poets with wide-ranging practices and experience: Siobhan Campbell, Ruth Carr, Natasha Cuddington, Shannon Kuta Kelly, Kathleen McCracken, Alanna Offield, and Lorna Shaughnessy. As stated in their first newsletter; “all founders are currently based on the island of Ireland and share a vision for the press that is international and intergenerational.” According to Lorna Shaughnessy, one of the founders, a poet-translator (featured in Asymptote Spring 2020), and a personal friend of mine, the aim of the press has always been to produce two books of poetry a year, one by an established or historical poet whose work the editors feel merits recovery, and one by an emerging poet.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Small Crescendos” by Pirkko Saisio

August 3, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Mia Spangenberg

But all love strives towards that big crescendo.

From the Finlandia Prize-winning author who published the first Finnish-language lesbian novel, this week’s Translation Tuesday features a genre-defying work of autofiction from Pirkko Saisio. The eroticism of encountering a stranger—be it in a tram or a seminar room; in real life or one’s imagination—is what ties together this attempt to follow the ruminating mind. In relating the path of her own desire, our narrator asks: “Is this story actually going anywhere? And is this even a story?”—cognisant of the limits of narrative in pinning down unruly desire. In Mia Spangenberg’s translation, Siasio’s virtuosity and playfulness is on full display. “Small Crescendos” is a perfect addition to your reading list this Women in Translation Month. 

“As a reader and translator, I’m enchanted by the lightness of Saisio’s prose and its rhythm and pacing, but it also poses a challenge, since Finnish is an agglutinative language and more concise than English. During revision, I focused on reading the translation out loud, as if it were a spoken word piece. Finnish can exhibit a gender fluidity that does not exist in English (there are no gendered pronouns as “hän” refers to both he and she), which may seem radical but is simply a tolerance for knowing less about people’s gender in writing. However, when Saisio writes about her love affair with an actor, I ultimately chose the word “actress” because it is otherwise easy to assume that Saisio is describing a heterosexual relationship when she is in fact not. This would be clear to most Finnish readers as Saisio came out publicly as a lesbian in the 1990s and has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Finland.”

— Mia Spangenberg

When a wave crashes against a rocky shore, it sprays
glistening pearls of water into the air. Like small crescendos.

A gaze. One is at the bottom of the stairs, and another is descending
the stairs.
There’s a gaze, and the beginning and ending of a relationship are in that
   gaze, with a slight
acceleration in the middle, an accelerando.

A hand grips a pole on the tram. It’s a man’s
hand, slender and beautiful, meant for some instrument, maybe
a cello or viola.
I place my hand beneath his and squeeze the pole.
And yes!
The cellist’s hand slides down the pole and covers my own. Oh those long,
thrilling seconds between stops!

And that gaze again. READ MORE…

Pop Around the World: I Suoni D’estate

June 19, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Florian Duijsens

A Musical Journey to Italy

Celebrating summer though music is best done by letting the outside world mix your playlist. Instead of being bunkered up inside, we best give ourselves over to the choices of others, through song snippets wafting out of open windows and automobiles, that ubiquitous song of the summer blasting at regular intervals from shoe stores and gaudy discotheques, the presets or record collections of your Airbnb hosts, or foreign radio stations in your rental car. If the songs are in another language, the effect is that much more transformative, creating a wonderfully schizophrenic sense of anonymity in incomprehensibility and of endless possibility in the unknown.

Yet it also has to be admitted that there is as much crap music abroad as there is at home. And it will definitely seem to be a much higher percentage at first, because how would you even know where to start, which station to start streaming? It helps when your favorite artists sidestep into a foreign language. Erlend Oye, for instance, a Norwegian singer who makes up half of the much-beloved twee popsters Kings of Convenience (and more recently fronted the now defunct Whitest Boy Alive) last year surprised the world with a rare solo single in Italian. Though the album it was supposed to be a part of hasn’t yet materialized, this first taste is an infectiously strummy tribute to the grand Italian pop tradition of the 1960s and 70s. READ MORE…