Posts filed under 'Mythology'

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.

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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.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 31, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and René Esaú Sánchez

Updates from Mexico and Palestine solidarity around the literary world.

This week, our editors share news of solidarity, legacy, and cross-cultural connection. Around the world, the literary world is showing up to express support for Palestine, with the Palestine Festival of Literature continuing their crucial work of uplifting work that urges us towards compassion, the Palestinian struggle, and a condemnation of violence. In Mexico, some of the greatest writers in Latin-American history are celebrated for their efforts in connecting their nation to a greater, global heritage of letters. Read on to find out more!

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

In a historic demonstration of solidarity, the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), Writers Against the War on Gaza, and Amplify Palestine have come together to organize the event “Freedom to Write for Palestine,” held on May 7 at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. This significant gathering brought together writers who had withdrawn from PEN America’s World Voices Festival and the PEN America Literary Awards, condemning the organization’s failure to support Palestinian writers facing violence and displacement in Gaza. The unprecedented withdrawal of dozens of authors led to the cancellation of both PEN America events just weeks before their scheduled dates.

The program featured opening remarks by Nancy Kricorian and an introduction by Derecka Purnell, and included powerful readings and stories from Michelle Alexander, who read the work of Haya Abu Nasser, and Mohamed Arafat, who shared his family’s harrowing experiences. Evie Shockley read pieces by Fady Joudah, while Nicholas Glastonbury presented an insightful commentary on the Palestinian struggle. The event can be watched in full here. READ MORE…

The Seyavash Cycle and Ritual as Translation

August 3, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Claire Jacobson

If the rituals as such are the bridge from one story to the other, we can view this transformation as an act of translation . . .

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Claire Jacobson covers the path of the Seyavash cycle through time and cultures, its adoptions and adaptations. 

In Khurasani poet Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi’s epic the Shahnameh, symbol of innocence and hero-prince Seyavash undergoes a false rape accusation, a martyr’s death, and a symbolic resurrection. This tale—the pure hero is falsely accused of rape and suffers either a literal or symbolic death and resurrection as a result—is found across cultures and time, often beginning with the hero’s virtuous rejection of a lustful woman: the incorrupt Seyavash recoils from his stepmother Sudabeh’s declarations of love, as does the Khotanese version of the Mauryan prince Kunala from Queen Tishyaraksha; the righteous Joseph (Yusuf) flees Potiphar’s wife, Zulaikha; the chaste Hippolytus rejects Phaedra’s advances; the honorable Bata refuses to betray his brother Anpu by sleeping with his sister-in-law. Much like Seyavash, each of these men are then written into the cycle of accusation, death, and resurrection. 

Many of these myths coexisted in a shared discursive space, but not all of them continued to develop and change as living stories. After the Islamic conquest of the Iranian plateau, several began to converge. By the early Islamic period, the tale of Yusuf and Zulaikha was considered by literary critics to be the same story as Seyavash and Sudabeh but in a more appropriately Islamic format, and many of the rituals that had long been practiced to celebrate Seyavash were repurposed to commemorate the death of Husayn at Karbala. In this case, ritual (by which I mean the popular practice of religion) seems to act as a medium of translation, carrying the shape of the re-enacted story forward even though the language, notions of gender, and cultural landscape were all slowly changing as the millennia passed.

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Submission Call For New Column On Myths: Retellings

March 1, 2023  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel

. . . what does it mean to translate myths, embodiments of reason, morality, and culture?

Across cultures and time, people have turned toward myths for their wisdom and experience. Even today, when ‘myth’ has become synonymous with ‘falsehood,’ we are drawn to the weight and impact of mythology in contemporary literature and media; from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 2018 retelling of the Kĩkũyũ myth of origin in The Perfect Nine, to Madeline Miller’s 2018 retelling of the myth of Odysseus in Circe, to Makoto Shinkai’s expansion on the myth of Namazu in the 2022 film Suzume, myths prevail in modern consciousness, woven into our lives, retold and retold again. 

In this way, myths are inherently translational. From one mouth to the next, from the oral to the written, from one language to another, from antiquity to contemporary retellings, they have all been acts of translation. But what does it mean to translate myths, embodiments of reason, morality, and culture? How do our personal lived experiences reshape myths in retelling? How do cultural values and the bounds of language influence translations of myths? When a translator approaches a retelling with an explicit agenda, such as Thiong’o’s feminist approach to the Kĩkũyũ origin myth, what does that mean for the myth itself? When we read myths, when we relate to and learn from and shape these ancient texts to fit our modern lives, is that not its own form of translation? And again, what happens to the myth itself in these myriad retellings? 

Here at the Asymptote blog, we are headlining a new column on myths and myths in translation, Retellings, and would like your submissions and pitches! We are interested in the following approaches, and more than open to any other formats:

  • In the language you work from, what myth has had a particular impact on you? How does the language of the myth move you, as a reader, and how has the myth affected the legacy of literature in its language?
  • Myths of creation; of origin; of love; of conquering—how do these vary across cultures? What aspects remain constant? We would particularly be interested in hosting a group of translators from various languages in a roundtable to discuss these questions. 
  • How does a myth develop in translation? When a myth is translated from the ‘original’ language to another, do the morals, message, and impact transform in turn? In what ways? How does translation between languages differ from other retellings?

Completed essays can be submitted to the blog on Submittable until May 15, and pitches can be emailed to the blog editors at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Please include the language you translate from and/or work in, as well as any particular myth or type of myth you are interested in discussing in your email. 

We’re looking forward to your submissions!

—The Blog Editors

Memory as Terrain, Museum, Dictionary: On Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao—New York—Bilbao

November 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The mythologization of one’s personal repertoire begs the question of significance: what makes something worth telling?

Bilbao—New York—Bilbao by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, Coffee House Press, 2022

“I realized that our dad’s whole family history was made up of round trips, flights, and returnings,” reflects author Kirmen Uribe. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, a novel which won Uribe the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain, stems from the family history in question. Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, it is a sort of metanovel that straddles fact and fiction, laying its mechanisms bare. Within the brackets of his own travel—a flight from Bilbao to New York—the narrator’s mind rambles through various elements he would like to weave into his hypothetical novel: interviews, folklore, philosophical reflections, images, and anecdotes. He meditates on structure and process, always on the precipice of making decisions, giving the whole novel the impression that it’s just about to start.

Uribe is from the Basque fishing town of Ondarroa, where the men have historically spent large parts of the year on the water. Urbanization, industrialization, and the mechanization of the fishing industry have by now, however, made the traditional way of life nearly obsolete. As a member of the intermediary generation, the rhythm of this extended round-trip journey is still familiar to Uribe; movement is not a means to an end, but a comfortable and creative mode of being that always ends in a provisional homecoming.

Throughout, the reader senses that his search for the novel’s structure is a search for meaning. Uribe’s desire for the moments that make up his personal, family, and national history to coalesce into narrative is tangible, though he struggles to make them conform. Details, encounters, images—he feels their weight and wants a story to give them coherence. But they resist, and his resulting frustration is echoed by the reader. When a new anecdote begins, we wonder: where does this fit in? Why should I immerse myself in this moment? Is this character major or minor?

Memory has always been the terrain that grounds seemingly disparate moments, and Uribe’s memory is like the ocean maps that his ancestors drew for their fishing journeys; the features depicted are those most salient to the cartographer. Before the time of GPS, Uribe recalls his father drafting a map of his habitual fishing ground off the coast of an uninhabited Scottish island called Rockall. It was a personal map, jealously guarded, that showed the significant underwater features and the migratory patterns of the fish. Rockall echoes through the novel, looming large like a landmark, as it would have been for Uribe in his youth—the place where his father was when he wasn’t home. I looked it up on Google Maps, but as I zoomed out to see where it was in relation to the United Kingdom, it quickly disappeared. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2022

October 10, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Alex Tan, and Eva Wissting

New work from the Arabic, the Korean, and the Ojibwe language!

In this month’s round-up of the latest in world literature, our editors bring vital texts addressing faith, (false) mythologies, desire, migration, and Indigenous culture to the forefront: a collection of penetrating, prismatic poems from the lauded Egyptian poet Iman Mersal; from South Korea’s Lee Geum-yi, a fiction that tells the long-silenced stories of women crossing the seas to be wed to strangers; and a new collection of poetry, documenting Ojibwe lives, by eminent writer Linda LeGarde Grover. Read on to find out more!

threshold

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

Review by Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor

Perhaps it begins with a search. The Egyptian poet Iman Mersal returns to her homeland in hopes of procuring a book by Saniya Saleh, an elusive writer no one seems to have heard of. Instead she finds a table, piled with the canonized words of men; nowhere in sight is the person she seeks: a wife, sister, and mother, who can only secondarily be a writer in her own right. “I don’t know how she likes to see herself,” she laments in a wandering essay. Left with the “wasted potential” of what survives, she can imagine only a voice of muted cadence, “a whispered song of mourning which slips through to me amid the din of revolutionaries’ rabble-rousing slogans, of warriors intent on victory, of those broken by defeat angrily denouncing state, dictator and society.”

A similar quality of whispering, of slipping through, inhabits Iman Mersal’s angular The Threshold, a collection of poetry translated delicately by Robyn Creswell in conversation with the poet herself. In the titular piece, a collective biography of sorts charts a path through the streets and labyrinthine hypocrisies of Cairo in the nineties: “one long-serving intellectual screamed at his friend / When I’m talking about democracy / you shut the hell up.” Elsewhere a speaker ventures, “Let’s assume the people isn’t a dirty word and that we know the meaning of en masse.” Yet this momentary compact reveals its own fragility; language with all its alibis and forms of subterfuge seems a poor vessel, too riddled with holes to hold “all the wasted days” and the “nights / of walking with hands stretched out / and the visions that crept over the walls.”

Mersal’s work is unafraid of its own promontories and edges. Often, the writing advances a crepuscular view of the self, ever-partial and shrouded in semi-obscurity, divided from its figurations. The opening poem dryly declares, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.” Her name, which contains the Arabic for “faith” and “messenger,” is too “musical” for “a body like my body / and lungs like these—growing raspier / by the day.” On what map might we locate the trembling contours of that occluded life, “whose existence I’ve never been sure of,” and which appears to “have neither past nor future” in an encounter with a stranger, on whose shoulder she accidentally falls asleep? How unwieldy it feels in its bulk, how relentlessly it has been anatomized, in spite of its wispy resistance to measurement:

This is the life into which more than one father stuffed his ambitions, more than one mother her scissors, more than one doctor his pills, more than one activist his sword, more than one institution its stupidity, and more than one school of poetry its poetics.

READ MORE…

A Wanting to Not Forget: An Interview with Autumn Richardson

September 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful.

In Landmarks (2015), British writer Robert Macfarlane’s meditation on place, he named Autumn Richardson, among other writers, as “particularizers … who seek in some way to ‘draw every needle’ … [with] precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention.” Reliquiae, the journal of landscape, nature, and mythology which Richardson co-founded and co-edits with her partner, composer, writer, and artist Richard Skelton, is guided by this ethos and mode of engagement. In its ten years, Reliquiae has published texts from antiquity: Navajo songs; the Song dynasty poet Wáng Ānshí; magical and medicinal incantations from Catawba, Klamath, Chuckchee, and Winnebago peoples; southern African beliefs in naming stars; fragments from the German Renaissance alchemist-theologian Paracelsus; evocations to Yoruba deities; the Náhuatl poet Nezahualcóyotl; Egyptian spells; and hymns of the now-extinct Eoran language in Australia. The journal has also introduced readers to English translations from, among others, the original Algonquian, Binisayâ, Old English, Ancient Greek, Hindu, Old Icelandic, Iglulingmiut, Old Norse, Scottish Gaelic, West Saxon—along with their source texts.

Speaking to the precision and attention that guides her work, Richardson tells academic journal Studies in Travel Writing, “My own writing is more concerned with movement through landscapes … the vertical, going down through the layers botanically, biologically, geologically, etymologically, historically.” In this interview, I asked about the wondrous archive of Reliquiae, and how she explores landscape, ethnology, (vertical) travel, ecology, botany, and occultism in her own art, writings, and translations.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Personally, I think of Reliquiae—and its disciplinary breadth of landscape, folklore, ecology, esoteric philosophy, animism—as a treasure trove of consequential importance not only to specialists, writers, and translators, but also for a generalist readership. In the submission guidelines, there is emphasis on “beyond plain nature writing.” Can you elaborate on this?

Autumn Richardson (AR): Fundamentally, Reliquiae fills a niche that is shaped by our own unique interests. We couldn’t find a single publication that focused on landscape and the natural world, whilst refracting that focus through the prism of myth, esotericism, magic, occult philosophy, and anthropology. One of the reasons we formed Corbel Stone Press in 2009 was to begin publishing work that connected these disparate but allied disciplines. We began by publishing our own writing, but our goal was always to edit a journal, and 2022 is the tenth anniversary of Reliquiae.

AMMD: Let’s talk about Heart of Winter, your 2016 collection of found-poems assembled from the journals of ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr Thorild Wulff which chronicles the Second Thule Expedition, their 1917 journey through the north-western coastal landscapes of Greenland. When asked about your translation process from the Danish (and Inuit), you responded that, “it was a process of simplifying ever so slightly … [not wanting] to change [Rasmussen’s] words hardly at all … want[ing] to preserve his voice.” As a translator who questions her own discursive presence in the text, does this imply that between the competing ideologies within the translation of myths and folklore, you favour linguistic faithfulness over stylistic realism?

AR: That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m not dogmatic in my choices—it’s more instinctual. I’m acutely attentive to the shape, texture, and colour of each word in both languages when I translate. However, I have noticed that provisional, literal translations are strangely compelling. There’s something about that interstitial state—between one language and another—that is extraordinarily powerful. This can often happen, for example, when the word order of the original is preserved, resulting in an unusual word-grouping in the translation. For me, I find this shadow presence of the original language unspeakably rich and evocative, and I always try to retain something of its colour in my work. My concern is always to mirror, as faithfully as possible, the poet’s choice of words, as well as what I perceive to be the emotions and motivations behind the poem or song itself. For example, within the Inuit songs in Heart of Winter, a primary and repetitive motif is the uncertainty of survival, and the consequent gratitude or joy when a new season is witnessed, when nourishment is attained. It was immensely important to me to try to carry these sentiments forward, because, to my mind, these expressions and emotions were the heart and the purpose of the songs themselves.

READ MORE…

Fact and Fantasy in the Black Forest: An Interview with Alexander Pechmann

September 20, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

The Austrian author’s latest spiritual adventure story asks readers to consider the nature of time.

Die Zehnte Muse (The Tenth Muse), published by Steidl in 2020, is a genre-bending novel set in the Black Forest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The story focuses on two main characters, Algernon Blackwood and Paul Severin. Blackwood is modelled on the twentieth-century supernatural author of the same name, well known for his short stories “The Willows” (1907) and “The Wendigo” (1910), while Severin is modelled on the German expressionist painter Karl Hofer. The novel centres on the mystery of Talitha, a timeless figure both men develop fixations on, twenty years apart, after glimpsing her in the forest.

Pechmann deftly weaves together strands of philosophy and layers of storytelling in under two hundred pages. On some levels, the book feels like a classic gothic ghost story. There are all the major elements: a forest; restless, disillusioned young men; a creepy, strict religious boarding school; a supernatural presence. But the book also covers the nature of time, dreams, spiritualism, and the occult, the psychological, Gnosticism, art history, translation, and Yenish culture. The Yenish are a nomadic people from central Europe, whose distinct culture emerged in the early nineteenth century, although the Yenish language predates this. Here, Pechmann discusses the many-layered novel and the enduring mystery of Talitha.

Anna Rumsby (AR): How would you classify this genre? I’m tempted to say neogothic, but it’s also a fairy tale, historical fiction, a semi-biography, and in some places almost a philosophical essay.

Alexander Pechmann (AP): In some reviews, the book was called a “Künstlerroman” (art novel) or a psychological ghost story. That’s OK, but I like to call it—as well as my other novels—a “spiritual adventure” or “adventure of the soul,” in contrast to “adventures of the mind,” such as detective stories or science fiction, or “adventures of the heart,” such as stories about love and relationships.

Adventures of the soul are rooted in dreams and make use of ancient traditions, fairy tales, superstitions, and religious ideas. Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen wrote this kind of fiction, and Blackwood also had a certain love for symbolistic paintings. Symbolism had a strong influence on me while I was working on the novel, but I feel also close to the Romantics with their deep love for nature, and classic Austrian writers like Leo Perutz who mixed historical facts with fantasy.

AR: How did your experience as a translator and linguist inform this novel? There’s a huge attention to language—I’m thinking specifically of the Bible translation chapter regarding Talitha, but there’s a great blend of English, German, French, and Yenish throughout.

AP: I have a special interest in writers who move freely between cultures and languages. I’m thinking of Lafcadio Hearn, who was born in Greece, grew up in England, went to the USA, and ended up in Japan, or Marmaduke Pickthall, who went to Syria as a young man and would be the first English translator of the Holy Quran. Algernon Blackwood spoke German and French fluently and was also a traveller between cultures. The attention to language in Die Zehnte Muse grew naturally out of the fact that the school of the Moravian Brothers in Königsfeld was and still is visited by students from all over the world. Also, the Black Forest, the background of the novel and place where I live, has always been a melting pot of different languages, dialects, and cultures. While working on the novel, I learned more about Yenish and was astonished that this language uses both Hebrew and Yiddish words. This fit in perfectly with my idea that Talitha was accepted by the Yenish, even though she obviously came from some other ancient culture.

AR: Who or what is Talitha?

AP: In my first draft, she was just a wild child, living in the forest. I knew she was somehow related to the Yenish, so I was searching for typical Yenish names. I liked Talisha or Talitha best, and then I read the story of a priest’s daughter named Talitha who was raised from the dead by Jesus. This opened up new possibilities for my story. Could someone who was resurrected by Jesus grow old and die like a normal person? What if this girl was damned to live on and on? I do not answer this question in the novel and leave it up to the reader to decide whether she was just a lost Yenish girl, the ghost of a murdered girl, or the resurrected biblical Talitha. She might also just be a fantasy of Paul Severin, she might have stepped right out of Maurice Denis’s painting, or she could be even an incarnation of time itself. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 3, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Jacqueline Leung, and Suhasini Patni

Stay up to date with the literary world from Hong Kong to Palestine to India!

This week, allow our editors-at-large to take you around the world to find out about the most exciting literary news. From Hong Kong, the highly anticipated 21st Hong Kong International Literary Festival has announced its first slate of writers. New lyric dispatches allow us to hear from a variety of voices from Palestine. Finally, fellowships and festivals from India are worth your attention. Read on to learn more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:

After a two-year-long hiatus with its main website, Cha, Hong Kong’s popular English literary journal, is open for submissions again from July for their Auditory Cortex 2021 special feature. Co-edited by Lian-Hee Wee and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, the issue accepts poetry written in various Englishes, acknowledging the diversity of the language across multiple territories. The auditory cortex is the first point in the brain reacting to sound, and as such the publication is looking to document the acoustics of lesser known varieties through a series of recordings accompanying the texts. Cha is also calling for abstracts for the Backreading Hong Kong’s 2021 academic symposium, “Translating Hong Kong,” with Hong Kong Baptist University and The University of Toronto Scarborough this December. In addition to new insights into translation practice, the symposium hopes to explore the cultural and linguistic implications of interpreting works about Hong Kong, whether translation reiterates the colonial dominance of English and how it feeds into the city’s culture.

Back for its 21st year, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival just announced its initial line-up of writers and speakers. Held between November 5 to 15, this year’s festival is entitled the Rebound Edition and will focus on themes of resilience, recovery, and mental health. It has so far confirmed the appearance of Amor Towles, Paula Hawkins, Damon Galgut, and Mary Jean Chan, as well as local emerging writers Alice Chan, Virginia Ng, and Angus Lee, with more details to be announced in late September.

Beyond the page—and my usual reportage of Chinese-English translation happenings—Asia Society Hong Kong Center is hosting a series of six screenings and talks of Korean films with English subtitles between now and December. Titled “Beyond K-pop: Korean Families in Films,” the program features new and classic hits including Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), Ode to My Father (2014), and Minari (2021) which won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language. The films offer portrayals of Korean families in different eras and social contexts, addressing issues of historical strife, separation, and immigration. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Juan Andrés García Román

December 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Nick Rattner

You’re the blonde girl who all morning long turns her desk like a sunflower.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the awe and dread of winter are at once historical and timeless in these selections by Spanish poet, translator, and scholar Juan Andrés García Román. In “The Hour,” a looming sense of nostalgia-fuelled Weltschmerz—allegorized here as passing seasons—prompts our speaker to recognize the fleeting joy of life and youth, while also imploring the importance of “staying” in the face of melancholy. In “For the First Time, You Feel Sad (Belisarius Sends His Troops Up Into the Trees),” our speaker deploys allusions and anachronisms—everything from Byzantium military history to Roman mythology to contemporary French children’s literature—to illustrate the love and longing of a winter-born absence. The cerebral maximalism of García Román’s verse is done justice here by Nick Rattner’s adroit translation of the poet’s layered metaphors and embedded historical/literary references. A learned take on the season-change poem which warrants a careful, meditative read.

The Hour

for Antonio Mochón

Who, after tossing and turning a winter
night while snow
covered the peaks, honored the refrain,
the brave old songs,
and the postcards of mountains
displayed in mountain lodges,
who, I say, did not this way pass
through a cemetery and, feeling a quaver
in their legs, partly from
fatigue of another world,
and partly to shield against wind and lightning,
did not slip themselves into an empty niche
to wait out the storm, and from this feel
suddenly tired of the path, READ MORE…

City of Signs, Empire of Signs

May 18, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

[Barthes] comes to know Japan not for her certain qualities, but for what she inspires within him about the art of living.

“If I want to imagine a fictive nation . . .” With those words, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, his study of Japan and its available reality, begins. Going on to infuse the elements of Japanese existence—everything from haiku to monolids—with his singular manner of interrogation, the Japan that Barthes illustrates is one that exemplifies the mental journeys that arise in correspondence with physical ones. Now, fifty years after its publication, Xiao Yue Shan takes contemporary Tokyo as a point of origin to discuss the Japan that corresponds to the Barthian instinct for examination, and how his fascination with this country’s collection of signs is a direct result of the city’s peculiar composition.

The urban environment is a contract between humans and their machines, between conscious and unconscious topographies, between vessels and inhabitants. It is a haven of both creativity and consumption, a spatial and experiential experiment. Of its understanding there comes a need for the discretions of a knowingly discontinuous cognizance; it is impossible to know the city wholly, and there is also no need for such knowledge.

In Tokyo there is a discreet strangeness in the negotiation between the city and its inhabitants—movements are organized covertly around narratives and histories. All that is built requires a reverence for what was there before. The past is hidden and present, the city is whole and in parts. When Roland Barthes arrived here in 1966, he recognized the enormous task that it assigned to him, that “Japan has afforded him a situation of writing.” The resulting 1970 text, Empire of Signs, is a luxury of the imagination, in which a mind perforates the scene with both an intent to investigate and an egoism that affords one the comfort to discern and judge. Japan was an amalgam of facts and fictions, to be navigated with all the directions of thinking.

Foreigners assign themselves to the subject of Tokyo with a fascination first. To achieve the perfect balance between knowledge and impressions, of experiences both living and mythical. In his assignment Barthes accomplished a passion of translation, which is to fearlessly integrate the insights of the foreigner with the extant, accumulated comprehensions of the local. Where someone who was born and lived the entirety of her life in Tokyo may have accumulated a wealth of notes in the slow, linear fashion of smallness to bigness—from the room to the home, from the home to the neighbourhood, from the neighbourhood to its vicinity, and from thereon the entirety—the foreigner comes to involve herself with the city via a series of shocks, of enthrallment with “ordinary” things, of curiosity that encourages in turns awe and despair, and of constant referral to her lack of knowing. Inevitably one sees what the other cannot, and inevitably in this interchange an enormously valuable body of knowledge arises. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 22, 2019  |  in News  |  by Jonathan Egid, Nina Perrotta, and Xiao Yue Shan

Join our blog editors as they explore everything the Spring 2019 issue has to offer!

The Spring 2019 issue of Asymptote, “Cosmic Connections,” features work from 27 countries and 17 different languages. If you’re not sure where to begin, our blog editors have you covered with recommendations for some of their favorite pieces, including an essay about an adventure in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a story that jumps from medieval Jewish theology to the relationship between an Argentine father and son, and poems that offer us a glimpse into intimate moments in the city of Shanghai.

Asymptote’s newest issue is one of the journal’s best to date, meaning that it was nearly impossible to choose just one piece to highlight. In the interviews section, I found Dubravka Ugrešić’s comments on literary activism and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s discussion of the role of Marxism in his work particularly illuminating, while, in the special feature, Nancy Kline’s essay stood out for its focus on the often-overlooked role of the writer’s (and the translator’s) accent and spoken voice in the translation process. But I’d like to devote my highlight to an essay by a somewhat lesser-known writer, one who might otherwise get lost among the many big names that appear in this issue.

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“The Will to Oblivion”: Ma Jian’s China Dream in Review

February 4, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan

China Dream is psychological, interweaving an increasingly uncanny present with a spectral past that eventually encroaches upon it.

China Dream by Ma Jian, translated from the Mandarin by Flora Drew, Penguin Books.

The controversy over the cancellation and restoration of two public talks involving Chinese dissident writer Ma Jian by the venue provider, Tai Kwun, in last November’s Hong Kong International Literary Festival, has added to the topicality of Ma Jian’s newly published translated work, China Dream. Bearing a politically sensitive title that blatantly alludes to President Xi Jinping’s project of rejuvenating the Chinese nation, his “Chinese Dream” as portrayed in the novel is quite an oddity as a translated work. The translated English version was published before the original Chinese version, which is forthcoming from a Taiwanese publisher; however, this is within expectations considering the sensitiveness of the subject matter. Ma Jian’s scathing critique of autocracy not only targets the national project of the present Chinese government but all forms of rigid, state-controlled policies that annihilate individual subjectivity.

China Dream is in line with the tradition of dystopian fiction in its imagination of negative government. Different from its Chinese predecessors, such as Lao She’s Cat Country, which is more akin to a Swiftian satire, or Chan Koon-chung’s The Fat Years, whose dystopian vision is embodied in the form of science fiction, China Dream is more psychological, interweaving an increasingly uncanny present with a spectral past that eventually encroaches upon it. China Dream is about the will to oblivion and subsequent self-destruction of a Chinese officer who rises to power after his betrayal of his Rightist parents in the Cultural Revolution. The narrative centers on how Ma Daode, the director of the fictional China Dream Bureau, who is simultaneously a representative of state corruption and moral guilt, falls from his prime, and kills himself in a paradoxical moment of delirium and recognition.

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