Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 27, 2020 | in News | by Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our Section Editors pick their favorites from the Winter 2020 issue!

We thought of the Winter 2020 issue as a fantastic salad, surprising and delightful in its compact variety. We’re willing to concede, however, that it is a large salad; the challenges it presents might be more approachable if they’re coming from a buffet. With so many delights and delectables on offer, where does one begin? Perhaps, we humbly suggest, with these selections from our section editors, which include a Federico García Lorca play and an Eduardo Lalo essay.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Kurdish Feature Editor:

Brought into English by Caitlin O’Neil (a former team member, I’m thrilled to say), Corinne Hoex’s sensuous—and sensational—Gentlemen Callers is full of exquisite treats, rivaling Belgian compatriot Amélie Nothomb’s wit, humor, and imagination. Although Asymptote makes it its mission to move beyond world literature’s Eurocentric focus, it’s gems like this that remind me that there’s still much to discover from smaller, less heard-from countries within Europe. I would consider it scandalous if Hoex’s fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road. From the Poetry section, Gnaomi Siemens accompanies her sexy, updated take of Ephemeris (horoscopes from the 16th century) with a thought-provoking note: “Horoscopes (hora / time, skopos / observation) are ephemeral. Translation is an observation of time and a holding up of the writings and ideas of one time to observe them in a new temporal context.” Pair with Joey Schwartzman’s 21st-century renderings of T’ang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Whip-smart and bittersweet, these timeless poems about transience will stay with you for at least a little while.

From Sam Carter, Criticism Section Editor:

This issue’s Criticism section introduces us to two poetry collections that embody the Asymptote mission by refusing to be contained by borders, whether linguistic or geographic. Our very own Lou Sarabadzic takes us through the important work done by Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology, which contains poems from ninety-three writers and nineteen languages in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of this terrible atrocity. And Emma Gomis reviews Time, Etel Adnan’s latest exploration of temporality and poetic form that arose from a series of postcards exchanged with the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar. READ MORE…

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The Troubling Biography of Corneliu M. Popescu

November 21, 2019 | in Essays | by Andreea Scridon

Rhyming “outblaze” with “always” suggests an intuitive understanding of the English language.

In 1977, a massive earthquake erupted from sinister pith of the Vrancea Mountains, with a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter Scale. The city of Bucharest partially crumbled on top of itself. In weight of damage, that meant destruction to approximately 33,000 buildings, wounds to 11,300 people, and death to 1,578 people—including actors, singers, film directors, writers . . . and a nineteen-year-old translator named Corneliu M. Popescu.

Born at the end of the 1950s, a decade that represented the height of communist censorship, Corneliu Popescu was ultimately swept away by the violent waves of the era he lived in. The sporty and sociable son of a lawyer, “Cornel” was offered a good education: while most people studied Russian in school, Cornel studied English with Ion Kleanthe Gheorghiu, who had been Romania’s ambassador in London, shortly before being imprisoned for anti-communist activities. Much of the boy’s short life seemed governed by the power of the moment, polymorphous in its guise as coincidence or destiny: perhaps subconsciously aware of the importance of now, he was effectively a savant, translating Treasure Island into Romanian at age ten. At around sixteen, enamored with the foamy intensity of Mihai Eminescu’s poetry, he began translating the poet, something only his parents and teachers knew about. Agreeing to postpone publication so that he could fully dedicate himself to preparing for medical school (a scholarship at Humboldt University had been lined up for him), Cornel edited his manuscript up to the day of his death: March 4, 1977. As he had arrived home from a tutoring session earlier than expected, the earthquake caught up to him at home. He was found in the arms of his mother the next day, amidst the rubble.

A Linguistic Dystopia: Language and Metamorphosis in Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary

June 3, 2019 | in Essays | by Jacqueline Leung

What happens to a language when generation gaps are allowed to stretch on forever?

For Yoko Tawada, a Japanese author who writes in both German and Japanese, language’s power—and its failings—are a central concern. In today’s essay, Asymptote Editor-at-Large Jacqueline Leung explores how Tawada’s fascination with language informs her novel The Emissary, which takes place in a dystopian Japan that has forbidden the use of foreign languages.

The very existence of language—the signified and the signifier, the sender and the recipient—denotes distance. For a writer like Yoko Tawada, who practices her craft in both Japanese and German (the latter picked up in her twenties), the space between reality and what is written or said is where poetry resides. Linguistic play is at the heart of Tawada’s creativity; in The Naked Eye, she wrote one chapter in German and another in Japanese, alternating between the two until the end. Then she decided to translate everything the other way so that she had a German manuscript and a Japanese manuscript for her publishers.

This exophonic maneuver—exophony being a term indicating the practice of writing in a language not your mother tongue (the distinction makes you wonder if there ever was a term for writing in your mother tongue)—is an impossibility in the dystopian Japan depicted in Tawada’s latest novel, The Emissary, translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani. Learning a foreign language is forbidden in the fictionalized Japan that has regressed to closing its borders after irreparable environmental disasters, possibly nuclear, contaminated the archipelago and pulled it away from the Eurasian continent, geographically and politically forcing its isolation. The aftermath is an exacerbated impression of Japan’s current dilemma with its aging population—government statistics released just this April reveal that over a third of its people are 60 and above.

Recovery in Ruins: A Review of Bella Mia

January 25, 2017 | in Reviews | by Thea Hawlin

Caterina has always identified herself in relation to her sister; she was the ‘other’ twin.

In the wake of the more recent earthquakes in central Italy it seems painfully appropriate that Calisi Press should choose to release the English translation of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s award winning Bella Mia, set in the aftermath of the devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake in L’Aqualia in 2009, the deadliest Italy had seen since 1980.

In the early hours of 6 April, 2009, amidst the chaos of the tremors, one woman dies. She leaves her only son behind, left in the care of her surviving twin sister, Caterina, and their elderly mother. The broken family becomes the center for Pietrantonio’s moving tale of recovery. Set in the ruins of a family and the wreckage of the city, the story details the delicate stages of grief as each character moves to re-build their lives after the disaster.

Caterina’s sister Olivia was a constant presence in her life, and one cannot help but think of the powerful female relationships depicted in Ferrante’s novels when reading Caterina’s memories of the two as children, surviving the complex and riddled world of the schoolyard and vying for attention from their peers. In her death, Olivia becomes omnipresent in the lives of those she has left behind: her son blindly chases cars driven by women who look like her; her mother builds her day around visiting her grave, her sister still wears her clothes for good luck. Caterina’s survival guilt is evident—she is ‘alive by mistake’ as far as her nephew is concerned—and the constant expectation that she ‘should be his spare mother’ rather than his grieving aunt torments her. ‘We could have swapped deaths, as we’d always swapped clothes, books, occasions,’ Caterina obsesses. She dwells on the inevitable, unanswerable question: why her? Why was fate kind to her and not her twin? For two people so tightly bound for so many years, why at this point in time were they so violently torn apart?