Translation Tuesday: “sailing to batavia” by Zen Hae

July 18, 2023 | in Translations | by George A. Fowler

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand.

This Translation Tuesday, to coincide with our Summer Issue and its standout Indonesian Special Feature, the spotlight is on the subtle, elegant prose of Zen Hae. A colonial administrator longs for the comforts of his nyai —his Indonesian concubine—and the febrile sensations of the land he has subjugated, plundered, and since departed. He has sucked hard on its every pleasure, and the taste has brought everything into question.

may you my nyai be always under the lord’s protection—who allows interest on loans and subjugation of new worlds. be well in your acceptance of all things.

if this lowly one sails to batavia, nyai, wear a blouse and the best batik cloth. and betel nut…chew it gaily—use gambier from barus and quicklime from banten to perfect its redness. there’s no need for a parasol. that’s because we’ve missed the batavia sun from the very start. that’s the eye that kisses our ancestors on the fourth day. under it they supposed the swampland was a future heaven and the bare-chested men were sheep with no shepherd. someday that is where our kingdom shall be made real.

related thereto, wait for this lowly one in jacatra’s bay. welcome him at the mouth of the ciliwung with a three-blossom smile.

we have left the city that belittled us, the country that shall vanish in one smack of the hand. we have swallowed months of curses at sea, and have crawled across almost the entire earth, with a map more wondrous than a dream. we have sojourned at the cape of hope, at goa, coromandel, columbo, malacca, also cities wiped out before dawn. a third of us are dead, another third sick and will die the moment we arrive, and one or two now gone mad. we, though, the strongest men, remain.

we smelled the scent of liquor in the brick houses in the south. that one was he who subdued the mountain wind and boiled our blood into adulthood. we have dreamed for you nyais to pour it into cups when we are tired of building this city and would like to know what will happen ten seconds before doomsday. if this unworthy one grows old, oh lord, even if he shuts his eyes, let it not be at the end of the sword or muzzle of a cannon, nor even from malaria or dysentery, let it be only in your embrace alone, amongst the fragrance and warmth of spices.

if this unworthy one steps foot in batavia, nyai, receive us, your children too: our blood has been tainted and given birth to across the ocean.

Translated from the Indonesian by George A. Fowler

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 6, 2023 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Eva Wissting, Katarina Gadze, and Wambua Muindi

The latest from Sweden, Kenya, and Croatia!

Join the Asymptote Editors-at-Large for the first weekly roundup of the year as they bring to you dispatches on literary prizes, book festivals, and more! From opposition to the proposed “cultural canon” in Sweden, the Kenyan launch of Taban Lo Liyong’s most recent poetry collection, and the expert- and child-elected best children’s book in Croatia, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Just before the Christmas holidays, on December 22, the Swedish Writers’ Union along with eight other Swedish organizations published a statement against a Swedish “cultural canon.” The statement is a response to a proposed formalized “Swedish cultural canon,” initiated by the new Swedish government and its Minister for Culture, Parisa Liljestrand. According to the organizations, a formalized Swedish cultural canon that would define the central Swedish literary and artistic works is “a very simplified way of trying to define culture and that the effect is rather to limit the breadth, diversity and variation in cultural activities.” Neighboring country Denmark introduced a very similar kind of formalized canon in 2006, “Kulturkanonen,” which was wildly debated. The canon was published in book form and on a website—the latter of which, however, was closed down six years later. Today, the formalized Danish canon is mostly forgotten, but it still dictates what is taught in high schools and colleges. Out of the fourteen Danish writers listed in this canon, Karen Blixen is the only woman, and several important names in Danish literary history are not included because they were considered too complicated for high school students. Whether a Swedish version of such a canon will be formalized remains to be seen.

In Conversation: Daniel Mendelsohn on his new memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic

September 22, 2017 | in Interviews | by Henry Ace Knight

What I’m interested in creating is something that combines all the things that I do in my life as a reader and writer and teacher

Memoirist, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn is perhaps best known for the application of mythic paradigms from the Western classics to the analysis of popular and literary culture. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006 for The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, and finalist again in 2012 for his essay collection Waiting for the Barbarians, his criticism frequently graces the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The forthcoming release (Knopf, September 12) of his new memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic—about his octogenarian father’s experience auditing his Odyssey freshman seminar at Bard College and their subsequent voyage aboard an Odyssey-themed cruise—occasioned this conversation with Asymptote Interviews Editor Henry Ace Knight.

Can you tell me about the genesis of the book? Was it taking shape in your mind as early as your dad’s request to sit in on the Odyssey course?

No, not at all. The sequence was that early in 2011, before the semester began, he approached me about taking my course; I knew that he was interested in rereading the classics in his old age, and I said, “Well, I’m doing this Odyssey course in the spring…” And he said, “Oh, can I take it?” It didn’t occur to me at the time that it might be something that I would write about. Then, about halfway through the course, at which point so many interesting and funny things were happening, I started taking notes—his interactions with the kids, the things he said about the text. Much of the book is based on the notes I took right after class, memorable exchanges I recorded. Around the midterm, I thought, “OK, somehow I’ve got to write about this,” although I hardly envisioned a book at that point. In fact, at the end of the semester, when Froma [Zeitlin, a Classics professor at Princeton and Mendelsohn’s mentor] told me about the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, I called a friend of mine who was the editor of a travel magazine, and I said, “My dad and I are going on this Odyssey cruise and I think I want to write about it.” But I only thought I was going to write a magazine article! Then, when my dad fell ill, I started thinking all of this was…suddenly it took on a shape, you know: the class and the cruise and his illness. And so I started thinking, in a sort of inchoate way, of how all of this could add up to something: him taking the class, us going on the cruise, and him suddenly having a stroke and thereby raising the question of whether he could be his old ‘self’—a very Odyssean question indeed. I started to see it all as one event moving along an arc and that that arc was the arc of the Odyssey.

Did you start to draw more and more parallels between the Odyssey and your relationship to your father as the semester progressed?

I’ve done this with several books now, this entwining ancient texts and personal narratives. I did it in my first memoir, The Elusive Embrace, in which I wrapped exegeses of various classical texts around a story about me and my family and being a gay man who decided to become a father—my story was interwoven with musings on classical texts about desire and parenting and so on. And then I did it in The Lost, in which the intertext is not a classical text but a biblical text: I used Genesis, with its memorable narratives about fratricide and global destruction and wandering and miraculous survivals, as a kind of foil for this family story about the Holocaust. Once you start thinking about a text, these parallels to your life start to present themselves. So in this case, because my mind was on the Odyssey, everything about what happened to Dad and me, the course, the cruise, started presenting itself as “odyssean,” as potential material, and the parallels between the personal narrative and the text started to make themselves felt. So, for instance, the first major section of my book, which recreates the first weeks of the Odyssey course and our discussions of the first four books of the Odyssey, which are about Odysseus’s son Telemachus going on a sort of fact-finding mission to learn what happened to his absent father, twines around flashbacks to my childhood in which I too am a boy searching for his father, trying to understand who he is. And so on.

What happens when I start thinking about a memoir is that I’ll have an intuition about how a certain text is going to structure the memoir, and then once I’m thinking that way it just takes off. But of course it’s only in the writing that you can really carefully work out the parallels and draw attention to them in a rather purposeful, literary way; so in this sense I’m also creating the parallels, I’m establishing them in my text for the reader. I know the Odyssey intimately, so as things were happening in real life I would think, “Oh my God, this is so Odyssean!”—like the guy on the boat with the scar. [A major revelation in An Odyssey turns on an encounter between Mendelsohn and an elderly fellow passenger who had a scar on his thigh dating to an incident in World War II. In Homer’s Odyssey, a climactic moment is linked to the history of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh.] When I met that old gentleman with the scar I thought, “You cannot make this stuff up!”—as it was happening, I was thinking that no one was going to believe this, it was just too good to be true. But it really happened!