Mother Earth
Mother earth, much trodden, sun-washed,
dark slave and mistress
I am, beloved.
From me, the humble and the sullen,
you burst forth—a powerful stem.
And like the eternal stars, and as the flame from the sun,
I circle in long and blind silence
through your roots, through your branches
and half in vigil, and half in slumber,
I search, through you, for the high sky. READ MORE…
"Nine Bright Shiners is certainly one of the best new collections of poetry to have come out in the 2014-2015 (literary) year."
I first came across Theo Dorgan’s work in a charming anthology of art writing from the National Gallery of Ireland, Lines of Vision (Thames & Hudson, 2014). A group of acclaimed Irish novelists and poets wrote about which paintings had most affected them as artists. Dorgan chose an evocative little history painting by Ernest Messionier, Group of Cavalry in the Snow: Moreau and Dessoles before Hohenlinden (1875), depicting two of Napoleon’s generals contemplating their chances on the eve of the wintry battle of Hohenlinden in December of 1800. It’s an intimate scene, and its effect, as described in rapturous detail by Dorgan, especially its effect on the imagination of a young boy, is enchanting:
There’s a self riding down out of the picture, no two selves. One of them
stolid and wary, wondering what these damn officers are about to get
us into…my mind is full of the coming battle, my sympathies with men
breathing this cold air tonight who will not be breathing it tomorrow…
All this and so much more, so very much more, out of one small
painting—and I close my eyes for one brief instant, leaving the gallery,
not sure when I open them where I shall find myself, on a Dublin street,
so long familiar, or on a wooded slope with a sky fill of lead-heavy snow
above my head, hearing the creak of leather beneath me, feeling the
solid heat of the animal bearing me down off that crest towards some
tomorrow at once unknown, unknowable and absurdly unfamiliar.
Dancing with the child I was, cheating the monoworld. READ MORE…
Reviewing Poetry of India: Anthology of the Greatest Poets of India, ed. Paul Smith (New Humanity Books, 2014)
A few months ago, a friend of mine who was curious about the nuances of Indian culture asked me to explain the artistic differences between North and South India. I realized it was a loaded question, and I could only give him a general overview of similarities and differences between north and south, Aryan and Dravidian, and Central Asian, Persian-Turkish influences versus Burmese and Sri Lankan. I felt I had a vague generalist understanding of my country of origin, though my answers seemed to satisfy him.
It is exceedingly difficult to encapsulate the cultural diversity of the Indian subcontinent, spanning across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, with a cultural nebula across Burma, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. To travelers like the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (the 14th century Central Asian [Uzbek] warrior), the marauder Timur (the subject of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) and even Mohandas Gandhi, returning from years of living among the racist Boers of South Africa, India remained a baffling and exotic mystery to the intellect and senses.
Fortunately for us, a book like Paul Smith’s massive anthology, Poetry of India: Anthology of the Greatest Poets of India, gives curious readers of Indian culture and literature an adequate place to start. Paul Smith is an Australian poet and scholar of Indian and South Asian literature. He has translated the works of Rumi, Hafiz, and Nizami, as well as the works of various other Sufi and Persian poets. In this anthology, he delves straight into the complexities of Indian literature, Sanskrit poetry from South India and the Deccan states, medieval Tamil poetry, and poems by well-known nineteenth and twentieth-century poets like Makhfi, Ghālib, Tagore, and Iqbal.
Shadab Zeest Hashmi wonders if language is "luggage," borrowed—or her very own
Home and flux mean the same in a land named after a severance, or the great “partition” of the subcontinent: a paradox of freedom-and-loss, umbilical-cord-and-scissors. Born in Pakistan, a country that emerged on the world map after the collapse of the British Raj and the largest mass migration in human history, “permanence” is forever in the shadow of exile.
If poetry seeks who we are, I’ve found myself searching in language, not land. Land, in its aspects worth remembering, becomes language. If I carry language, I carry land. What is exile, then, if not a road paved for poets, permanent wayfarers?
I came to America as a college student. In Passage Work, the first series of poems I completed as my senior thesis at Reed, I wondered: why write in English, the language of the colonist? Have I taken language as a loan for poetry? Have I betrayed Urdu? In these earliest poems, I call language “luggage,” a historical-personal luggage, both burden as well as reason for being. READ MORE…
Translated from the Old English by Spenser Santos
The Seafarer
May I utter truth for myself,
to say of trials, how in the times of toil
I often withstood wearisome times,
bitter breastcare, how I have bided,
come to know on a ship, abode of much care,
the terrible seawave’s rolling often held me there,
anxious nightwatch at the boat’s prow,
when it pitched against cliffs. Pinched by cold
were my feet, frostbound
with cold fetters, there the sighs of care
were hot around the heart; hunger tore from within
the mereweary mood. That the man,
to whom the most pleasant on earth befalls, knows not
how I, wretched and sorrowful, on the ice-cold sea
dwelled in winter in the paths of an exile,
bereft of beloved kinsmen and
hung with icicles; hail flew in showers.
There I heard naught but the sea to roar,
the frigid wave. Sometimes the swan’s song
did I take for entertainment, the gannet’s cry
and curlew’s sound for men’s laughter,
the seagull’s singing for mead.
Storms there beat the stony cliffs, where
the tern, the icy-feathered one, answers him,
very often the eagle screamed round about,
the dewy-feathered one; not any protecting kinsmen
could comfort the wretched spirit. READ MORE…
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday! The time has finally arrived for the Best Translated Book Award longlist… After weeks of blog- and social-media hype, both the fiction and poetry longlists have been announced, and we can’t say we aren’t impressed! The lineup includes, among others, several Asymptote friends, like Faces in the Crowd author and blog contributor, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, blog interviewee and Translation Tuesday featurette Danish author Naja Marie Aidt, deceased Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (featured in another Translation Tuesday dedication), Chinese interviewee and Nobel-deserving Can Xue, and many, many more. It’s definitely worth taking a peek through the list—I’ve no idea how the judges managed to narrow it down (at Three Percent, Chad Post laments the books he thought would make it—but didn’t), nor how they’ll be able to pick a winner from such a strong group. READ MORE…
from YOUTH
The way the snow falls
and covers the plain
that’s how I grew up
at the hearts of your eyes.
*** READ MORE…
A conversation with Amanda Aizpuriete, Latvian poet and translator
Amanda Aizpuriete is a mystical poet. In conversation this past fall, she told me she writes “about places I haven’t been, lives I haven’t lived.” We met in Jurmala, a place whose name literally means “seashore” and which comprises a string of resort towns halfway between Riga and Kaugari, where Aizpuriete has lived all her life. Her mother was entitled to military housing there. Her children went to the same school she attended as a child. “I have lived through the most dramatic changes,” Aizpuriete says, who was born in 1956 and has published collections of poetry while Latvia was under Soviet control to the present.
“There was only one publisher at the start, and an ‘inside’ review was of the greatest importance.” She explained this meant a critique and recommendation of a prospective book by a well-known writer.
Aizpuriete studied philology and philosophy at the Latvian State University from 1974-1979, as well as at the M. Gorky Literature Institute’s Translation Seminary in Moscow from 1980-1984. Through this time, she met translators from Ukraine and Azerbaijan and discovered what she describes as “great writings,” just opening up to publishing in the mid-eighties when Gorbachev entered power. First to translate this work into Latvian, she interviewed Josef Brodsky a couple of years after he’d won the Nobel Prize, and translated his play Demokratija into Latvian with his collaboration. “This was a beautiful episode, done through relationships,” Aizpuriete says. As poetry editor for the magazine Avots (Wellspring) in the mid-eighties, Aizpuriete was able to see the debut of banned Latvians, those it was not possible to publish earlier. READ MORE…
Happy friday, translation friends! We frequently post all sorts of dispatches on the blog—when the Asymptote family stretches far and wide to connect with other readers all across the globe—but rarely does our team encounter literature under threat. Here’s a report on the Karachi literary festival, in which the Guardian contends that “books really are a matter of life and death.” (they aren’t elsewhere, either?!). And in Egypt, good news for freedom of the press: a high court has granted bail to two Al Jazeera journalists. And Guernica reports on another country in conflict struggling to find voice on the international stage: Syria in image. READ MORE…
Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and Sean O’Brien, forthcoming from Archipelago Books
Selected volumes are a curious affair—when done well, I think of them as seductions, acts of largesse introducing to one who is ignorant, unable to access the “whole” thing, but desirous of such access, a writer of importance. The Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes is precisely this sort of book, bringing into English the lyrically and politically powerful poems of a major Cape Verdean poet and diplomat.
Cape Verde was made independent in 1975. Many of its inhabitants emigrated shortly thereafter, but many also stayed behind. Fortes, writing in a mixture of Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole, describes his country in the heated, generative moments of its new formation, as well as its moving outward and forward in the world. In translating Fortes’s poems, Daniel Hahn and Sean O’Brien have had to re-create a language linked to the islands and to the people as if by a circulatory system: “In that lesson / of earth & blood / Transfused / I heard the wild waves surge / From the heart to larboard.”
Fortes’s Cape Verde is full of tongues: all of nature speaks and sings. His language is fleshly. This visceral quality comes from abstractions made tangible through Fortes’s dense, at times opaque, symbology of bread, coin, sun, sea, guitar, and so on. For example, the last few lines of “From Mouth to Windward,” through the grammar of lists, draw concrete images together with abstract concepts like “marriage” and “birthright,” conflating them such that both “types” feel bodied, sensual, intellectual, inevitable: “Sea and monsoon, sea and marriage / Bread, stone, a patch of earth / Bread and birthright.” But it is also the translators who perform these transformations by—essentially by writing like poets. The alliterations I “see” in the en face Portuguese (which I do not read) are matched in English, enhancing the sense that language is not simply for understanding but for seeing, hearing, and touching.
As much as these poems emerge from the archipelago, they also describe the emigration of its people into Europe and the United States. When Fortes writes, “I saw patricians / clad in togas / Speaking Creole / In vast auditoria,” I hear the reverberation of a distinct Cape Verdean way of life moving along with its people: “. . . the earth and the story / Emigrate with us under our tongues.”
I would recommend this magnificent, generous, and bilingual presentation of Corsino Fortes’s work to anyone who enjoys grappling with the poignant, the sensuous, and the esoteric. It will be difficult for me to forget the “Tree and drum of the ancient viola” and the sardine as “a flickering tongue in the sea’s mouth”; nor “Eating the earth eating the earth eating the earth,” when “the earth is flesh”; nor Fortes’s prayer-command to the sunflower to “enter [him] / Before the sun / Disorients you Sunflower!”
***
The Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes is forthcoming from Archipelago Books & Pirogue Collective’s Island Position here.
***
Aditi Machado’s poems have recently appeared in The Offending Adam, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, MiPOesias, LIES/ISLE, and Better Magazine; others are forthcoming in Conjunctions. She has a chapbook called The Robing of the Bride; it is available from Dzanc Books. She edits poetry for Asymptote, an online journal dedicated to translation. She earned her MFA at Washington in St. Louis and is now studying toward a doctoral degree at the University of Denver.
The corpses of Orto dei Fuggitivi speak
No bones or shreds of toga,
even less flesh, or blood, or semen:
what’s left of us is the shell
of our corpses in lava, and don’t say
lava saved us: rather condemned us
to eternal sudden death.
You won’t think of us often:
your century wants a culprit
to commemorate the dead.
We remain because our nothingness
remains: there’s the rub.
Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao on Indonesian writing—and how Asymptote fits in a new, more nuanced "World Literature"
Asymptote’s mission is to introduce not only literary voices from a wide range of countries, but a greater number of voices from within each country. That’s where our twenty over editors-at-large, from Cuba to China, come in. Their goal? To seek out the worlds nestled within worlds that may be invisible from the outside. With their fingers on the pulse of their regions’ literary scenes, our editors-at-large act as extra eyes and ears for our section editors, ensuring a stream of the freshest content from the world over. Often this work is commissioned from scratch (see Mui Poopoksakul on Contemporary Thai Fiction or Yardenne Greenspan on Contemporary Israeli Literature). Editors-at-large also organize outreach events, partner with local journals, and send us literary dispatches for the blog. Our Indonesian editor-at-large, Tiffany Tsao, who gave us this dispatch from the 2014 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, wrote the following blog post to commemorate our fourth birthday.
—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief
World literature is a loaded word with a lot at stake. The term makes a grand promise: access to literatures, in foreign tongues, about unfamiliar peoples, in far-flung places. “World Literature” promises to reveal the astounding diversity of the globe through letters.
But its execution risks the exact opposite effect: in place of diversification, simplification; in place of multiplication, diminishment. A handful of writers behave as spokespeople for an entire nation, ethnic group, even continent; a single novel purports to function as representative of a variegated and ever-varying literary and popular culture of any given context. This prospect of oversimplification alarms both skeptics and advocates of world literature alike, and (unfortunately) even the most good-intentioned of attempts to avoid this plight may count for naught. READ MORE…
A look back at Asymptote, Ayotzinapa, and solidarity through poetry & translation
Asymptote is the only literary magazine I’ve ever worked for (or even heard about) that has the editorial and translatorial brainpower and resources to pull off a 20-language project in 10 days.
Because that is just what we pulled off with Say Ayotztinapa, which—thanks to the intrepid blog, design, and social media teams—surged on the wave of worldwide solidarity with the victims of the Ayotzinapa massacre in September 2014 and with the subsequent protests. And it’s wasn’t only a translatorial feat, the post was shared in the thousands, including retweets by organizations like English PEN, Words Without Borders, and Granta.
A look at intersecting poetics, visual arts, languages, and global industries
How to write the poetry of finance capital? There certainly is a poetry in the modern market; in the glowing lights of the myriad digits that flit through a bank server; and in capital’s capacity to erect and destroy cities with the stroke of a pen.
But when all that is solid melts into air, how can an artist make capital itself into a tangible object for reflection? The artist Xu Bing attempted this task with his sculpture “Phoenix”: a pair of twelve ton, one-hundred-foot long birds meant to represent China’s new ascendance in this age of global capital, fashioned from scrap metal by a team of migrant workers. Xu Bing’s sculpture, in turn, inspired the contemporary Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe to write a poem in tribute to the work, also entitled “Phoenix,” which Austin Woerner has recently translated. READ MORE…
