Posts filed under 'politics'

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Reflections on the Daily: Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal

May 25, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

This is the journal of an established writer, who, even within these pages, grapples between his own identity and the "legend" of Jean Giono.

Occupation Journal by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Jody Gladding, Archipelago Books, 2020

This is not a journal. It’s simply a tool of the trade. My life is not completely depicted. Nor would I want it to be. As I’ve said, here I practise scales, I break up my sentences, I try to stick as closely as possible to the truth. But sometimes events are so rich with drama or pathos . . . that practising scales—my scales— isn’t sufficient and I have to invent. For me, anyway, expressing truths of this order is impossible without inventing. Moreover, it’s to be able to express them simply that I force myself to do this daily work.

—Jean Giono, “December 25, Christmas”

In his own words, this book is an exercise: a series of attempts to train himself in writing, for when his “trade” is truly called upon. His goal? Simplicity and truth. Yet, reading this work in 2020, now available for the first time in English and translated by Jody Gladding, it is so much more than a mere exercise. Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal is a fascinating record of life under Nazi occupation in France, and an insight into the daily reading and writing practices of a dedicated author. Written between September 1943 and September 1944 whilst living in the town of Manosque in the south of France, it was only published in French in 1995 (by Gallimard, as Journal de l’Occupation). The diary entries are a fascinating historical record as well as immensely clever insights into the presence and importance of literature in a writer’s life.

By the time he began Occupation Journal, Giono was already a well-known writer, with over ten works published, including his famous “Pan trilogy.” He was also equally famous for his pacifism. Having been called up to fight on the frontline in WW1, Giono would never forget the horrors of his experience, and the resulting principles influence all of his early work. This journal, therefore, comes at a crucial time in his development; the majority of his work published after the war left behind pacifism, whose failure he witnessed in the coming of a second war, and adopted a greater pessimism with regards to human nature. Certain writers, including Stendhal and Balzac, also heavily impacted his later writing. This journal is a key into discovering this period of transition—a period so evidently crucial in the development of his thinking that its importance cannot be underestimated.

The infusion of literature into his daily living is remarkable. Giono notes profusely what he is reading, what he intends to read, and his reflections on what he has read. His reading is structured and often consists of long classics: Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Balzac, Homer, Virgil. It’s almost enviable in its attention to detail and its scope—”I’ve read all of Proust carefully ten times”! Fascinatingly, he often views literature as a model, a possibility of this world, and he judges the world by the standards of those encountered in fiction. He views “nobility” and “grandeur,” for example, in terms of Lancelot and Don Quixote and applies this to war taking place in the “modern, mechanical world,” where, of course, society falls short:

But the quest for the Grail made the knights-errant gallop in a straight line. Even Don Quixote walks straight. Today it seems as though the Grail has shattered and they are chasing all the scattered bits of it in every direction.

READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 25, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Daniel Hahn

Suspending sight and clarity, abdicating control: closing eyes.

For the fourth instalment of our Saturday column, In This Together, we present three diary entries from renowned Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn. Below, Hahn introduces us to Tavares’ work and the background behind his stream-of-consciousness diary that, written like a prose poem, records the daily changes of the pandemic experience:

The novelist Gonçalo M. Tavares is, like most of us, stuck at home. He is in Portugal, from where since March 23 he’s been writing a daily “Plague Diary.” As each piece is finished, it gets translated—sometimes overnight—into several languages for publication around the world. I have the good fortune of being one of the translators. To date he has written (and I’ve translated) thirty-two pieces, including the three that you can read below.

Gonçalo is one of the Portuguese world’s most critically acclaimed writers. José Saramago tipped him as the next Lusophone winner of the Nobel, saying, “Tavares burst onto the Portuguese literary scene armed with an utterly original imagination that broke through all the traditional imaginative boundaries. This, combined with a language entirely his own, mingling bold invention and a mastery of the colloquial, means that it would be no exaggeration to say . . . that there is very much a before Gonçalo M. Tavares and an after.” But while he has a stellar reputation in many languages, he is as yet frustratingly underappreciated in English. So if he’s new to you, I should say, perhaps, that this writing project is not typical of Gonçalo’s work—but then, I don’t know whether any one piece of his work is typical of his work, come to that. All are extraordinary, as I think this one is.

Each entry seems to take you through a single day’s experience—stepping-stone by stepping-stone—an observation, a piece of news, a thought that gets followed down a rabbit-hole, a bit of culture consumed, a recurring, niggling worry—in a way that partly recreates the peculiarly time-adrift days so many of us are experiencing; unstructured days filled with tiny moments (another news alert, an e-mail from a friend, stop to pat the dog, time perhaps for another coffee), but threaded together with some really subtle, almost invisible artfulness. Each day reads alone, but the best effect is cumulative, each piece slightly developing and illuminating what’s gone before. The writer is looking far outward as much as inward, so the diary ends up being global as well as intimate; its ingredients include utter banality, yet even that banality is woven into something weirdly engrossing, sometimes distressing, sometimes strangely comforting.

One day we will be living in a place where this whole project can be published all together as a book, to be read for its artistry and its thoughtfulness and as a reminder of who we were in the spring of 2020; but in the meantime, while we are still living in the present that it describes, I have felt its entries gradually becoming one of the richest ways I daily connect with the rest of the world (absent any of the old possibilities). I hope readers can find those connections for themselves here, too.

Extracts from “Plague Diary”

by Gonçalo M. Tavares

6 April

Human number 486 died in a Madrid hospital.

Lists of the dead.

Lists of chosen books.

A list of places to visit after the plague, when it is the anxiety that is driven away and not the bodies.

Ten pages in the newspaper with pictures of people with two dates.

Jacob Steinberg, Israeli poet: “we look tonight like a city in flames.”

I need gauze for the wounds of humans and animals and I consult a link.

“https://www.mifarma.pt/gasas-suaves-hansaplast-10-uds-85m-x-5cm.”

In the details, the link says the following:

“For looking, mole suggestion to clean and collect wounds.”

Later: “Individuals sterile wrapping.”

Then, the clincher. How to use it:

“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”

“Use or cure the Hansaplast look to fix a look on nowhere.”

“Apply a new one, I think that less hair daily.”

All instructions should be like this.

Instructions from a lunatic for other lunatics.

I like automatic translators that move into high aesthetics without knowing it.

“Clean the area surrounding carefully before applying the look.”

Clean the surface of an animal’s leg or a human arm well.

Carefully clean and then apply the look.

With a certain strength.

I try this on Roma’s leg.

Medicine that carefully cleans the surrounding area and then applies the look.

The ancients were men who applied the look.

It didn’t work.

My Greek friend tells me that a few days ago, at the refugee camp in Ritsona, a woman tested positive for coronavirus when she went to give birth in a public hospital.

Only then did they realise that many in the camp were infected.

Quarantine. The baby reveals things.

The good soldier Svejk and the description of the lunatic asylum:

“one very educated inventor . . . who spent his life picking his nose and only said once a day: I’ve just invented electricity.”

The raving and badly translated ad for the gauze reminded me of that madman who invented electricity once a day.

When this is over, the outside world is going to be full of crazy people, daily inventors of electricity.

In Italy the government has given approval for all students to pass their year.

In Sweden there are fears of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

Somebody asks: If you lose your desire, would you go looking for it?

Where?

Alexander Kluge talks about a doll “where the eyes” tell you the time.

Seeing the right time in the eyes of the doll.

Seeing the right time in the eyes of some old men on television.

At certain moments, clocks seem to stop working.

All that work are human eyes.

In Italy, everybody who goes out onto the street has the right time in their eyes.

In Spain too.

And in other places. In the United States.

I receive a link: click on a year and the most listened-to songs of that time will come up.

It’s called “nostalgia machine.”

A collective nostalgia machine.

Jung, explicit in do re mi.

I click on 1986.

The choices are terrible.

From Phil Collins to Samantha Fox.

Sometimes it’s better to lose our memory: memory 0.0

Two days ago in India: “Thousands of people flee to escape hunger.”

The factories are closed, almost everything quarantined.

Thousands quit the capital and return to their village.

There aren’t enough buses.

Reports in the Guardian. Many had to return on foot.

200 kilometres from New Delhi.

“The road seemed endless . . . and my children just took short breaks sleeping on the ground,” Mamta explained.

The only thing that kept us moving was that we had nowhere else to go, said Mamta.

The only thing.

“Each day a deeper rebirth,” the painter used to say, quoting a master.

The following day, in the same place, but sunk deeper.

With just your head out.

That’s how you learn: with just your head out.

Boris Johnson has been put into intensive care.

The Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will take his place.

They’re talking about 15 million new unemployed people in the United States.

I return to my book.

“Take five steps forward and five steps back,” says a doctor at the asylum of the good soldier Svejk.

It is a test to see whether the man is crazy or not.

I try to do this.

We should all do this.

Five steps forward and five steps back to see if we stay in the same place.

We don’t stay in the same place.

It’s no longer possible to stay in the same place.

*

8 April

All Mexican women are in love with the undersecretary of health, Hugo López-Gatell.

From a friend of mine in Mexico City, she was the one who verified this.

He speaks every evening at 7:00 p.m.

All the women, of all ages, are in love.

Married, single, widows.

He’s charming and intelligent, they say.

He’s a combo, they add. He has everything all in one.

There are photos of him all over Mexico and circulating on the internet, in different poses and suits.

And with the caption:

“I’ll protect you”

“I’m telling you to stay home”

“I’d be happy to explain it to you”

And another one, with a mean (“but very lovely”) expression, with the caption: “I saw you went out!”, as if Hugo López-Gatell were reproaching a citizen for not staying home.

Many men are also in love with him, says my friend from Mexico.

“He’s so supergorgeous our doctor.”

“I fell in love with him from the start of Covid-19 and since then I’ve done what Hugo López-Gatell says.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese city of Wuhan reopened this Wednesday. READ MORE…

Physical Politics: On Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s The Last Days of El Comandante

April 8, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

One is left wondering about the inherent value of innocence in a world where the smallest act can have grave, lifelong consequences.

The Last Days of El Comandante by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer, University of Texas Press, 2020

Can a single person hold a country together? Are the mundane pleasantries we all agree to participate in the only things that keep society from devolving into complete chaos? How much control do we really have over even the smallest details of our lives? Written by Hugo Chávez’s biographer Alberto Barrera Tyszka, The Last Days of El Comandante takes the reader back to the final few months of the Venezuelan strongman’s life, a time when Venezuela “was always on the point of exploding but it never did. Or worse: it was exploding in slow motion, little by little, without anyone actually realizing.” These reflections by one of the novel’s main protagonists, Miguel Sanabria (retired doctor turned chair of his apartment building’s residents’ association), introduce the reader to the overwhelming uncertainty that began to engulf the country with Chávez’s mysterious 2011 operation in Havana, Cuba. It merits stating that between ongoing food shortages, contested presidential elections, and accusations of U.S. interference in Venezuelan politics, the instability permeating the novel has an all-too-real corollary in the Venezuela of reality.

With Chávez’s impending demise as a backdrop, the novel thrusts us into the unraveling lives of a number of interconnected characters, despite its relatively short two hundred and forty-eight pages. The variant cast includes: Sanabria and his wife Beatriz, who don’t agree on politics, and his nephew, Vladimir, with whom he is very close; Tatiana, a freelance designer, and her common-law husband Fredy, who receive word that the woman who owns their apartment not only plans on returning to Caracas from Miami, but that she needs them to move out at a time when affordable, secure housing in the city is at a premium well beyond their means; María, a young student, spars with her justifiably fearful single mother, who pulls her out of school and confines her to the apartment because of ongoing violence in the streets; and lastly, U.S. journalist Madeleine Butler who, entranced by Chávez’s larger-than-life persona, flies to Venezuela to write a personal profile on the ailing strongman. Chávez himself, of course, serves as the human event that binds all of these people and their troubles together, even as the country’s decline mirrors the slow deterioration of his own physical state. As things grow worse, the characters spin in and out of each other’s orbit as their daily lives and relationships become harder and harder to maintain. Sanabria gets sucked into the conflict between Tatiana, Fredy, and their landlady, while María, locked in her apartment, begins an online relationship with the couple’s young son over the internet. Every chapter is punctuated with official updates about Chávez’s health, as well as different characters’ responses to those updates, an almost point-counterpoint format that underscores people’s increasing lack of faith in their government and in the world around them. When Miguel Sanabria first informs his wife of Chávez’s illness, for example, she responds by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all lies . . . Something the Cubans made up to distract us.” READ MORE…

Johannes Anyuru’s Dystopian Swedish Future: A Review of They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears

January 22, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting

Anyuru doesn’t shy away from complicated issues—instead, he utilizes a complex story structure to take us right to the core of them.

They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears by Johannes Anyuru, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Two Lines Press, 2019

As I’m reading the English translation of Johanne’s Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears at the end of 2019, a news report catches my attention. The Sweden Democrats, a right-wing populist anti-immigration party with increasing support since entering the Swedish parliament in 2010, has proposed limiting the access to Swedish public libraries. Non-citizens in Sweden would lose their right to borrow books or use other library services. I’m talking about a proposed bill in the real Sweden, in the real now.

Terrorist attacks have become a familiarity in western European cities over the past years, and that’s starting to be reflected in the fiction that’s published. Anyuru’s latest novel starts with a bomb attack at a comic book store in Gothenburg. While this is fiction, there are clear references to both the Parisian publication Charlie Hebdo and the controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks.

It was five years ago, in January 2015, that the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by terrorists. Twelve columnists, editors, cartoonists, and other workers in the building were killed and eleven more were injured. You might remember the Je suis Charlie manifestations that followed across multiple countries. Probably less known around the world is conceptual artist Lars Vilks, a survivor of several targeted attacks, including the February 2015 attack in Copenhagen that killed one person. Lars Vilks has lived under death threats since 2007 because of his depictions of the prophet Muhammad. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mr. Shyti Sheds Light on Some Lesser Known Aspects of National Hygiene” by Ardian Vehbiu

January 14, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Ilir Baçi

. . . it resembled those desk calendars with individual date sheets, on the back of which one can read a quote by Marx or some curiosity from Mars.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the prolific Albanian writer, Ardian Vehbiu, mixes the language of bodily intimacy with the language of the state and bureaucratic maintenance. A dry metaphor takes root, illuminating not only the persistence of pastiche but also the tendency of humans to analyze and rearrange thoughts. This tendency, what some may call the poetic or political, exists in some way at every level of human work. With humour, Vehbiu manages to, in the space of a small speech, cast light on material circumstances, personal history, and the idiosyncratic phenomena that rises from circumstance.

“There will be those, among you,” Mr. Shyti said, “who still remember the time when one could not find any toilet paper in Albania: the State of Workers and Peasants, which thought of everything, did not consider it necessary to provide for this indispensable item for the daily wellbeing of its citizens, not because it was its intention to abandon them in their efforts for keeping their private parts clean, but because it was, perhaps, rather confident that the Albanians had such adequate tradition that they would not find it difficult to overcome such a trifle. I, for a start,” Mr. Shyti continued, “did use polished river stones or, indeed, fig leaves for personal hygiene purposes; however, the truth is that, leaving aside a significant—and still unknown—number of compatriots that humbly used jugs of water to wash themselves, the Albanians of the time used the daily newspaper as toilet paper. I do remember, as a matter of fact,” he recalled, “my late Uncle Neptun, who developed a habit of saving his newspaper copies, which, later, when they were past their relevance, he would cut into equally small pieces, with the precision of a surveyor or metalworker, using his wife’s fearful sewing scissors. He used to do this on Sunday afternoons, while listening to live football coverage on his battery-powered transistor. The result of his work was a handsome pile of regular square sheets, fixed on the wall with a monstrous nail right next to the Turkish toilet; it resembled those desk calendars with individual date sheets, on the back of which one can read a quote by Marx or some curiosity from Mars. And, so, like many other guests at Uncle Neptun’s,” he went on to explain, “I, too, would happen to squat on his toilet, waiting for ‘relief,’ while perusing pieces of field news, recommended phrases, headlines as large as tank tracks, fear-instilling political invectives, accusations and counter-accusations against the superpowers and Eurocommunism, letters from common citizens and public epistles; or watching photographic fragments of leaders, terraced hills, military naval ships, milky cows, and front-runner textile workers, always out of context and randomly remixed as if in a Dadaist work of art, thanks to poor Neptun’s magician folding and precise scissors, may his soul rest in peace! Thus, a toilet was transformed into a recycler not only of the Albanians’ metabolic waste and periodical paper, but also of news and information disseminated by those newspapers, even the ideology of the times, albeit always in the form of collage, or in stark combinations. To those of you who are young and have no recollections of such times,” concluded Mr. Shyti, “I will limit myself to saying that reading slightly outdated newspapers in such minimalistic and fragmented pieces resembles, more than one would think nowadays, a news aggregator or portal, including Facebook, which people now think of as something new.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

hrabal_all_my_cats_jacket

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…

Collective Memory: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter: A Fiction in Review

August 21, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

An exercise in the resilience of human memory, the novel integrates a broad swath of literary and global cultural touchstones . . .

Human Matter: A Fiction by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio, University of Texas Press, 2019

As noted over the years by scholars such as Arturo Arias, Central American cultural production remains largely at the margins of academic study. As Arias points out in Taking Their Word, because popular knowledge of the region is so sparse, and because geographic ignorance (particularly in the United States) is so widespread, Central American immigrants will often identify Mexico as their country of origin, both for reasons of Latinx solidarity, and to protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. This erasure is not even a recent phenomenon: the protagonists of the 1983 film El Norte, the Guatemalan-Maya brother and sister Enrique and Rosa Xuncax, are told to tell people that they are from the heavily Indigenous state of Oaxaca, Mexico, to avoid being taken advantage of in both Mexico and the US. However, from the United Fruit Company in the early twentieth century to the practices of Canadian mining companies, and even US president Donald Trump’s facilitating, in the words of the Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman, “organized crime” in Guatemala’s 2019 presidential elections, global forces have always played, and continue to play, an outsized role in the region.

Despite its apparently marginal status, the region has made a number of enduring contributions to world literature. Foremost among them is one of the fathers of Latin American modernism, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, not to mention one of the most important works of Indigenous literature in the Americas, the K’iche’ Maya Popol Wuj. Outside of these points of reference, however, much of the region’s vast, rich literature remains untranslated, which makes Eduardo Aparicio’s translation of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano as Human Matter all the more important.

Rey Rosa, perhaps Guatemala’s most important living novelist, has had an eclectic literary trajectory. Having gone to New York in the early 1980s, he eventually became the protégé of the US-expatriate author Paul Bowles, spending a good deal of time with the author in his adopted home of Tangier, Morocco, and even becoming executor of Bowles’s literary estate upon the author’s death in 1999. Tellingly, one of Rey Rosa’s previously translated novels, the magnificent The African Shore, deals with the intersection of tourism, privilege, and migration in the border zone not between Guatemala and the US, or even between Guatemala and México, but between Morocco and Spain.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 9, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Ruba Abughaida, and Sarah Moore

Follow our editors through Lebanon, Hong Kong, and France as they bring a selection of literary news of the week.

From the town nestled in the peaks of Lebanon, to the recent surge in Hong Kong streets, to the crystal waters of the Occitanie coast, our three literary destinations of the week bring forth an array of Lebanese love stories, reimaginings of home, and the rich culture of Mediterranean poetry. In the words of the great Sufi poet Yunus Emre, “If I told you about a land of love, friend, would you follow me and come?”

Ruba Abughaida, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Lebanon

The mountain town of Bsharri in Lebanon should see an increase in tourism following the Lebanese debut of a musical adapted from Gibran Khalil Gibran’s Broken Wings, published in 1912. Born in Bsharri in 1883, Gibran’s book The Prophet, published in the United States in 1923, is still one of the best-selling books of all time after ninety-six years and 189 consecutive print runs. Showing at Beit El Din Palace, a nineteenth century palace which hosts the annual Beiteddine festival, the musical tells of a tragic love story which takes place during the turn of the century in Beirut.

Closer to sea level, an evening of poetry in Beirut celebrated Lebanese poet Hasan Abdulla.  Born in Southern Lebanon, Abdulla was inspired by its natural beauty, and infused his poetry with observations of nature. His work, spanning over forty years, has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian. 

READ MORE…

The Miracle Born of Everyday Reality, Or What We’ve Learnt About Ourselves

May 1, 2019  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Jana Juráňová and Julia Sherwood

Yet, against all the odds, Čaputová prevailed. What does this mean for the future?

Image credit: Mikuláš Galanda

In an exclusive for Asymptote, Slovak writer Jana Juráňová reports on last month’s groundbreaking presidential election in her country.

It took just two weeks since Zuzana Čaputová was elected Slovakia’s first woman president for the press to stop talking about this astonishing event and pivot to other domestic issues. As our media are preoccupied with things like the malfunctioning ruling coalition, which insists on clinging to power come what may, the population has slowly reconciled itself to the fact that this gang will continue lining their own pockets and haemorrhaging Slovakia’s economy, even if it bankrupts the country. Robert Fico, the former Prime Minister and chairman of SMER-Social Democracy—the senior partner in the coalition government whose links with real social democracy are actually rather tenuous—keeps promising new “social packages,” like some freshly crowned fairy tale king tossing gold coins from a carriage, making economists shudder at the thought of how much all these “free” handouts will cost. A lot of coverage has also focused on the creation of a new party, announced by outgoing President Andrej Kiska after extensively agonising over whether to stay in politics or not. While he kept the public guessing with vague statements, two smaller parties emerged, including Progressive Slovakia, which nominated its deputy chairperson Zuzana Čaputová as its candidate in the presidential election (she resigned from her previous position after accepting the nomination). At that point, the party’s ratings were quite low and she was a relatively unknown environmental activist and lawyer. Despite losing ground, SMER-SD remains the strongest party in parliament, polling 20% support, a figure all the more remarkable in the wake of the murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée a little over a year ago, and given the endless supply of scandals involving the party’s top officials. In this set-up, Kiska’s new party is likely to attract the mainstream electorate, currently composed of reluctant voters and non-voters. No wonder that passions are running high within the panicking coalition following the news of the President’s new party, as well as among opposition parties worried that the newcomer will take away their votes. Amidst this turmoil, the fact that the first woman president in Slovak history will take office almost 100 years since the day women’s suffrage was won in postwar Czechoslovakia in 1920 seems to have slipped people’s minds.

We have been plagued with so many problems that we regularly forget the most pressing of them. That the greatest scandal of recent years—the murder of Ján Kuciak—has not been forgotten is only thanks to the huge effort on the part of journalists who have managed to publish a steady trickle of news on the criminal investigation, as well as the young activists behind a new movement, For a Decent Slovakia. Other burning issues have been rapidly cooling off, as Slovakia returns to the state of the proverbial frog that didn’t manage to leap out of the boiling kettle in time and is slowly getting used to living at boiling point without even realising it’s been cooked.   READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2019

April 15, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daniel Persia, Josefina Massot, and Paul Worley

The latest in translated fiction, reviewed by members of the Asymptote team.

Looking for new books to read this April? Look no further with this edition of What’s New in Translation, featuring new releases translated from Thai, German, and Brazilian Portuguese. Read on to find out more about Clarice Lispector’s literature of exile, tales of a collection of eccentric villagers, and a comic book adaptation of Bertolt Brecht.

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Tales of Mr. Keuner by Bertolt Brecht and Ulf K., translated from the German by James Reidel, Seagull Books, 2019

Review by Josefina Massot, Assistant Managing Editor

If Brecht’s bite-sized, biting tales of Mr. Keuner can be thought of as a corpus, it isn’t by virtue of their “what,” “when,” “where,” or “how”: they deal with everything from existentialism to Marxist politics, have often hazy settings, and run the gamut from parable to poem; it’s the titular “who” that pulls these sundry musings together.

Until recently, their fellowship was purely formal: Mr. Keuner (also known as Mr. K) was practically nondescript, a mere “thinking man” whom Walter Benjamin traced back to the Greek keunos and the German keiner—a universal no one. This seemingly baffling figure would have made sense given the original tales’ fifth W, their “why”: since they were meant to edify general audiences, they would have gained from as null a champion as possible. After all, a man stripped of his traits is stripped of individuality, untainted by bias; he is the ultimate thinker, the voice of global truth. READ MORE…

Small Streams That Grow into the Main Flow of the Novel: An Interview with Radka Denemarková

April 8, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Filip Noubel

I just want to speak the truth because I cannot stay silent about the pain affecting others.

Radka Denemarková is a unique phenomenon on the Czech literary scene. A true polymath, she has written plays, scenarios, short and long novels, a double novel that can be read from both ends, translations, and essays. On April 7, she was awarded the Book of the Year award at the Magnesia Litera ceremony, making her the only four-time winner of the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic. Her most noticeable works include Money from Hitler (2006), which tells the story of a Holocaust survivor who returns to her home village in Czechoslovakia only to be denied existence; Sleeping Disorders, a humorous play featuring Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ivana Trump; and A Contribution to the History of Joy (2014)—of which Asymptote published a partial translation—a reflection on violence disguised as part essay, part crime novel. Finally, her most recent novel is Lead Hours, a major work expanding over 700 pages, spanning China and Europe, and exploring the fate of a series of characters witnessing the crumbling of their value system as they face life crises. Denemarková was also featured in Asymptote as a translator, and is now translated into over fifteen languages, including Chinese. She is currently working on her next novel.

Filip Noubel (FN): Your latest novel, Hodiny z olova, which can be translated as Lead Hours, just came out in January. What does the title refer to, and why is China such a prominent theme in this 700 page-long major work? 

Radna Denemarková (RD): The reason for China being the center stage of my novel comes out of a series of trips I made to that country, the first in 2013. I was literally shocked by what I experienced there: the breaking down of a socio-political system combined with the consequences of globalization, and how all of this affects us in the most intimate way. Initially, I had a very idealized notion of China, shaped by the little knowledge I had about its poetry, calligraphy, and philosophy. What I hadn’t expected at all was the brutality of daily life.

The main issue in China we face concerns how economic pragmatism changes the human soul, and how we can bring back the notion of humanism in our daily language. While the world seems to embrace new forms of totalitarian ideologies, we need a new language. People are afraid to speak openly. People report on each other even within the family circle. In Beijing, in the case of a car accident, people accepted as normal the fact that the male driver of an expensive car hit a woman because she was poor and uneducated and had no business ‘getting in the way.’

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 4, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Janani Ganesan and Lee Yew Leong

Expired copyrights, new literature, and the difficulties faced by translated literature feature in this week's updates.

As we welcome the New Year in, join our Editor-in-Chief, Yew Leong, and one of our Assistant Managing Editors, Janani, as they review the latest in world translation news. From the trials and tribulations faced by indigenous languages to new literary journals and non-mainstream literature, there’s plenty to catch up on!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief:

Though it was actually in 2016 that the UNESCO declared this year, 2019, to be the Year of Indigenous Languages, recent unhappy events have revealed how of the moment this designation has proven to be. A 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who was unable to communicate how sick she was died while in U.S. Border Patrol Custody—only one of several thousands of undocumented immigrants who speak an indigenous language like Zapotec, Mixtec, Triqui, Chatino, Mixe, Raramuri, Purepecha, or one of many Mayan languages, according to The Washington Post. Jair Bolsonaro, the new Brazilian president who has made insulting comparisons of indigenous communities living in protected lands to “animals in zoos,” wasted no time in undermining their rights within hours of taking office and tweeted ominously about “integrating” these citizens. On a brighter note, Canada will likely be more multilingual this year as the Trudeau administration looks set to enforce the Indigenous Languages Act before the Canadian election this year. The act will not only “recognize the use of Indigenous languages as a ‘fundamental right,’ but also standardize them,” thereby assisting their development across communities. Keen to explore literary works from some of these languages? With poems from indigenous languages ranging from Anishinaabemowin to Cree, Asymptote’s Fall 2016 Special Feature will be your perfect gateway to literature by First Nations writers.

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My 2018: Jonathan Egid

December 20, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Jonathan Egid

I relished the opportunity to read texts with somewhat more invigorating prose than typically displayed in analytic philosophy journals.

Israeli writer Amos Oz and Cretan memoirist George Psychoundakis are two of the highlights of Assistant Blog Editor Jonathan Egid’s 2018 reading list. Addressing topics ranging from Israeli politics and the death of Jesus (Oz) to Renaissance poetry and home-brewed alcohol (Psychoundakis), the two writers nevertheless share a sense of humour and a talent for producing powerful and thought-provoking texts.

Having spent most of the first half of the year reading texts about, rather than in translation, as part of my research for a thesis on the philosophy of cultural and conceptual difference, I relished the opportunity to read texts with somewhat more invigorating prose than typically displayed in analytic philosophy journals, and my summer reading list was full of translated fiction.

High on this list was the Israeli writer Amos Oz’s first new novel in over a decade, Judas. An old-fashioned novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, Judas begins with an end; the protagonist Shmuel Ash is left suddenly by his girlfriend, and then learns of his father’s bankruptcy, which forces him to abandon his promising studies. He takes up work caring for an elderly cripple in an ancient house on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the narrative follows Shmuel as he is drawn into the troubled history of this crumbling house and its mysterious and enticing inhabitants.

The narrative is interspersed with Shmuel’s reflections on his now-abandoned thesis, giving the story—which takes place almost entirely in the old house and the neighbouring streets, cafes, and alleyways—a dazzling historical and intellectual scope, as Oz spans continents and centuries from medieval Al-Andalus to Galician shtetls and kibbutzim on the Sharon plain, tracing the fraught history of Jesus and the Jews. The focus of these reflections is neither Jesus nor the Jews, but on the eponymous Judas, or rather on the figure of Judas, the figure of a most reviled and hated traitor.

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