Posts filed under 'postmodern fiction'

The Secret Outside Us: Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day

November 21, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Jae Won Edward Chung

The balance of the surreal, the cerebral, the melancholic, and the grotesque puts Bae’s work in league with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Today, we continue our four-part series on contemporary Korean Literature sponsored by Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Introducing our next title is scholar Jae Won Edward Chung, who last reviewed Yi Sang’s Selected Works (tr. Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney, Sawako Nakayasu, and newly annointed National Book Award winner Don Mee Choi).

The Secret Outside Us: A review of Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day (tr. Deborah Smith)

Ayami, a former actress in her late twenties, works in an audio theater, takes German lessons, and fantasizes about the birth parents she never knew. One day, she has a disturbing encounter with a man loitering outside the theater. When he insists on being let in, their hands briefly meet over the opposite sides of the glass door. Buha is an aspiring middle-aged poet who has never written a poem in his life. He obsesses over a woman poet whose photograph he once saw in a newspaper. He appears to cross paths with her in the same audio theater where Ayami works. Is Ayami the poet? Here, too, their hands overlap without touching. But something is off. The poet woman should be decades older than Ayami. And we know—or think we know—that Ayami is not a poet.

On the surface, Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day is about alienated city-dwellers stranded in their quest for connection and significance. The novel is filled with creative and intellectual types, most of whom have experienced varying degrees of failure. They discuss theories of photography and obsess about Max Ernst’s objets. Their lifestyle and banter may feel like familiar territory for some readers, but their journey is not without pathos, as we find ourselves in the thrall of the same yearning and fear that grip these artists as their lives unceremoniously pass them by. There are also scenes of levity. In the first section, we’re promised the appearance of a German poet. Seventy pages later, a detective novelist arrives instead, with hopes of taking an inspiring train ride up to Yalu River bordering China (Ayami has to remind him about North Korea).

As the introduction of this detective confirms, Bae is operating within the parameters of the postmodern noir. The balance of the surreal, the cerebral, the melancholic, and the grotesque puts Bae’s work in league with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. READ MORE…

Life in Print: Michael Hofmann on Translating Peter Stamm

February 20, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Translation in my experience effaces itself as you do it. There’s no such thing as translation-memory or any abiding feeling of translation-pain.

In a tumultuous January, Asymptote Book Club sent to subscribers a remarkable novel that is as compelling as it is disorienting: The Sweet Indifference of the World, written by esteemed Swiss author Peter Stamm and translated by Michael Hofmann, an accomplished poet with the penchant for “avoiding the obvious.” Instilled, as the best fictions are, with the tantalizingly elusive and the startlingly clear, the prose takes unorthodox turns to investigate a love lost and a life lived. Though we now have tools to navigate nearly every physical terrain, literature is still our main method for traversing the topography of psychological human experience. To grant us an insight on this unique work, Michael Hofmann talks with assistant editor Lindsay Semel about failures, freedoms, and the the survival of simplicity through translation.

The Asymptote Book Club is our gift to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. Bringing the most notable titles in translated literature for as little as USD15 per book, you can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

Lindsay Semel (LS): So far, you are Peter Stamm’s only voice in English, and you’ve ironically referred to him as your “living author.” How does his writing converse with some of the other work you’ve translated? Do you find any interesting points of contact, clash, or cohesion?

Michael Hofmann (MH): Peter’s writing is so pure and clean. There’s nowhere to hide in it. Most of the things I’m associated with (or that I write myself) are much murkier and endlessly more elaborate. In some ways, we’re not a natural pairing at all. For someone like me who spends much of his time shuffling subordinate clauses or thinking of the ideal way to modify adverbs (with another adverb), it’s a purge and a cure. The contact, I suppose, is that to some extent he comes out of the Anglo-Saxon tradition (Hemingway, Carver, etc. etc.—though he has many more writers behind him), and I’m trying to return him to it in the most graceful and fitting way I can. In a way, it doesn’t feel like translating at all—it’s more like making a forgery. Trying to pass off something English-inspired as English!

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Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm

January 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

How often do we look back on our lives only to be confounded by our own choices?

Do writers aspire to live forever? Is literature a cultivated method of extending our capacities, prolonging the temporary, and rectifying our past mistakes? In this month’s Book Club selection, Asymptote has selected lauded German author Peter Stamm’s latest novel, The Sweet Indifference of the World, which probes such questions with a graceful awareness of how human relationships materialize and dissipate. Cohered by a love story told and retold, Stamm deftly enwraps complex psychological themes of identity and memory in his polished prose, translated into English skillfully by poet Michael Hofmann. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

The Sweet Indifference of the World by Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, Other Press (US/Can) & Granta (UK), 2020

What casualty of a failed love affair doesn’t leave some phantom of themselves wandering eternally through their memories, in search of what could have gone differently? Peter Stamm’s The Sweet Indifference of the World, translated from the German into understated, efficient English by Michael Hofmann, invites the thrilling possibility of the alternate ending. Christoph, middle-aged and still coasting on the success of his first and only novel, recalls his relationship with actress Magdalena, grasping at a slippery opportunity to finally salve his unsatisfied soul. 

The masterful craftsmanship of both author and translator animates a universe that trembles on the limit of realism. An elevation from the typical love story, the novel invites meditation on topics like the nature of narrative, the unreliability of perception, the standards by which we judge the value of a human life, and even the act of translation. READ MORE…