Posts filed under 'queer poetry'

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 3, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Areeb Ahmad, and Wambua Muindi

Dispatches from Mexico, Kenya, and India!

This week at Asymptote, our Editors-at-Large report on book fairs, Annie Ernaux’s visit to India, and celebrations of International Mother Language Day all around the world. From the efforts of Trans activists and performance artists in Mexico to a recent multilingual anthology published by Olongo Africa, read on to learn more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community in Mexico City has been vibrant and active in the first months of 2023. Between February 23–March 6, the Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería took place in Mexico City. This forty-fourth edition of one of the biggest international book fairs in Mexico brought together writers, scholars, editors, and artists from all over the world. They gathered in the historic downtown to host readings, panels, and roundtables on literature, social sciences, and politics.

There were more than a hundred events, ranging from book presentations to movie screenings to workshops for children. In one panel, Asymptote contributor Tedi López Mills presented an edited anthology of her poetry, published by the National University of Mexico in its pamphlet series Material de lectura. The publication will bring López Mills’s poetry to a wider public. In another event, Cuban poet Odette Alonso moderated a talk with Lía García and Jessica Marjane, two Trans performance artists and organizers that have been at the forefront of the movement for Trans rights and recognition in Mexico. García and Marjane founded the National Network of Trans Youth, which has strengthened the community bonds among Trans young people in Mexico. García has acquired international recognition, having been invited to perform and read to institutions outside of Mexico, among them Harvard University and the University of Illinois’s Humanities Research Center.

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Where the Poems Live: In Conversation with Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott

March 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by M.L. Martin

There’s a rawness, an honesty, and an urgent need of poetry that is both captivating and heartbreaking. Queerness is at the center of that . . .

Last fall, Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott published Almost Obscene (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), a wide-ranging selection of poems from Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), introducing English readers to the poet for the first time. 

Gómez Jattin’s poetry defies the contemporary impulse to categorize a book of poems or its poet in any straightforward fashion. A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, born in Cartagena, Gómez Jattin wrote from the margins of his literary culture on topics ranging from mental illness to homosexuality to drug use to Greek mythology; the distance between the poet’s life and his subject(s) often seems imperceptible. 

I recently had the chance to interview both translators over a series of emails, during which we discussed the collaborative process of translating this book together, as well as the “deceptively simple” queer poetics of Gómez Jattin, and exactly where in the body his poems ‘live.’ 

M.L. Martin (MLM): Thank you, Katherine and Olivia, for making time to discuss this powerful and important book, Almost Obscene, which is out now with Cleveland State University Poetry Center. I’m always curious about how translators find and connect with their translation projects. How did you first encounter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s work? And what aspects of his work—and his biography as a marginalized queer Colombian poet of Syrian descent—did you wish to share with English readers?

Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): I first heard of Raúl when I traveled to Medellín, Colombia in 1997 to attend the International Poetry Festival. He had been a good friend of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, whom I was traveling with, and he had just died. It was big news at the festival. Raúl was a controversial figure in Colombian poetry, as you can imagine, and the rebel rouser organizers of Medellín’s poetry festival had supported him. I got to know his work through Víctor; which I found both compelling and heartbreaking. He had been on my list of poets I wanted to see in English translation. Fast forward to 2012. Olivia was a student in my literary translation course at Kenyon College. Back then, I’d assign each student a poet to translate, normally one who hadn’t been translated yet. I assigned Raúl to her. She loved the work and eventually her manuscript became her honors thesis in Spanish at Kenyon. At this point, the project was all hers. I had only been involved as her thesis advisor. 

Olivia Lott (OL): Just as Kate says, Raúl was the first poet I translated, as part of her literary translation course and then honors thesis. The project took me to Colombia, where I taught English through the Fulbright Program and spent weekends and holidays traveling around the country to meet poets. My year there gave me time to read a ton of Colombian poetry and to get a sense of the literary scene. I always kept Raul’s work in mind. I was struck by how he was often excluded from national anthologies, and how even in Cartagena (the city where he lived most of his life) his work was difficult to track down in local bookstores. Through this experience I began to translate other poets, but I never abandoned the Raúl project, in part due to the possibility of “righting” his legacy through giving his work a second life in English-language translation. 

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Reframing Queerness: On Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole

September 26, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

These songs celebrate both queer rights and queer wrongs, the beauty and the madness, the mess that undergirds everything.

Glory Hole by Kim Hyun, translated from the Korean by Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan, Seagull Books, June 2022.

Twentieth-century queer American visual artist Keith Haring was renowned for his pop art that emerged, according to critic Barry Blinderman, from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His work predominantly engaged in queer activism, urging for safe sex practices and AIDS awareness. The poet Kim Hyun cites his 1980 drawing, Glory Hole—also the title of his own collection—in the notes to the poem, “Old Baby Homo.” The drawing shows a standing man with his head out of the frame. Two vertical lines represent the wall the man faces and where the eponymous glory hole is located. His penis is shown on the other side, burnished and luminous like the sun, surrounded by disembodied hands seeking it out. In an academic paper titled “Faceless sex: glory holes and sexual assemblages,” the researchers—Dave Holmes, Patrick O’Byrne, and Stuart J. Murray—posit: “[T]he glory hole affords an intense, temporary escape from the demands of subjectivity . . . The hole itself becomes the site of sexual energy and exchange.” Glory holes, by facilitating anonymous sexual encounters, enable a new politics of desire.

Arriving during the full-blown AIDS crisis in the US of the 80s, the drawing reframes queerness outside of the pathology of promiscuity, depravity, and disease. The glory hole, instead of being a vector for proliferation of the virus, is transformed into a fecund well of possibility. The paper further claims: “[D]ue to the fragmentation—the disorganization—of the body, the glory hole allows the free play of desire and fantasy for both users. Users may feel liberated not only from the social roles and expectations dictated by a predominantly heterosexual world, but also from the codes of the gay world . . .” Kim Hyun’s collection is not interested in being contained within any sort of category. From futuristic dystopias and planet hopping to alternate histories and forged references, from science fiction to pornography and literature to art, between prose and poetry, Glory Hole is unrepentantly queer in every way. The poems desist simplistic readings and are expansive in meaning, using language both in itself and as a vehicle to advance images that transform incoherence into the sublime.

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Translation Tuesday: “Chemistry Lesson” by Hagit Zohara Mendrowski

May 24, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Dana G. Peleg

In our room we are delivering / each other

Revel in the sensuous yearning of “Chemistry Lesson” this Translation Tuesday, a poem by the pansexual Hebrew poet Hagit Zohara Mendrowski’s that itself enacts a pedagogy of queer desire. In Dana G. Peleg’s translation, the linguistic aspects of gender between Hebrew and English unfold in poetic time to elongate and stretch the modes of desire latent in Mendrowski’s poem. Read this poem today and hear from the translator on the choices she made: 

“The love poems of Hagit Zohara Mendrowski, a pansexual Hebrew poet, reflect a great yearning. In many of her poems, the lover she yearns for is non-existent or a fantasy male or female lover. In this poem, the female lover is real, tangible. Furthermore, the gendered conjugation of verbs and prepositions in Hebrew does not leave any doubt regarding the type of the lovemaking depicted here. When using second person singular in Hebrew poets are forced to choose a gender. English, on the other hand, allows room for interpretation. I took the liberty of leaving readers with a question mark for a while. That question mark becomes an exclamation point when Mendrowski writes “pigeons” in the feminine. This is a grammatical error, or a children’s word, since “pigeon” in proper Hebrew is pluralized in the masculine. This usage adds another layer to the yearning expressed in this poem, for turning lesbian lovemaking into an act of procreation, of recreating.” 

—Dana G. Peleg

Brilliant formulae you have developed
Insist on impregnating me

When you squat on all six
my tongue draws infinite figures of eight
inside you. The whole room is lit. I drop into
The world of my childhood, scared
to sprout
but your obstinate womb pushes away—

Outside people continue to
Spit, swear, drag their heavy baskets.
Honk their limping cars.

In our room we are delivering
each other. Wander READ MORE…

A Gesture of Togetherness: An Interview with Ian Russell

April 18, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

In my reading of the current Winter 2022 issue, I was drawn to the vivid and imaginative poetry of Spanish artist Pepe Espaliú. The featured excerpt, translated beautifully by Ian Russell, was taken from Espaliú’s only collection of poetry, En estos cinco años (Through These Five Years). The collection was written in the years preceding his death from AIDS, gracefully exploring the topic of mortality. Russell’s translations introduce a new audience of Anglophone readers to a dynamic activist, who fought to call attention to AIDS through his art while many political leaders refused to even acknowledge the disease. Russell was generous enough to agree to speak with me over email, and in the following interview we discuss Espaliú’s legacy as a performance artist, the communal aspect of translation, and some interesting parallels between birding and poetry.

Rose Bialer (RB): Before we start discussing your translations of Espaliú’s work, I’m curious to know how you became interested in translation in the first place. What was your introduction to the craft?

Ian Russell (IR): I can think of two starts. I got offered some freelance work to translate articles from Spanish to English while I was in grad school and took them purely to make a little extra money. I actually felt like I wasn’t very good at it. But right around that same time I had some friends that wrote poetry ask me to help translate their work. I felt totally unqualified since I had only done these academic articles, but after working on them and talking through the poems it became a really gratifying creative outlet for me.

RB: How did you come across Pepe Espaliú’s art? What initially attracted you to his poetry?

IR: I came across Espaliú’s visual work in researching HIV/AIDS in Spain. Later, I discovered he had written quite prolifically, and I found a copy of the first printing of En estos cinco años in the library (this was before Jesús Alcaide’s stunning 2018 La imposible verdad); I really loved the sort of smallness, the roundness, that I encountered in that short edition. I don’t know if that makes sense—the book is comprised of several different sections that seem pretty hermetic at first read, and many poems have an aphoristic quality. Other prose poems sit in their text blocks on the page. I felt a smallness and roundness that was easily digestible, maybe.

RB: In your translator’s note you mention that a challenge you faced in rendering this excerpt of Espaliú’s poetry was understanding that his poems are only a part of his artistic repertoire—he was also a visual and performing artist. How did you go about translating this poetry with consideration of Espaliú’s larger body of work? Did you translate while immersing yourself in it?

IR: I actually started writing about Espaliú’s performance work first. During the pandemic, I found it more difficult to keep up with that sort of critical analysis, and turned to translating Espaliú as a way to think about his performances, as if translating might offer some clue to approach the visual/performance. I think the main piece that came together for me in that process was how the installation, performance, and poetic pieces all read as a reaching out, a convocation of togetherness. So, in that way, I became more comfortable translating the work as a gesture of togetherness with the artist.

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Happy World Poetry Day!

March 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Celebrate with an eclectic selection of the best poems from our archives!

In honor of World Poetry Day, we invite you to revisit some of the best international poetry from our eleven-year archive. For a start, Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo’s work soars to great heights through its accumulation of brilliant specificities. But it also catches one unawares with looser, breath-taking lines like these: “Life itself is a round thing / so that when we go wrong, we go wrong roundly.” Revisit Lêdo Ivo’s “The Earth Is Round” from our Summer 2021 issue.

 

A leading light of South Korea’s contemporary poetry scene, Yi Won takes ‘avant-garde’ to new extremes. Catapulting the reader into a future where technology rules the human spirit, her lacerating social commentary interrogates the very nature of poetry itself. Courtesy of translator Kevin Michael Smith, discover Yi Won’s radical work from our Summer 2018 edition. READ MORE…

Against Invisibility: Poet Roy G. Guzmán on Queer Identity, Memory, and Honduras

March 18, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

The literary market, films, music, everything tells you, in some way, that no one’s interested in your voice, in your stories, and in your culture.

Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) was born in Honduras, grew up in Miami, lives in Minnesota, and last year, Graywolf Press put out Catrachos, their first book of poems. In February, the book was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards in the poetry category, alongside Ray González, Danez Smith, and Torrin A. Greathouse. Roy debuted with authority, potency, rebelliousness, and nonconformity, but also with pain and sensitivity, with empathy and nostalgia and tenderness, with admiration. Catrachos is filled with references to their childhood in Miami and how it was for them, a poor Central American person, to grow up in a hostile environment. In a country that considered them, in their own words, “an afterthought” and “a second-class citizen.” Catrachos, in a way, serves as a testimony for the experience of the Central American diaspora in the United States. But it’s more. Mucho más.

In Roy’s poems we find, yes, family traditions, but also violence, resistance, what it was like for them to grow up as a queer kid. Catrachos is a beautiful and soothing portrait, not devoid of harsh and urgent criticism toward imperialism and racial violence. Roy, in their debut, speaks with curiosity and tenderness, while acknowledging the devastation caused by colonialism. Trailblazing, the gringos might say.

Last year, Roy and I spoke about all this. About Catrachos, their memories of Honduras, their family, their identity, about considering themselves “the other.” We spoke about Rubén Darío, X-Men, and the Pulse massacre—the basis of a poem they wrote called “Restored Mural for Orlando.” We spoke about being a poet, about being queer, Latinx, mestizx, mulatx, indigenous in the United States and in Honduras.

–José García Escobar

José García Escobar (JGE): First, I wanted to ask you about leaving Honduras and growing up in the U.S. I’m curious about the Central American communities in the U.S. You reference your childhood much in Catrachos, but I feel like it’s often indoors. Were there many Hondurans where you lived?

Roy G. Guzmán (RGG): Miami often gets talked about as this cosmopolitan city, as sort of Mecca of Latin America, right? The Miami that I grew up in was very different than sort of what you see in Texas, what you see in California, where there’s much more solidarity not only among Central Americans but also between Mexicans and Chicanxs people. That’s something that I did not grew up with in Miami. Miami, at least in the nineties, it was much more Caribbean. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans and Cubans. And I think that when it came to the Central American diaspora, many more Nicaraguans. We saw many more Nicaraguans because they were considered political refugees. This is important. There were many Cubans, and they were seen as political refugees. There were Nicaraguans, and they were also seen as political refugees. Then there was us. We were basically seen as immigrants that had made this transition because of economic instability, and so I felt like a second-class citizen. I was less desirable than the political refuge. The other thing was that many Hondurans I grew up with were undocumented. Add that to the equation. This means that our communities were very disconnected. So, I grew up in a place that treated me as an afterthought. It wasn’t until I left Miami and I moved to Chicago, for my undergrad, that I was exposed to a very different kind of resilient. There are conversations that I never had in Miami and suddenly I had, the minute I left. And off course years later when I ended up coming back to Miami, after my master’s, to teach, I was incredibly aware of the power dynamics, the imbalance, the issues with, not just representation, but visibility and invisibility. I was able to understand shame, internalized racism. I was able to understand things like white privilege. I was able to understand anti-Central American discrimination.

JGE: You arrived to Miami in the mid-nineties, right? This was before Hurricane Mitch devastated a large part of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua as well. After Mitch, did you see more Central Americans arriving to your community?

RGG: Not as many. But I did live the impact of the hurricane. My family, obviously, as part of the diaspora, one of the things that we do as Central Americans in the U.S. is we send money back to our families. So, after the hurricane we had to make sure that our family had a consistent form of funding, so they could get by. Our family would also tell us that they would see bodies left and right, bodies floating in the rivers, or people’s businesses completely destroyed. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “I fell in love with a poet . . . ” by Manuel Tzoc

August 13, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Paul Worley

I fell in love like you fall in love with silence / and darkness (fears I’ve never conquered)

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of the Indigenous/Queer poet Manuel Tzoc. “I fell in love with a poet” comes from Tzoc’s theatrical poetry El jardín de los infantes locos y la escafandra de oro (The Garden of Insane Children and the Golden Diving Helmet). The poem, imbued with a strong, imaginative voice that comes through even in translation, is a love address to a poet—a poet that exists only within Tzoc’s address itself. This imagined lover/poet is a pastiche of Guatemalan and international attributes, past and future stories, and complex desires. Identity is woven together from what the addressed poet does and does not do, what he wears. To a certain extent, the poet as the subject of address in Tzoc’s poem is an ideal subject, but not an idyllic or stereotypical one. Desire is expansive, and by imagining and versifying the poet/lover, Tzoc is able to birth the ideal made possible in poetry to encompass the specificity and the variety of a intersectional Indigenous Central American/urban/Queer poetics.

I fell in love with a poet
a boy poet
with the attitude of a horrible little prince
I fell in love like you fall in love with silence
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All of What It Could Be: In Conversation with Tiffany Tsao

June 10, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

To ignore his work’s vision, not to mention its cultural context, seems violent to me—a form of suppression.

When reading a new book in translation, I usually begin by reading the translator’s note. Although it is customary to print the translator’s note at the end of any translated work, I find it enriches my reading to know in advance how the translator approached and connected with the text, to understand their particular choices and challenges. But while translator’s notes often reveal a profound intimacy with the original text, I have rarely read a translator’s note as unapologetically impassioned and moving as the paean Tiffany Tsao wrote for Norman Pasaribu’s award-winning collection of poems, Sergius Seeks Bacchus. Tsao’s translator’s note calls Pasaribu and the collection a “miracle” and describes how working on the translation of Sergius Seeks Bacchus was transformative for both translator and author. “Norman’s poems,” Tsao writes, “have become a part of and spring from me as well,” adding, “I don’t think that I can ever go back to be being the person that I was before.” 

Through the translation of Sergius Seeks Bacchus from the Indonesian, Tsao and Pasaribu have forged a partnership that is intellectually energizing and dripping with creative charisma.  After reading Pasaribu’s vibrant poems, Tsao’s exceptional translator’s note, and following the two on social media as they successfully toured the UK, I was raring to speak with former Asymptote Editor-at-large, Tiffany Tsao. Amongst other things, Tsao was generous enough to share more about the “mutually nurturing” relationship she has developed with Pasaribu, and how Sergius Seeks Bacchus, published in the UK by Tilted Axis Press and forthcoming in Australia from Giramondo, has come to belong to both of them.

-Sarah Timmer Harvey, April 2019

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Congratulations on the publication of Sergius Seeks Bacchus. Can you tell me about the collection and how it was received in Indonesia?

Tiffany Tsao (TT): After spending three years working with Norman on the translation, I almost feel I’m too close to speak coherently about it! It’s like being asked to describe someone you know intimately: you’re aware of all their facets, of them in different situations and at various points in time. Still, I’ll try my best. Sergius Seeks Bacchus is about contemporary queer life in Indonesia—as he and others have experienced it, but also and importantly, as all of what it could be. Hence the Christian, Batak, and speculative dimensions of many of the poems. Some of them depict realities for queer individuals that Indonesia’s present-day circumstances deny: strolling the streets of Heaven hand-in-hand; strolling the streets of post-alien-invasion Earth hand-in-hand; being celebrated by one’s family via the traditions of one’s culture; getting married (and divorced); having children; being happy; growing old. The poems range in tone too, from melancholy, darkly humorous, wistful, playful, tragic, to tragicomic. Perhaps this variegation is also what makes Norman’s collection so difficult to sum up.

The collection’s reception in Indonesia was bifurcated in the extreme. On the one hand, it won a major national literary award, placing first in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript competition. On the other hand, because the poems of Sergius Mencari Bacchus were overtly queer, Norman experienced a tremendous amount of online bullying afterward, which plunged him into severe depression.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 7, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, Nina Perrotta, and Paul M. Worley

June is a month of commemoration and celebration from opposite sides of the Pacific.

Literature has always been at the forefront in movements for societal change, and, in the efforts to continually push for action, we perceive the bold literary markers that fulfill art’s role to pay tribute, to inspire, and to call for attention. It’s been thirty years since the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on June 4, 1989 in Beijing. It’s been over fifty years since the Latin American Studies Association was founded in the spirit of building civic engagement. It’s been fifty years since the Stonewall Riots began on June 28th, 2019 in New York City. From commemorations in Hong Kong, joyous displays of pride in the US, and unprecedented exchange of Latin American academic dialogues occurring in Boston, our editors bring you news that show a valiant, ongoing endeavour towards justice.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, also called the June Fourth Incident, for which it is tradition among different parties in Hong Kong to hold annual commemoration. In light of the anniversary, the city’s literary journals are organizing special features and events to take stock of the cultural, political, and social changes the incident has caused in Hong Kong, China, and beyond.

Cha, Hong Kong’s resident literary journal in the English language, is publishing a special edition of original English and translated works, photography, and art exploring the incident and its aftermath. The issue will include a selection of translated works by Chinese poets Duo Duo (featured in Asymptote’s Summer issue last year, also translated by Lucas Klein), Meng Lang, Lin Zhao, Xi Chuan, and Yian Lian, as well as a translation of “One Family’s Story” by Ding Zilin, co-founder of the Tiananmen Mothers. Alongside the Tiananmen issue, Cha is also collaborating with PEN Hong Kong to hold a remembrance reading with local writers at Bleak House Books on June 3.

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