Posts filed under 'Surrealism'

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva

August 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

As the novella progresses, there is a blurring between author and protagonist, between the author’s writing and the writing within the writing.

In Muriel Villanueva’s poetic, undulating The Left Parenthesis, a young mother works towards repair and reinvention, threading together the disparate reflections of selfhood. Under the guise of notes on reprieve, Villaneuva delves into surreal ascriptions of consciousness, of a psychological journey that braids together experience and fantasy. In beautiful, spare language, The Left Parenthesis is an open punctuation, seeking outwards to define that which is in constant flux—life.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. 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, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva, translated from the Catalan by María Cristina Hall and Megan Berkobien, Open Letter, 2022

I knew you weren’t well, but I pretended it wasn’t true, because the whole thing made me sick, too. If you died, so did I. If we were a pair, what would that make me afterward?

What do you do when you define yourself by your relationship to another person, and that person ceases to exist? How do you go about allowing the self that you have become to crumble away, making room for a new self to grow? Muriel Villanueva’s The Left Parenthesis—a slim, surreal novella tracking a woman’s trip with her young baby to a small beach town—examines precisely such questions in sparing, direct prose.

The narrative follows the inner life of a woman seeking to understand herself. Throughout the novella, the protagonist, also named Muriel, unpacks and dissects her three selves: the self that is a mother to her daughter Mar, her wife-self (she tells us at the start that she is a widow), and the self that acts as a mother to her own husband. She grapples with the fact that she was never sure which of her selves would emerge when she opened her mouth, a response to her husband’s oscillation between his child-self (the one she felt compelled to mother) and his burgeoning man-self. This three-week excursion, a brief parenthetical phrase within the novel that is her life, is something she undertakes to hopefully catalyse a transformation within her, a process of purging and healing.

Threaded through this book is the eponymous theme of an opening parenthesis, an explanatory and exploratory phase of existence that is separate—parallel—to the day-to-day. “At the beginning of my stay here I thought the cove with the shape of a waning moon. Now I think it’s only a parenthesis. It opens over here and I don’t know where it closes.” The cove to which the protagonist retreats is curved like a parenthesis, simultaneously opening out and welcoming in. This symbolic shape is mirrored in the curve of her arm as she breastfeeds her infant daughter, nurturing her baby as she herself is being nurtured by this trip, this secluded spot to which she has retreated. READ MORE…

Ethical Extremes: On Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony

July 25, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Over and over again, throughout these stories, we are confronted with the question of consumption, literal and figurative.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Grove Atlantic/Granta, 2022

From Sayaka Murata, the award-winning author of Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, comes Life Ceremony, a debut compilation of her short stories. The collection is unsettling, paved with the disturbances of odd people and new customs nestled amidst familiar words and routines;. Instead of burials, human bodies are recycled—a beloved father-in-law’s skin might be used as a bride’s veil, a person’s hair for a cardigan, human bones for chair legs. Instead of funerals, there are life ceremonies, where mourners dress in “skimpy clothing” to partake in eating the body of the deceased before going off in pairs for “insemination.”  One woman is convinced that she has been reborn into an ordinary family in contemporary Japan, when in her previous (real) life, she was a warrior with supernatural powers from the magical city of Dundilas. Another woman falls in love with her curtain and feels betrayed when she walks in to find her boyfriend (who somehow has confused it for her) wrapped in its folds on her bed.

Sayaka Murata is a master of delivery, and in Ginny Takemori’s translation, it becomes clear that the way to convey these odd stories in all their philosophical force is to do it deadpan, matter-of-factly, and sometimes, coldly. But—there are breaks, moments that aren’t so much characterized by their coldness but by their sincerity, their characters’ confusion, and their loss. When Naoki, who is ethically opposed to using furniture or clothes made of human corpses, faces his late father’s dying wish to have his skin used in his son’s wedding, he is thrown off balance and says vacantly: “I can’t. . . I don’t. . . I really don’t know what to think anymore. Until this morning, I was confident about how to use words like barbaric and moved, but now it all feels so groundless.” We are made to sympathize with him even amidst bombardments of oppositional, universal ideas, derived from a new ethics that says discarding any part of a human is wasteful—one that asks: how is using human hair any different from using another animal’s?

In “Life Ceremony,” Maho can’t bring herself to partake in the ceremonial eating of the dead following an instance, thirty years ago, when she was bullied for suggesting the very thing that everyone does so casually now. She says to her friend Yamamoto, who also doesn’t eat human meat: “It’s just that thirty years ago, a completely different sense of values was the norm, and I just can’t keep up with the changes. I kind of feel betrayed by the world.” I too felt betrayed by the world in Murata’s novel, suddenly becoming painfully aware of how fast change comes via contemporary mediums—how many of our habits and values are dictated by global capital, and how much effort it takes to resist, even if only for the reprieve of a few moments to think and form opinions. How lonely it is both to belong to a world like this, and to be an outlier. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Flowerie Dream” by Hàn Mặc Tử

May 31, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Phuong Anh

I beg, please empty out words and let yourself be present

This Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to a poem by the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, a celebrated figure of the New Poetry Movement in colonial Vietnam. Translator Phương Anh—whose interview with Vietnamese writer Thuận we recently featured—brings to us this poem with its modernist and mist-like qualities. “Flowerie Dream” is a meditation on the quality of presence from the early twentieth century that refracts the influence of French symbolism. 

“Hàn Mặc Tử’s poetry, with his surreal and ambiguous imagery, has often been considered untranslatable. It doesn’t help that, with each printing, there have been tweaks in punctuations and even words. In my opinion, his poems invite multiple translations, with mine being one of the possibilities, based on the version found in the bilingual edition Le Hameau des Roseaux by Hélène Péras and Vũ Thị Bích. My approach for this poem was mainly to bring out that meditative and quality of mystique in the Vietnamese, and to take liberties in changing the structure, particularly in the first stanza. In Vietnamese you can often create a double action in a very short space, but when translating into English (or French), in unpacking all actions, sometimes the line becomes too long, taking away that succinctness from the Vietnamese. Therefore, I decided to move a few words around—but only when it fits the effect. For example, instead of directly translating the word ‘không gian’ (space), I left the line hanging on ‘staining.’ Partly because I felt the line was getting too long, but also because I wanted to bring out the idea of the staining movement of the smoke by having it intrude onto the next line. This adds to the mystical quality of the ‘khói trầm’ (smoke) which also can refer to the agarwoods sometimes present in spiritual practices. Similarly, I moved the verb ‘daring’ up a line, and placed it at the enjambement to underscore both the speaker’s confidence and hesitation.” 

—Phương Anh

Flowerie Dream

Low-hum smoke gently ripples across, staining
Bluish time spills into golden dream
This evening’s dress is too formal—daring
To kiss chrysanthemum soul’s in the dew

Can you water the flowers with your warm tears?
Count a petal for each loving time
Can you bury the pieces of withered spring?
And please, bury them in the depths of the heart. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Matilde Ribeiro and MK Harb

Festivals and prizes from India and Lebanon!

This week, our editors from around the world highlight literary festivals, events, and publishing trends in India, along with accolades for previous contributors to Asymptote from Lebanon. Read on to find out more!

Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor, reporting from India

Geetanjali Shree’s novel Tomb of Sand was shortlisted on April 7 for the International Booker Prize. This is the first novel written in Hindi to have come this close to winning the prestigious award. The novel was translated to English by Daisy Rockwell, who emphasized the polyphonic nature of the text, which uses loanwords from other Indian languages like Punjabi, Hindustani, Urdu, and Sanskrit.

This linguistic choice, which mimics the way in which speakers of many dialects of Hindi borrow words from other languages, is especially important in light of persistent attempts to “purify” and standardize the Hindi language by removing all non-Sanskrit words. Moreover, in a literary field that is still dominated by twentieth-century authors like Premchand and Yashpal, Shree’s achievement could encourage more contemporary authors writing in Hindi.

However, there remains in general a fundamental disconnect between Indian literary awards and festivals and the choices of the Indian reading public, especially in non-English languages. This was one of the problems addressed during the online discussion “Karimeen for the Soul,” a panel on Malayalam literature hosted by the Bangalore International Centre on March 28, featuring Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Paul Zacharia, publisher Karthika VK, translator Nisha Susan, and journalist Nidheesh M K. Karthika noted that a major problem with regard to “mainstream” publishing and awards is their reliance on the novel as the main form of storytelling, rather than the short story, based on relative sales figures for the two forms. In the meantime, regional newspapers and magazines continue to publish experimental, pathbreaking local-language short stories, a medium that, Zacharia noted, “comes alive when innovation is dead.”

READ MORE…

“Now You Fly and Sing”: Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter in Review

October 14, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Paalen Rahon embodied the far-ranging imaginations of surrealist pursuit: a shapeshifter.

Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, New York Review Books, 2021

Surrealism has left an indelible mark on our cultural imagination, a defining umbrella term for the experimental and the dreamlike, from poetry to imagery. Though a litany of artists come to mind when we think of surrealism—from its founder figures André Breton and Philippe Soupault to visual exponents such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, or René Magritte—the legacy, albeit impressive, remains overwhelmingly, and perhaps erroneously, masculine.

Some work has been done in recent years to revise that history—such as through new translations and a number of exhibitions for British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington. Now, translator and professor Mary Ann Caws has curated and translated the works of poet and painter Alice Paalen Rahon to further our reach towards the women of surrealism, in the volume Shapeshifter.

The visual arts have long dominated the conversation around surrealism, despite its origins as a literary term—coined first by poet and theorist Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, then used in two manifestos in 1924, of which Breton’s has stood the longest and is now seen as definitive. Breton described Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Though first staked in terms of the “written word,” the paintings of Dalí or Magritte may now serve, for many, as the first introduction to Surrealism. This domination of visuality in Surrealism has also affected Paalen Rahon’s legacy. Her artwork has long been appreciated in her adopted home of Mexico, celebrated with a large retrospective in 2009 at the country’s Museum of Modern Art. However, with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.

READ MORE…

To Build New Emotions: Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg Discuss After the Sun

September 23, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

I think most of [my characters] are looking for a way out of society—this thing we call society.

 Jonas Eika’s After the Sun is a masterfully realised work of contemporary fiction. In potent combination of the lyrical and the visceral, the five stories that make up the collection span landscapes, relationships, and planes of reality, moving with intensity and poeticism to form characters and worlds which convince us of their reality through their strangeness. After the Sun was featured as our Book Club selection for the month of August, and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan spoke live to Jonas Eika and translator Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg about the exceptional qualities of this text—its dream logic, its musicality, and its radicalism. Their conversation is as follows.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. 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, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I had approached this collection from the underlying cohesion of dream logic—which seemed to me to be what rounded out all the narratives in this volume. So I was wondering—first of all—do you remember your dreams?

Jonas Eika (JE): I’m really bad at remembering my dreams. I used to be kind of good, but I lost it. One dream that I do remember—which is also relevant to this book—is the end scene of one of the stories called “Rachel, Nevada”, which is in the middle of the book. It ends with this old woman coming home from a concert in this very ecstatic state, telling her husband that the singer from the concert had and came to her and said, So good to see you. We’ve met before, we’ve met on the radio. And that dream is what sort of started the story—I just knew I wanted to find a way to get there, to find out what came before. But I must admit, it’s also rare for me that I use dreams so specifically in writing, or maybe it’s there without me knowing.

Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (SNH): Actually, I often remember them. But I think my dreams are usually very easily interpretable. I’ve had a dreamscape that’s mapped onto every place that I’ve lived, which is interesting. So I have a Copenhagen scape, and a New York scape—slightly altered landscapes of the places. I grew up on Long Island and in the Long Island scape, there are wolves everywhere—though I’ve never seen a wolf on Long Island. I tend to remember dreams really vividly, actually, and then they kind of dissipate over the course of the day. But the scapes I remember.

XYS: There’s always these associations of dreams with the divine or the primordial, but what actually what related these narratives to dreams for me was the idea that anything could happen at any time, and no matter what was happening at whatever time, it always kind of made sense. There was this cohesion throughout the writing that allowed absurdities to occur without them seeming as absurdities. I mean, this might be just a cultivation of the stories’ surreal circumstances, but I also think it has a lot to do with the innate musicality and the structure of the writing. So I wanted to ask both of you—was this an intentional thing that you were constructing? Or is it something that was more of a stream-of-consciousness ideal?

JE: I really like that description—and I think that the dream logic you talked about is making sense for me now. One of the things I did attempt consciously while writing was to keep it very open in terms of genre and narrative, but with the scenes that seem to break most with the reality of the story, I wanted them to somehow come out of the same logic, or be born out of the same landscape—out of the same objects and emotions that are already in the realist world of the story. So I’m glad you think it feels sort of logical or that it makes sense, even though it’s surprising. And how that came about was actually by finding this musicality in the language. I feel like often when writing works for me, it is like I’m tapping into an underlying rhythm. I will usually have a few sentences, which are often the first sentences of the story that just play around in my mind, and then I really get into that rhythm, and then I start writing when I’m ready or when an energy has sort of build up. So there was something improvisational about it.

SNH: Maybe it’s the dream logic, or the musicality, that ties all of the stories together—because I do think it’s interesting that they are so different. They take place in different places, they have different tones, they’re shifting in perspective, they’re playing with different genres, but there still is something that makes it such a coherent work. Perhaps that does have to do with that specific kind of musicality, that maybe is also in its own way, connected to a logic—or this dream logic.

XYS: I’m always pleasantly surprised when I read prose writers who also kind of have this insistence on continuity of music in their work; we tend to think of fiction as a lattice built architecturally, and then ornaments placed on top of that, but there’s something attractive about the idea that prose writers are paying equal attention to the movement of one sentence to the next—as poets do. Do either of you read or write poetry at all?

JE: Maybe I write a poem now and then, and just hide it in my drawer quickly. But I do read a lot of poetry and I just came to think of the Japanese poet Hiromi Ito, who I really read while writing this book, actually. And, I mean, she writes poetry, but a lot of narrative poetry. I read mostly Wild Grass by the Riverbank, and there’s something about the way she used rhythm and repetition to make even the weirdest things—the scenes where the distinction between life and death or human and non-human totally dissolve—make total sense, because she introduces it by the same patterns and rhythms that constitutes the universe of those poems. So I do read a lot of poetry, and I take that into my prose writing as well.

SNH: One of my guilty pleasures is reading poetry really fast—reading it as if it was prose, because I love that feeling of just being completely overwhelmed by language. And sometimes I’ll go back and read it more slowly, but I think that also has something to do with the way that I translate—a sort of expectation of having this full sensory experience wash over you without thinking too much about it, just letting the craft that’s been put into it do its work. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: After the Sun by Jonas Eika

August 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration.

In the last act of summer, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present an award-winning collection of short stories by Danish writer Jonas Eika. In five deeply immersive studies of sensation and cognition, After the Sun is an introduction to a stunning new voice in descriptive prose, establishing a new narrative tradition with non-linear dreamscapes and astounding evocations of the physical body as a site of storytelling. As our own world continues to evolve ever more into the intangible, Eika is a writer that makes corporeal the unreal realities of our times. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. 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, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Lolli Editions, 2021

To throw things into relief, I’ll play an old trick and say there are two kinds of people—those who seek to understand their dreams, and those who prefer that they remain in the inscrutable realm from where they came. The deciding quality—which also contributes to one’s ability to endure an intensive retelling of another’s dreams—is perhaps having to do with one’s own understandings of a life’s compartments; if within the rationale of time’s chronology, strangeness and encryption can occasionally take on the roles of logic and comprehension. Whether one sees a life’s events as a series of why-questions seeking the compatibility of answers, or if what we perceive as happenings are innocent to their order, oblivious of our insistence on purpose, and the phenomenon of them all fitting into the elapse of a life is simply an incredible feat of human storytelling.

It is incredible: that what baffles us about our own lives—mysteries, coincidences, appearances, and disappearances—is given such distinct clarity when organised into the perpetuity of sentences and pages. They move the world, they provide instruction, they are understood. A gun never appears to not go off. Fiction gives dreams a language that we also speak, ascribing to their impossible nature the subtle conviction of a greater design. In the reassuring procession of language’s patterns, we read life, with all the pieces fit somehow in place.

The stories in Jonas Eika’s collection, After the Sun, move firmly against this reassurance of knowledge; instead they insist forward with all the strangenesses of reality. Time is liquid, settings shift like cards in a deck, the present arrives as if already in memory. The logic of dreams dominate the prose in a determination that thwarts simple comprehension, and as such, Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration. In these five stories, the interruptions of the world—antithetical to our egocentric perceptions of individual purpose—is what drives the reading forward. We are led not by the simple fact of our choices and pathways, but by the world as it happens in experience. Before the discerning objectives of order intervene, we are allowed to luxuriate awhile in the immediate poetry of sensation—consciousness amidst the inexpressible moments of a new encounter.

Eika is especially interested in those dreaming moments where one is estranged from our lives and our bodies. “Alvin,” the story that begins the collection, establishes its opening shot in the aftermath of an “extremely fictional flight.” Then, nothing goes quite according to plan. The bank he’s meant to work at has burned to the ground, his savings and accommodations along with it. Eventually, he falls into the company (and the apartment) of a man he meets on the street. In confrontation with the dissonance between world and interiority, language serves to confirms the singularity of experience; in the wide landscape of world-events, we speak of what is happening to us as a confirmation of being. But where this iteration of feeling and knowing is so often a seeking of solidarity and mutual recognition, these stories instead maintain the volatility of selfhood: life as easily mutated by us as we are by it. The domino-effect of Eika’s narratives then signal a thrilling ceaselessness of possibility, speaking to the world as we know it now, boundless in abstraction. The speed by which we travel, the phantasmagoric architecture of financial markets, the way temporality collapses between reality and virtuality, After the Sun molds these accustomed surrealisms of our everyday into established reality. READ MORE…

Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen Holds a Trick Mirror up to History

April 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The writer proceeds as though attempting an exorcism, dragging flesh and blood relics to the present.

The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Fitzcarraldo, 2021

In 1989, an extraordinary exhibit opened at the Zoology Museum of Barcelona. Visitors flooded the unveiling of a retrospective on the work of German zoologist Peter Ameisenhaufen, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1955, and his assistant, Hans von Kubert. The exhibit consisted of the meticulous field notes, drawings, photographs, and x-rays of the rare animals the scientists discovered on their travels: Perrosomus, a desert rabbit with exaggerated incisors, Squatina squatina, a leathery sea creature with grotesquely humanoid features, and Solenoglypha polipodia, a snake with birdlike legs running along the length of its body.

If this is starting to sound far-fetched, it’s because it is.

Ameisenhaufen and von Kubert are the alter egos of Catalan photographers Pere Formiguera and Joan Fontcuberta, and the exhibition was, in fact, an artistic one. Designed to question the intentions of photography and its rich potential for deception and fakery (around 30 percent of those attending the inauguration with university degrees said that they believed the animals were real), the exhibit asked visitors to examine the blurred line between fact and fiction and see what truth they could extract.

In much the same way, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s latest novel in three parts, The Things We’ve Seen, sets the mind racing with blurs and glitches—periodic and perturbing reminders of just how malleable our reality, both past and present, can be in the hands of an expert. The English title of the book is taken from a line of poetry by Beat poet Carlos Oroza, which serves as one of the epigraphs to the novel, and subsequently appears with mantra-like regularity:

It is a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as given

With this as his cornerstone, Fernández Mallo creates an intricate network of information and stories, which sprawl outward and intersect seemingly at random, to form a vertiginous commentary on history, war, memory, and our interconnected, twenty-first century lives. In the first part, a writer not unlike Fernández Mallo himself attends a conference on the small Galician island of San Simón, where a group of Twitter-obsessed creatives and thinkers reflect on digital networks. He is accompanied by Julián Hernández, a real-life man who is part of a real-life punk band, Siniestro Total. With the mention of actual people, places, and events so early in the novel, it is tempting to think that what follows will be a species of essay. However, The Things We’ve Seen is published by Fitzcarraldo, whose color-coded covers give the game away (white for essays, Klein blue for fiction). Far be it from me to judge a book by its factuality, but in this case, it is as though the author is daring the reader to believe, to latch on to the recognizable markers of our shared world. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Berliner Maqama, or The Hitchhiker from Heidelberg” by Haytham El-Wardany

March 30, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Katharine Halls

The bald man didn’t talk much but he was a big smoker, and he kept rolling spliffs, one after another

The maqama is a trickster tale genre from the classical Arabic tradition. In the Maqamat of Badi’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani—from whose ‘Maqama of the Blind’ the verses at the end of this text are taken—the itinerant narrator reports from towns and cities across the Middle East and Central Asia, encountering the mysterious rogue Abu al-Fath in a different guise each time. The challenge of evoking this intertextuality and the stylistic specifics of the maqama (which is traditionally written in rhymed prose, a feature that El-Wardany gently plays with here, and like premodern Arabic writing more generally, is not punctuated) offered the opportunity to experiment with visual presentation and stylistic eclecticism in the English translation.

—Katharine Halls, translator

Having travelled a great distance we stopped for a break, took refuge in a petrol station where we filled up the tank and emptied our bladders and stretched our stiff muscles until, refreshed, we got back in the car, determined to cover what distance remained  My wife took the wheel, it being her turn, and before she started the engine she said, Let us roll a spliff, which we did, but then as she turned the key to start the ignition a man appeared, I don’t know where from, bald and clean-shaven and wearing a jacket, and flagged us down, Are you going to Berlin? and we were, we said, so begging our kindness he asked for a lift        I looked at my wife and my wife looked at me, and then, decided, we looked back, Jump in—as long as you’re not a highwayman, God forbid, so he fetched two huge bags from the verge, loaded up, and sat down beside them and then we set off.

The air in the car took a turn for the cagey, for here we were all of a sudden with a stranger          We didn’t know who he was or where he was going, he just sat in the back seat not saying a word, and but for the eyes of the oncoming cars which flashed past like ghosts, it was silent and dark            Then when I glanced across at my wife, I saw she was lighting the spliff we’d just rolled, and it surprised me to see she’d decided to impose this habit of ours on the car as a whole, but no sooner had we taken a puff or two than our bald companion leant forward and plucked it from our hands, saying Man! What a friend for the road. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Fragrance” by S. Vijayalakshmi

February 9, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Thila Varghese

the desire to share everything/stimulated the conversation/while the voice inside cautioned to wait

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the promises of a domestic paradise belie a need for defendable boundaries in S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem “Fragrance.” We’re guided through a surreal mosaic of images that juxtapose lofty abstraction with quotidian concreteness: the soul leans against the door of a domestic threshold, time (itself concretized in clock hands) peeks and laughs, paradise beckons like a salesperson, and possible lives are stars that bloom corporeally with fragrance. The speaker’s interlocutor, described as having the disarming veneer of a wise man, evokes a sense of risk and relatability—his very speech is depicted as unusually cloying (honey drops with sweeteners) and performative (“courtesy words,” “mask having sloughed off”). Yet the speaker’s trepidation is expressed by dramatic, even violent metaphors: a circus ring of fire, a standoff requiring bullet-proof vests. Through its ironically “delicate” title, S. Vijayalakshmi’s poem confronts the ungentle truths of relationships, vulnerability, and possibility.

Fragrance

The conversation proceeded very smoothly.
In the voice that was preaching to me
like a profoundly wise man,
honey drops were mixed with sweeteners.
The figure hiding behind the rough voice
smiled, the mask having sloughed off.
The night breeze gathered up
the courtesy words and left.
As the desire to share everything
stimulated the conversation
while the voice inside cautioned to wait,
the clock hand peeked out
to check whether everything was going well
and laughed.
Within the boundaries of the conversation,
a thousand bouquets
extended their welcome.
A paradise opened and invited me,
like a sales agent, to come in.
Leaning against the door,
my soul struggled with the weight
of the boundary line’s bouquets,
unable to bear the load.
Even as I contemplated on
which foot to put forward first
to step into the door of the paradise,
an oracle declared,
“Enough with your cautionary instinct and analysis;
just discard them and come in.”
What to do with all the fragrances
from the countless stars
that bloomed within me?
Again, I draw a line.
The flames are burning
like those on the line of a circus ring of fire.
You seem to appear the same as I do,
and both of us are wearing bulletproof vests.
The bullets are waiting
in the tidal wave of conflicts. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2020

October 12, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, George MacBeth, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2020

July 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Edwin Alanís-García, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Oral poetry, plague journals, and surrealist masters: our blog editors are here with their selections from the Summer 2020 issue!

With our Summer 2020 issue, Asymptote has brought together new work from thirty-one countries drawn under “This Strange Stillness,” acknowledging all the fearful, sorrowful, and newly arriving things that are in great need of language. It is a timely collection, though we also hope that it is a lasting one, as the texts of this issue remains full of beauty, grace, craft, as well as a knowledge of these unnerving times. If you are in need of a place to start, let our blog editors be your guide.

In these varying todays that blend into one another, I am thinking of Audre Lorde: “seeking a now that can breed / futures.” With the daily cycles of news, statistics, and corresponding tides of political turbulence, the act of reading is accompanied by the weight of scrutiny into factual truths, and the attempts to form a set of principles out of them. All this in the hope that the formidable now will be rescued into a manageable, comprehensible future. As readers and thinkers, we find ourselves in the position of insisting on the importance that literature has always taken, yet literature that thinks only of its utility is powerless—any potency can only result from a craft that knows equally of its form as it does its function.

In perusal of the Asymptote Summer 2020 issue, I returned to indulging in the pure pleasures of reading—linguistic play, secret collaborations of words, and the mysterious harmony of object, image, sound, and divinity that culminates in the sublimity of poetry. I took a particular joy in the Iranian lickos, an anonymous collection of the indigenous, oral poetic form. They are brief, curious, and contain both the wideness and aliveness of a language meant to be passed between two people. The couplets and tercets, translated brilliantly and cohesively by Mahdi Ganjavi, Amin Fatemi, and Mansour Alimoradi, possess a fluidity and attention that draw the beauty of simple conversation, and the immensity of a single day’s emotions, sharply into view. From petty humour to profound loss, their visual simplicity are an entryway into the profound origins of a poetics.

There is also a great vivacity in Sanja Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska’s “(In)Finite Models of the Short Story,” in which the concept of narrative itself is taken on a wild spin throughout its wanderings into people, places, things, feelings, and myths. Too often we are distracted by semantics, and Mihajlovik-Kostadinovska, along with translator Igor Popovski, bring the reader back into the exhilarating disarray of imagining, reorienting the story back into control of itself. READ MORE…

The Circumference of Love’s Primal Language in Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde

June 10, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Jared Fagen

Love for Luca is not an ideal, but a configuration under constant scrutiny and forever reinvented (or misconfigured).

The legacy of Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca is his singular style: ferocious in desire, elaborate in theory, and fraught with the contradictions and impossibilities of translating human emotion into language. In the following essay, Jared Fagen situates Luca in his rightful place within the Surrealist canon in a comprehensive and discerning study of his love poem, La Fin du monde: Prendre corps.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
—Pascal

Ghérasim Luca’s La Fin du monde: Prendre corps (The End of the World: To Embody) deserves a place within any discussion of the surrealist love poem. Indeed, in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy’s contradictory conjoining of objects (following Lautréamont’s “dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”), the chance amorous encounters of André Breton’s Nadja, and the startling, ambiguous juxtapositions of Robert Desnos’s Liberté ou l’amour! (Liberty or Love!), a resemblance between the French treatment of love and Luca’s own handling can be undoubtedly determined. But for all the impassioned intensity, violent eroticism, and revolutionary fervor it shares in common with the works of such surrealist masters, Luca’s poem can also rightfully be situated—like the poet himself—just outside this conversation, on the fringes, or raised perhaps after its conclusion, in the exhaustion and wake of interpretation.

A founder and member of the short-lived Romanian circle (1940–1947), with Gellu Naum, Dolfi Trost, Paul Păun, and Virgil Teodorescu, Luca and his contributions to surrealist aesthetics are distinct precisely because of the tradition from which they spring (and disrupt) and the origins they seek to restore. This subtle yet significant variation of love between Luca and the French surrealists relies primarily upon a deviation of linguistic usage: despite the spirit, a rift (or departure) can be discerned on the surface—the body—of La Fin du monde; one in which love is performed by a peculiar operation of language that is as native as it is natal, as in place as it is apart. “If I am speaking only the language I have been taught,” writes Breton in L’amour fou (Mad Love), “what will ever serve as a signal that we should listen to the voice of unreason, claiming that tomorrow will be other, that it is entirely and mysteriously separated from yesterday?” For Luca, the question is fundamental to his own poetic project, yet is itself futile: “Putting aside the precariousness of man’s existence, his rudimentary biology leaning towards the reactionary, the funereal, with the vague and progress-inducing hope that everything will be solved tomorrow, when I know that this very tomorrow will always be late in arriving, because any tendency to surpass and shatter our own limits is prohibited because of our good sense, because of our modesty and rationalism.”

These two quotes reveal an interesting disparity between an amorous poetic language in service to stifling the world of reason in order to eclipse and transform it, and an amorous poetic language whose endeavor to seek respite or refuge from the progressive world results in its anguished expression. This latter point is critical to our experience of Luca’s poem. For Breton, surrealist love offers possibility, optimism, hope: the perpetual pursuit, possession, and renewal of love’s meeting as if—like the penultimate poem in his L’air de l’eau professes—“Toujours pour la première fois” (“Always for the first time”). For Luca, love is a construct already narrativized, or “ready-made,” always despairing of the revolutionary freedom it purports yet ultimately fails to fully achieve. Like Antonin Artaud’s Van Gogh, the “I” of Luca’s La Fin du monde is suicided by society, discharging its lascivious behaviors within “the myth of reality itself,” a reality that is “terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality.” READ MORE…

“Faithful to the imagination”: A Review of Silvina Ocampo’s Forgotten Journey

February 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Reading her short stories has the effect of seeing an enlarged eye behind a held-up magnifying glass.

Forgotten Journey by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, City Lights Books, 2019

Silvina Ocampo (1903-93) was once called “the best-kept secret of Argentine letters.” Luckily for Anglophone readers, however, more of her work is being gradually revealed, most recently with two publications by City Lights Books: The Promise and Forgotten Journey. The Promise is a novella which Ocampo spent twenty-five years completing, whilst Forgotten Journey, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, is her debut piece of fiction, a collection of twenty-eight short stories originally published in 1937 as Viaje olvidado.

Ocampo may be under-recognized outside of Argentina, but during her lifetime she was part of an elite literary and intellectual circle formed by Jorge Luis Borges. Along with Borges, and her eventual husband Adolfo Bioy Casares, she collaborated on a famous anthology of Fantastic Literature and formed friendships with authors such as Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Lawrence of Arabia, Federico García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral. She was also a visual artist, having trained in Paris under Fernand Léger and the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.

These surrealist influences are evident in her writing, and there is undoubtedly a fairytale quality to Ocampo’s stories: fairytale in the sense of its truest origins—innocence is flooded with the dark and the ominous, childhood confronts and battles adulthood. Throughout Ocampo’s tales, there is always a moment when death enters, knocking the innocent out. And these stories are dark: a horse is whipped to death, a servant murders the young son of her mistress, a woman’s pet is brutally killed by a jealous lover. The duality of dream and nightmare is always present, similar to writers such as Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, and Clarice Lispector. In a 1982 interview with Noemí Ulla, Ocampo says that Lispector wanted to meet her in Buenos Aires, and Ocampo was devastated not to have done so before Lispector’s death in 1977. READ MORE…