Posts filed under 'violence'

On Love & War: A Conversation with Majed Mujed

August 14, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

I’ve remained trying to confront death with the power of meanings that call for clinging to life, love, and the radiant beauty of human emotions.

Life is a perpetual conflict between love and war, their supposedly diametric imageries pervading our consciousness. In literature, our depictions of love have adopted the imagery of war to convey the depths of human emotion, and to describe and further lovers’ means and ends. Astonishingly, Iraqi writer and journalist Majed Mujed goes beyond imagery to present love as war, and war as love. “My poems are infused with love,” says Mujed, “even if they sometimes depict the struggles that I and the people of my country have faced.”

Majed Mujed had published six poetry collections in Arabic and received several awards in his native Iraq. Before moving to Ireland in 2015, Mujed worked in Iraq as a journalist and a cultural section chief of Iraqi official newspaper, al-Sabbah, and editor in other local Arabic journals and magazines. He is the recipient of the inaugural “Play It Forward Fellowship Programme,” a pilot programme lasting for eighteen months, offered by The Stinging Fly and Skein Press, and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. This program aimed at creating pathways for writers to develop, showcase, and publish their work.

Mujed’s The Book of Trivialities, published by Skein Press in 2023 and artfully rendered into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, features Mujed’s original Arabic poems alongside their English translation. In my review of the book in Poetry Ireland Review Issue 141, edited by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, I wrote: “The Book of Trivialities is at once an immersion into a war-torn country and discovery (or rediscovery) of a unique voice in Arabic poetry. This beautifully lush book mirrors our own potential and challenges the violence and materialism of the post-20th century.”

In this interview, I spoke with Mujed on the meaning of poetry, the process of translation, love, war, death, and more. This interview was conducted in Arabic, and I translated it into English.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): What’s your definition of poetry? And how can poetry change the world?

Majed Mujed (MM): Poetry, in my view, is the wellspring of human emotion, a symphony of words that resonates with the deepest chords of our being. It is the art that captures the essence of our existence, speaking to our divine nature and the enduring principles that govern our lives. Poetry, when imbued with innovative aesthetic and artistic qualities, leaves an indelible mark on our consciousness. It expands our horizons, deepens our understanding of truth, and fosters acceptance of its consequences. This transformative influence prioritizes the humane aspects of our being, steering us away from violence and oppressive behaviours. The impact of poetry extends beyond the realm of words, encompassing the broader spectrum of art, intellectual pursuits, and philosophical endeavours. When we declare that art has the power to change the world, we are essentially acknowledging its potential to transform humanity. By challenging our rigid thought patterns and moral compasses, creative expression can reshape our cultural and artistic perceptions, ultimately promoting values of justice, shared goodness, and generosity. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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 USD20 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. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen

August 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Ojen writes along the pulse, and everything she describes is powered by the thrashing motions of something holding on to life.

Lojman is a book that shows its teeth. In powerful, unflinching prose of malevolence and confinement, Ebru Ojen depicts the family unit as a condition in which the most abject of cruelties and annihilations are imagined, resulting in an unparalleled portrait of madness and oblivion. By pushing her characters to mental precipices, the author points us toward the emotional peaks of human existence, drawing blood in an open display of intense, battered aliveness.

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 USD20 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. 

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu, City Lights, 2023

There’s something out there. Such are the familiar words that announce fear’s dramatic incarnations—a sudden violent churning along the horizon, a scream that shears the night-fabric, a figure separating itself from the darkness. The common portrait of horror is aiming its heavy steps towards us, drawing nearer with each quickened breath—a grasp, a suffocation, a descent inevitable as gravity, an opaque force and singular direction. We’ve all been stranded in this lingering vastness, certain of some unbearable thing that approaches, and yet this dreadful knowledge, of what may lie out there, is only an elementary stage in fear’s true theatre. Eventually, one finds a more intolerable, more defiling fact: something that does not pursue, does not invade—something that does not come scratching at our windows, but dwells already in the closest, most secret part of us, capable of everything and knowing nothing of order, nothing of control.

Ebru Ojen’s Lojman is a horror of intimacies. In brutal, visceral treads, it walks that demarcation separating the inside from the outside, revealing all that rages against walls both visible and invisible—the unspeakable violence of the precipice. And while the outside still holds the unknowable chill of our darkest suspicions, in Lojman, it is the inside where monsters are unleashed. The title, transliterated from the Turkish word for lodging, is the first indication of this novel’s form—as tightly fortified as architecture, and as taut and enigmatic as the human body. Through passages of incandescent maleficence and enthralled terror, we are led into the stifling, worldly containers that somehow manage to hold utterly uncontainable things—all that goes on in a house, all that goes on in a mind. We have been made so small in order to live, and that unbearable reality is given, here, for writing to bear. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

January 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The necessity of casting off shame and regret, of rejecting violence instead of our identities, are crucial messages in this book.

In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, everything hinges on the unfolding of a page. Through the Brazilian author’s vivid prose, a world unfurls between the covers: of unrequited love, of shame and survival, of rurality and history—all of it circulating a letter that its protagonist has never opened. Asymptote is proud to present this incredible debut work as our first Book Club selection of the year, a book that merges its triumphant celebration of language with the pivotal interrogation of marginalization, all along the long journey towards self-acceptance.

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 USD20 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 Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, New Vessel Press, 2023

Much like the relationship that dominates it, The Words that Remain is just long enough to leave an indelible impression—but finishes in a flash. Stênio Gardel’s debut novel packs a literal and figurative punch, its brief pages flecked with contrasts: pleasure and pain, pride and shame, love and violence, peace and regret, strength and submission, what is spoken and what is kept silent. The storytelling moves fast, spanning half a century in its 150-odd pages, but Gardel’s sparse prose never creates a sense of freneticism. Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful, sometimes devastating change.

The Words that Remain tells the story of Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas, who paints his life as framed by two transformative events: learning to read and write at age seventy-one and falling in love at seventeen. Almost everything between the book’s covers oscillates between these two experiences, the chasm between them held taut by a letter—“half blessed, half cursed, wholly mysterious”—that he has never before been able to read. Penned by his past lover, the letter hangs over his life like a talisman, a burden, and a beacon of hope all in one.

Raimundo is gay. He and his lover, Cicero, are able to embrace their sexuality and one another for two years, but always with the fear of rejection from their families and community persisting in the background. This is rural Brazil in the 60s and 70s, and life is hard. Prevented from going to school by his father at an early age because “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table”, Raimundo must instead do backbreaking work to help support his family through floods, poverty, and infant death. While he longs for an education and the freedom to live with Cicero, the harsh realities of working-class life and widespread bigotry are so pervasive as to be almost completely internalised: being together gives them “a good taste, but [one] that left something sour in the back of their minds”, and even when they fantasize about living together, it is only imaginable in a big city—where no one will know they are more than just roommates. Sadly, their fears prove to be well grounded; when their families find out about their relationship, they are forbidden from seeing one another, and Raimundo is beaten mercilessly by his father for days, until he is driven away by his mother. In the long aftermath of this rejection, Raimundo thinks of himself as fated to wandering in a shadowy husk, his sexuality locked away, his life and love suspended in Cicero’s impenetrable letter, completely opaque like Cicero’s own destiny. READ MORE…

Tunnel of Forking Paths: On Can Xue’s Dystopian Moral Fable, Mystery Train

January 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

For the author, the deconstruction of language allows her to explore themes close to her oeuvre, but also to her personal experience.

Mystery Train by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, Sublunary Editions, 2022

To board Can Xue’s novella, Mystery Train, the reader must surrender entirely to a world plunged into eternal night, where characters give themselves up to be devoured by wolves and execute perfect needlework in pitch-black darkness, where fear and worship surround a power figure known only as the conductor, and where many are unable to make any sense of the cruelties perpetrated upon them. Can’s Matrix-style text offers little answers, opening up instead a multitude of unsettling questions about the body, induced guilt, and the illusion of choice.

In her introduction, Can (the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua), is generous enough to provide a warning to the unsuspecting reader: “We might decide that the life the artist is describing belongs to someone else, and has nothing to do with us. But it does have to do with us—because, for us, the people of the new millennium, the body-soul contradiction is vitally important.” Indeed, Mystery Train can be read as a fable on the struggle between the presence and demands of the body—down to its most basic instincts such as sex or bowel movements—and the incessant inquiries of the soul, which demand explanation yet continually fail to culminate in satisfying answers. The author goes on to explicates the purpose of this work in the short introduction: “Mystery Train characters suffer, but never in vain. Hardship forces each one to grow, and mature, and to become tougher than they were before. Gradually, they form themselves into responsible, creative individuals. The veiled yet nevertheless intense longing for death that pervades the story is in fact a longing for performance—for a death-defying stunt played out on a clifftop.”

As promised, Can is not tender with her characters. The protagonist, Scratch, has been working on a poultry farm; the train is taking him on a business trip to a remote city in the north of China, bordering Russia. He soon discovers after boarding his train, however, that he has most likely been fired—but nothing is clear. He recalls a strange send-off by the farm’s boss: “At the bus stop, the manager grasped Scratch’s hand in his own callused one and said, with strange formality, ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t taken good enough care of you. Please forgive me.’ Not yet sixty and already going senile, thought Scratch. It made no sense. Why all the emotion? He was hardly being sent to his death.“ In such short, sharp sentences, Can builds an atmosphere of oppression—a sense of imminent danger in a forest of undecipherable symbols and signs.

READ MORE…

Resisting Death, Inanimateness, Silence: Mohammed Sawaie on Palestinian Poetry

January 11, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Eric Calderwood

It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians. . .

Earlier this year, Mohammed Sawaie, a professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, published a new anthology of Palestinian poetry, The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems (Banipal, 2022), including poems by sixteen Palestinian poets from diverse backgrounds. I recently had a chance to interview Sawaie over email about this work. Our correspondence ranged over several topics, including the inspiration behind this translation project, the criteria Sawaie used to select the poems in his anthology, the choices he faced in rendering different rhetorical devices into English, and the place of the anthologized poems in Palestinian literary history and in the Palestinian struggle.

Eric Calderwood (EC): Talk to me about the inspiration behind this project. Why did you think that now was a good time to publish a new anthology of Palestinian poetry?

Mohammed Sawaie (MS): The genesis of the project began with reading the poem “He is calm and so am I” (“Huwa hadiʾ wa-ana ka-dhalik”) by the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with two of my assistants, while directing a University of Virginia language program at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan in 2012. It occurred to me then to translate this poem—and the comments on the translation led to a Eureka moment! Following that summer, I started to think seriously about compiling a list of Palestinian poets and their poems to make their translation available to English readers, who, outside specialists, are generally not informed about Arabic literature, let alone Palestinian literary production—especially poetry.

As Palestinians continue to struggle for their home country and their own independent state, they are continually faced by a strong adversary that controls every aspect of their lives. In their struggle against Israeli occupation, the daily violent acts culminate in flareups, devastating wars, invasions of homes, killings, imprisonments, and so on. Such events often go unreported in the Western media, unless there is a large-scale war. Nevertheless, due to the wide use of social media, more and more people are becoming increasingly aware of the injustices experienced by Palestinians. It is only natural, in my view, to introduce to English-speaking readers authentic voices representing Palestinians—the female and male poets of varied generations—who are best qualified to tell their stories, their history, their suffering, their alienation in their diasporic places of residence, and their aspirations for a safe home to return to, to identify with, and to build, on par with other fellow human beings.

EC: In the anthology, there are Muslim and Christian poets, poets with varying levels of education, as well as poets born at different moments of the twentieth century and who lived through the major events of modern Palestinian history—from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948), to the Nakba of 1948, to the present. Could you discuss your selection process for this anthology?

MS: Readers may not be aware that Palestinians enjoy one of the highest levels of education in the Arab world despite their nakba, their expulsion from their indigenous homeland, and dispersal in the world. Poetry is often believed to rise and develop because of adverse situations; consequently, there are innumerous poets among the fifteen million or so Palestinians worldwide, poets of varying degrees of quality and recognition by readers in the Arab world.

Perhaps this is an appropriate time to say a word about the style of Arabic poetics. Prior to the 1940s, Arab poets—Palestinians included—largely composed in the classical mode of composing poetry, which means adhering to one meter and the same rhyme throughout the poem (regardless of length). Around the mid to late 1940s, many Arab poets forsook this classical style and adopted a new mode of writing poetry, called al-shiʿr al-hurr, free verse, in which the monometer and monorhyme were abandoned.    READ MORE…

Will the Present Suffice? On Disappearance in Fiction

September 21, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

It seems that disappearance creates even more presence, focusing around the individual instead of erasing them.

What is absence—this deeply felt substance that is not made of matter, but lack? In texts across time, writers have given form to vanishing and its metaphorical power, studying its mystery and its abjection, its myth and its experience. In the following essay, MK Harb discusses three cases of disappearance in short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, and Danial Haghighi, and how the three authors use the duality of presence and absence to explore the psychology of those who go and those who stay, as well as experiences of class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism.

In a curious poem by the name of “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” the late Larry Levis created, in words blown with the precision of a glassmaker, a philosophical text on life and desire. Beginning with, “It’s a list of what I cannot touch,” Levis narrates the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, an ancient Greek priestess who, in her quest to ask the Gods for eternal life, forgot to ask for eternal youth. What ensues is a lesson in cruelty, for as time expands and centuries go by, she shrinks and dwarfs until she becomes as tiny as a thumb, upon which she is placed in a jar to “suffocate without being able to die.” As the years churn on, Sibyl eventually finds herself in a birdcage, placed there by an Athenian shop owner for her protection. She emits small bird-like whispers to Athenian boys, who often rattle her cage to ask: What do you want, Sibyl? To this she responds: death. Her voice goes mute as she witnesses an ever-changing Athens through to the Second World War, all the while continuing to be alive, shriveling and aging, yet somehow disappearing from living. Using Sibyl, Levis creates a melancholic irony in which a desire for a prolonged life leads to disappearance.

When I think of disappearance, I think of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the soul-crushing friendship between Lila and Elena, two intellectual women haunted by the other’s abilities, acting out their insecurities through never-ending disappearances and reappearances within each other’s lives. I think of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1960s film Woman in The Dunes, where a depressive Japanese scientist spends the night with a seductive village woman in a remote sand dune. After their affair, the staircase leading outwards—a symbol of return to urbanity—vanishes, and the most Sisyphean struggle ensues. In such works, disappearance is an allegory for life and time, lost and spent.

Disappearance has long been a hallmark of serious prose, a thematic thread throughout literature of all variances. In three short stories set in Canada, India, and Iran, this allegorical device operates at the narratives’ center. The first is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Man on the Threshold,” which follows the tradition of narration through memory, telling us of the writer’s childhood friend, Bioy Casares, who brings with him from London to Buenos Aires a strange dagger. This object triggers another story from a friend sitting with them, Christopher Dewey, who served in the British colonies of India. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

The International Booker at the Border of Fiction: Who Will Win?

May 27, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]his year’s shortlist . . . is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration.

With the announcement of the Booker International 2021 winner around the corner and the shortlisted titles soon to top stacks of books to-be-read around the world, most of us are harboring an energetic curiosity as to the next work that will earn the notoriety and intrigue that such accolades bring. No matter one’s personal feelings around these awards, it’s difficult to deny that the dialogue around them often reveal something pertinent about our times, as well as the role of literature in them. In the following essay, Barbara Halla, our assistant editor and in-house Booker expert, reviews the texts on the shortlist and offers her prediction as to the next book to claim the title.

If there is such a thing as untranslatability, then the title of Adriana Cavarero’s Tu Che Mi Guardi, Tu Che Mi Racconti would be it. Paul A. Kottman has rendered it into Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, a title accurate to its content, typical of academic texts published in English, but lacking the magic of the original. Italian scholar Alessia Ricciardi, however, has provided a more faithful rendition of: “You who look at me, you who tell my story.” This title is not merely a nod, but a full-on embrace of Caverero’s theory of the “narratable self.”

Repudiating the idea of autobiography as the expression of a single, independent will, Caverero—who was active in the Italian feminist and leftist scene in the 1970s—was much more interested in the way external relationships overwhelmingly influence our conception of ourselves and our identities. Her theory of narration is about democratizing the action of creation and self-understanding, demonstrating the reliance we have on the mirroring effects of other people, as well as how collaboration can result in a much fuller conception of the self. But I also think that there is another layer to the interplay between seeing and narrating, insofar as the act of seeing another involves in itself a narrative creation of sorts; every person is but a amalgam of the available fragments we have of them, and we make sense of their place in our lives through storytelling, just as we make sense of our own.

I have started this International Booker prediction with Cavarero because I have found that this year’s shortlist—nay, the entire longlist—is explicitly focused with questions of archives, loss, and narration: what is behind the impulse to write, especially about others, and those we have loved, but lost? Who gets to tell our stories? It is a shame that Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette—as one of the most interesting interjections on the narrative impulse—was cut after being first longlisted in March. The second portion of Minor Detail sees its Palestinian narrator becoming obsessed to the point of endangerment to discover the story that Shibli narrates in the first portion of the book: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl, whose tragic fate coincides with the narrator’s birthday. This latter section of the book is compulsively driven by this “minor detail,” but there is no “logical explication” for what drives this obsession beyond the existence of the coincidence in itself. READ MORE…

The “Untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini’s English-Language Debut

March 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Holzman

Lamborghini is all wild and free in his work, and Sequiera corrals it, grounds it.

Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Sublunary Editions, 2021

The subject of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s impact on Argentine Literature summons a polarity of responses. The late Leopoldo Marechal, commenting on Lamborghini’s seminal El Fiord, said: “It’s perfect. A sphere. Shame it’s a sphere of shit.” On the contrary, César Aira, Lamborghini’s mentor/curator of sorts, extrapolates his singularity—claiming his work to be unparalleled. Academics of the greatest rigor and other heavyweights of the contemporary Latin American literati—such as Tamara Kamenszain and Roberto Bolaño—have unfettered their comments on the writing of Lamborghini as well: the former finding the need to unabatedly analyze, theorize, and deconstruct the dialectic around Lamborghini’s work, and the latter encouraging the reader to enter with caution. With so much contention surrounding his oeuvre, taking on the task of translating any of Lamborghini’s work is a mighty—even ominous—task. It therefore comes to no surprise that a print translation into the English has taken a relatively long time to reach our hands, but it has arrived: Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, by the intrepid hand of translator Jessica Sequeira.

The written word, for Lamborghini, permeates the conscious with a concise and potent mechanism, boggling the minds of readers with an intelligently savage use of syntax, punctuation, and orthography. I first encountered his antics in El Fiord, his first publication. After quickly scrapping my thesaurus and dictionary, I stumbled between aversion and infatuation, rummaging through a labyrinth of blogs and academic databases for explanations and makeshift guides to the text. After a few years of indulging in the somewhat toxic relationship of attempting to translate El Fiord into English, my notes revealed that a great many elements of his writing transcend conventional translation approaches and decisions, culminating in ever more possibilities for the text. Thus, translation is an important tool for engaging the multifarious nature of Lamborghini’s work, and Two Stories demonstrates that the act of translation proves to be a helpful light while shadowboxing what some call the “untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini.

It is not only Lamborghini’s quirky punctuation and witty syntax that deems his work untranslatable; the challenge lies within his deep plunge into Argentine history, politics, literature, popular culture, and identity at large. Two Stories is no exception. Each story is meticulously laced with gaucho and contemporary slang—not to mention the author’s own neologisms. Jessica Sequiera is to be commended, then, for a translation that does not break or loosen the tensions Lamborghini creates with the aforementioned layers embedded in his work, setting the state for the Anglophone community to consider how Lamborghini has set himself apart, breaking from the established literary scene. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 26, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Jacqueline Leung, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. In Palestine, the world has been remembering the renowned writer Mourid Barghouti, who passed away this month; in Hong Kong, Dorothy Tse’s first novel to appear in English, Owlish, will be released by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Graywolf Press; and in Malaysia, two new anthologies celebrate Malaysian writing. Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

If it weren’t for COVID-19, the narrow streets of Deir Ghassana would have been jammed with mourners on Valentine’s day. Just like many other villages around the world, Deir Ghassana—the small serene village to the north of Ramallah in the central hills of Palestine— usually celebrates Valentine’s day, but not this year: for Mourid Barghouti passed away.

Born on a hot day in July 1944 in one of the village’s old houses, Barghouti grew to become a beloved Palestinian poet, performer, public speaker, and memoirist, albeit living most of his life in exile. He wrote the popular memoir I Saw Ramallah, which chronicled his return to the West Bank in 1996 and was translated by novelist Ahdaf Soueif. He also wrote a follow-up memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, which tells his story from 1998 to 2010, translated by Humphrey Davies. He published more than a dozen collections of poems, and a collection of his work, Midnight and Other Poems, was translated by his life partner, the great Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (1946–2014).

In his foreword to the English version of I Saw Ramallah, Edward Said wrote of Barghouti’s treatment of loss experienced in exile that, “it is Barghouti’s extended rebuttal and resistance against the reasons for that loss that endows his poetry with substance and gives this narrative its positive valence.” The loss of such a writer is great, but Barghouti will always be remembered. His legacy is extremely rich, not only because he was one of the most articulate defenders of the Palestinian cause, but because his writing has encapsulated the collective agony and sumoud (steadfastness) of the Palestinian people everywhere.

In his memoir, Mourid writes about the loss of his private days—his birthday and his anniversary—as author Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated on the date of the first, and cartoonist Naji al-Ali on the second. It seems life is only determined to keep the legacy alive. Sadly for Mourid and Radwa’s only son, the poet Tamim Barghouti (b. 1977), February 14 will be a different celebration from now on.

To get a taste of his writings, a collection of his translated works is published on ArabLit and a wide-ranging interview by Maya Jaggi, published in The Guardian (2008). READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

November 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any reader—from the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

at night

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

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…