Posts filed under 'wartime'

Poetry as a Therapeutic Tool: On the Continual Work of Poets During Wartime

December 11, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Galina Itskovich

History is not somewhere ahead of us—and nor is it far behind. We’re right inside of it, being already chewed on.

Dislocation: An Anthology of Poetic Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine, edited by J. Nemirovskaya & A. Krushelnitskaya, Slavica Publishers, 2024

In the second year of the war in Ukraine, even the title of this bilingual tome confirms my observation that recent anthologies may remind one of diagnostic manuals. Thankfully, there is no need to diagnose a breakage; while Russian aggressors have persisted in their assault, Ukrainian resistance is relentless. Ukrainians are still fighting for their land, and the land is more than territory; it means real people and individual stories. Yet, as such stories demonstrate, dislocations—occurring in the wake of global trauma—take a long time to heal. There is a palpable incompatibility between realities past and present, pain amounting to chronic, and ruptures shaping both local and international discourses into liminalities. Beyond the battlefield, injuries beyond broken bones proliferate in the form of shifted responsibilities, wounded memories, betrayed values, and faulty beliefs; at the end of the day, even the mysterious “Russian soul” has turned out to be an inflamed spirit of contradiction.

Dislocation is edited in a way that critics of different disciplines can equally appreciate its logic, reminding one that when life’s plot betrays us in its twists, we are still left with words. In the last days of February of 2022, the Moscow-born author, director, and Russian culture scholar Julia Nemirovskaya announced through social media that she would be collecting poetic responses to the war in a kopilka—a “piggy bank” in Russian—for safekeeping; this resulting collection has slowly turned into a historical document. Moved by the incessant thought that “the world must be made aware,” volunteer translators began working on poems that they found poignant, and by the end of that year, the first bilingual collection, Disbelief, was published in London. In the nearly two years that followed, the geographies and demographics of contributing authors continued to widen, and two new translators—Yana Kane and Josephine von Zitzewitz—joined the original team of Dmitry Manin, Maria Bloshteyn, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Andrei Burago, and Richard Coombes. Their work proves to be precise and emotionally relevant, and Dislocation houses 117 authors in translation, ranging from Russian citizens and expats to Ukrainian poets who write in Russian (their native albeit traitorous language), featuring a stunning cover with art by Maria Kazanskaya. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Here’s the Sun for You” by Vasyl Stus

June 6, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray

learn to play this exciting game about war: imagine the enemy all around you, they have come to rob you of your blissful existence.

This Translation Tuesday, the unnerving poetry of Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet Vasyl Stus furnishes a haunting glimpse into the suffocating atmosphere of Ukraine in the Soviet era–all too resonant as Ukrainians once again struggle to survive in wartime. Hear from translators Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray on Joyful Cemetery, the collection of poetry from which “Here’s the Sun for You” is taken, written two years before Stus’s arrest for dissidence and subsequent death in a Soviet forced labor camp in 1985: “Stus’s most politically radical volume, it [Joyful Cemetery] exposes, with a Kafkaesque subversion of logic, the grotesque nature of the Soviet totalitarian state. The running theme in the entire collection is the struggle, both as a human and as a Ukrainian dissident, to stay alive – free and authentic – in the kingdom of the living dead, which is rife with lies, artificiality, violence, and conformism.”

Here’s the sun for you, said the man with the cockade on his cap
and pulled out a nickel that looked like a tiny sun.
And here’s the road for you: he made a few steps to the right
and drew the edge of it with the toe of his boot.
To help you feel cheerful—turn on these tape-players and radios,
pick up these rattles
and bang them, bang them against your heads.
To avoid getting thirsty or hungry—
listen to the lectures and watch these popular films
about how happily you will all live
once you make it to the hereafter.
To avoid the rain dripping
down your necks—
remember:
every downpour
eventually ends
even the flood
from the windows
of heaven.
When you are cold—start singing these songs.
He handed out a sheaf of stamped lyrics
(approved by the censors for singing
in groups of two, three,
and even more voices).
When you feel that you need to rest,
learn to play this exciting game about war:
imagine the enemy all around you,
they have come to rob you of your blissful existence.
In a word, shoot at them, throw yourselves
onto machine gun nests
and fall under tanks.
Just don’t start running, he added.
Our kind benefactor!
Who would want to run from this paradise?
we cried in unison
as we struggled to see into the eyes
under the beak of the cap:
they looked like two drops of quicksilver.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray.

Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist and prolific translator. Widely recognized to be Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet, he has been celebrated for his intellectual, philosophical and psychological works engaged in radical self-exploration. Stus was also an uncompromising Soviet dissident. He grew up in Donetsk where he struggled against rampant Russification and later moved to Kyiv where his doctoral (and official poetic) work was cut short because of his public protest against the mass arrests of Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals. For his aesthetically insurgent poetry, as well as his indefatigable fight for human and national rights, he was arrested in 1972 and spent the rest of his life in Soviet prison and the Gulag. He died in 1985 in the Perm-36 labor camp. Despite constant oppression, Stus produced several poetry collections, including Зимові дерева (Winter Trees, 1970), Веселий цвинтар (Joyful Cemetery, 1970) and his magnum opus volume Палімпсести (Palimpsests, 1980), which he wrote, against all odds, in the Gulag.

Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar and translator specializing in Ukraine’s twentieth-century and contemporary literature, currently based at the University of Potsdam (Germany). He completed his PhD on the works of Vasyl Stus at the University of Cambridge, where he taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies between 2018-2020. His essays and translations have appeared in literary magazines such as Los Angeles Review of Books and Apofenie. He is the author of The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies (Berlin: FTS, 2021) and co-author of the verbatim play The Summer Before Everything (2016) on revolution and war in Ukraine. He is currently working on the first English-language monograph on Stus’s poetry.

Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) and several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe (forthcoming from Deep Vellum). Her translation of Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra was performed at the Omnibus Theatre in London in 2022.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2021

October 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Kent Kosack, and Thuy Dinh

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

night train

Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkv—zeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Ameer Hamad

May 25, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Katharine Halls

Rockets have broken the bones of our planets

This week, we feature two poems from the Palestinian writer Ameer Hamad, including “Prayer” which was written during the most recent bombardment of Gaza, an austere appeal for an end to the violence that has seen the Palestinians, killed by Israeli airstrikes, form the overwhelming majority of the death toll. These two poems translated by Katharine Halls are small enough to carry in one’s palm; they utilise a mode of poetic witness attuned to distillation, frankness, and the startling force of an ending. Even as the recent ceasefire has struck a note of fragile peace, we read Ameer Hamad’s unflinching poems as a reminder that a people’s freedom can only come at the end of dispossession.

Prayer

Lord with your cloth wipe the smoke from our mirrors
Extinguish the fire at our windows with your tears
We have no strength not to trust in your mercy
Rockets have broken the bones of our planets
Bombs have shattered the glass of our air
And the fragments lie heavy on our eyes
As we hold them out to you
That you may set them on the scales. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Selections from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret) by Agnieszka Taborska

September 15, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

When the world goes back to 'normal,' how quickly will we regain middle age?

Writer, translator, and scholar Agnieszka Taborska reflects upon the literary and historical precedents of the global lockdown in these excerpts from A Woman Awaiting (The pandemic from a garret), our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. In coping with the trauma and uncertainty of the current pandemic, Taborska offers a bookish yet personal perspective, one informed by an expansive breadth of literary knowledge as well as familial accounts of another historical tragedy: the Nazi occupation of Poland. Paradoxically, the speaker’s isolation takes us on a necessarily cosmopolitan journey through books, recontextualizing the pandemic through the lenses of Gabriel García Márquez, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bram Stoker, and Spalding Gray, among others. With candid, irreverent wit, Taborska chronicles her daily thoughts about the absurdities, losses, and shared anxieties of our current global crisis.

What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later?

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1]

Friday, April 3

With every passing day our activities take on more of the characteristics of ritual. In the morning we top up the humidifiers on our radiators, rolling up the blinds to let the plants soak up the sun from the first minute, and wiping down with a wet cloth the leaves that haven’t had time to gather dust since we last cleaned them. For the umpteenth time we move the flowerpots around to make their residents feel as comfortable as possible. The tiles, the bathroom, the bathtub, and sink have been scrubbed raw.  We recall with relief that there are still windows to be cleaned. We have shifted the furniture around, surprising ourselves with the audacity of our experimental solutions. Our new routine makes us laugh at the previous one. We strive to create hothouse conditions in our limited space. When all this is over, will we deliberately let our flat go to seed? Will we stick to a daily agenda or—on the contrary—will we turn day into night, drop in on our friends unannounced, wake up our neighbours by playing loud music at dawn, will we ditch every schedule?

The habit of checking the weather forecast is now a thing of the past. The degree of air pollution has also become irrelevant. A million dollars to anyone who, asked out of the blue, can name today’s date and day of the week without having to stop and think. On the other hand, we are getting expert at telling the hour. We have our hand on the pulse. We are aware of the days getting longer. We are familiar with the path of the rays of the sun as they move across the floor. We could tell the shadows out in the street where and how far to fall.

Our window looks out onto a small grocery store. We have noticed a pattern: young people go in wearing gloves and face masks, the old behave as if nothing was happening. Our activist neighbour picks up litter from the pavement as usual. A sight that takes me back to the past.

The dogs waiting outside the shop are surprised that their two-legged friends have suddenly been spending so much time with them. Two Labradors who came with a gentleman on a bike kill time by simulating copulation, as always. They mount each other and make rubbing motions, too brief for ‘anything’ to really happen. The infection has not impaired their erotic fantasies. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

February 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Announcing our February Book Club Selection: “Muslim”: A Novel by Zahia Rahmani

February 28, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Erik Noonan

She speaks out even though her efforts to liberate herself have only shrunk the bounds of her freedom.

Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel (translated into English by Matt Reeck and published by Deep Vellum) is a combination of fiction and essay, written with a “stark and uncompromising beauty.” When the novel was first excerpted in Asymptote back in 2015, Matt Reeck highlighted the way in which “The novel’s experimental form stages the gaps between places, and between accepted norms, where a person cast adrift must live.”

Now, Asymptote Book Club subscribers will have a chance to discover this “contemporary classic” in full. You can join our discussion on the Asymptote Book Club Facebook group, or sign up to receive next month’s title via our website.

 Muslim_A_Novel_cover_image

“Muslim”: A Novel by Zahia Rahmani, translated from the French by Matt Reeck, Deep Vellum, 2019

Reviewed by Erik Noonan, Assistant Editor

The protagonist of Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel has lived a life contained within the constraints of a pair of quotation marks. The exercise of her voice in the printed word—French in the original, English in a new translation by Matt Reeck—represents an effort to outtalk the multitude that would mischaracterize her and confine her to a type. She speaks out even though her efforts to liberate herself have only shrunk the bounds of her freedom.

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Festive Reads: Holiday Writing from Around the World

December 25, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Alexander Dickow, Alice Inggs, Barbara Halla, and Rachael Pennington

The Christmas season can be oppressive in everything from familial expectation to brow-beating advertising to relentless good cheer.

For many of us, Christmas is a time for gathering with family, giving gifts, and singing carols. For others, however, the holiday isn’t a snowy Love Actually postcard scene; in some parts of the world, it features tropical weather and end-of-year department store sales, while in others, it’s a just a regular day. You’ve read the blog’s Summer Ennui reading recommendations, and now we’re back with a list of our favorite Christmastime reads from Assistant Managing Editor Rachael Pennington, Communications Manager Alexander Dickow, and Editors-at-Large Alice Inggs and Barbara Halla.

Alice Inggs, Editor-at-Large for South Africa

Picture this: it’s December 25 in South Africa and there is drought somewhere in the country. Farmers pray for rain, sink boreholes, shoot dying sheep. The acacia in the bushveld to the north is bone-white and the grass invites fire. The heat is a white heat and cattle bones glare in the sun. The paint on Father Christmas statues outside shopping centres begins to melt and pine cuttings out of water droop. Tempers crackle and flare. The roads are too busy and the accident death toll climbs. White-robed umnazaretha worshipping in the open veld stand out against the brown-grey earth. It is hot and bleak and houses are full because all the family came to visit.

“It is a dry, white season” begins South African Black Consciousness writer Mongane Wally Serote’s poem “For Don M. — Banned.” It was written in the early 1970s for Don Mattera, a Xhosa-Italian poet and friend of Serote’s who had been banned by the apartheid government. The first line of Serote’s poem was later borrowed by Afrikaner André Brink for his 1979 novel ’n Droë Wit Seisoen (A Dry White Season). The book was banned too, as well as a subsequent film adaptation starring Zakes Mokae and Donald Sutherland. It’s been two and a half decades since those laws were repealed and the cultural whitewash acknowledged, but that line—“It is a dry, white season”—still echoes through summer in South Africa, the season in which Christmas falls; a reminder of the oppressive atmosphere that back then was not limited to the months when the temperature climbed.

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The Return of the Flood: How ISIS is Destroying Iraq’s Literary Heritage

April 8, 2015  |  in Essays, News  |  by Paul M. M. Cooper

Paul M.M. Cooper assesses the damage done to Iraqi literature and heritage by ISIS’s destruction of thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets.

ISIS continues to shock the world with calculated acts of cultural vandalism: taking sledgehammers and electric drills to the millennia-old pieces of art held at Mosul Museum, bulldozing the archaeological sites of Nimrud and Dur-Sharrukin, and most recently releasing a video showing the destruction of artefacts at Hatra. While the predictable images of gleeful vandalism circulate on social media, archaeologists took stock of the antiquities destroyed: statues of the kings of Hatra that form “the finest of all the sculptures unearthed” in the region, several enormous winged bulls with human heads known as lamassu, and assorted irreplaceable relics of the Babylonian, Persian and Roman Empires.

ISIS’s goals are clear: to destroy anything that hints at the region’s pluralistic past, and to strike a blow full of impotent cruelty against the Iraqi government and international organisations such as the UN and UNESCO. Against this backdrop and coupled with the stunning callousness of the group’s ongoing humanitarian atrocities, it has been easy to overlook another loss, one felt particularly acutely by lovers of international literature the world over: that of the still-undeciphered cuneiform tablets caught up in ISIS’s frenzy of destruction. READ MORE…