Translations

Translation Tuesday: “Night, wife, detergent” by Kaori Ekuni

August 4, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sharni Wilson

I love my wife . . . But if she's asking for something that they don't sell at the convenience store, I don't know what to do.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a husband construes his stubbornness as miscommunication in Kaori Ekuni’s “Night, wife, detergent.” Ekuni’s trademark wit guides us through this unreliable narrative: a self-assured husband thinks he’s tried everything to understand his wife—everything, that is, except actually listen to her. This messy “misunderstanding” reveals an even more unsettling truth about our narrator: he sees his relationship as a contest for dominance. A probingly comic take on gender dynamics and dysfunctional relationships.

My wife said she wanted to leave me. “We have to talk,” she said.

It was after 10:00 p.m. I was tired. We’ve been married five years, no kids.

“You can get along by pretending not to notice,” my wife said. “But pretending not to notice won’t make it go away.”

When I didn’t reply and kept looking at the TV, she turned it off. I had no idea what I was supposed to be pretending not to notice, or what wouldn’t go away. As always.

As she stood over me, glaring at me, I noticed that her pedicure was chipped. “Do you need nail polish remover?” I blurted out, with hope and relief mingled in my voice. You can’t remove nail polish without nail polish remover. Is that why she’s upset?

My wife shook her head.

“Well, then it must be those square cotton wipes. The ones you said you couldn’t do without, when I told you to use tissues instead—you’ve run out of those wipes.”

My wife sighed. “No. I don’t mean anything like that. I have nail polish remover and cotton wipes. The only reason my nail polish is chipped is that I’m so busy I haven’t had time to do my nails.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Death of the Doll” by Viktor Dyk

July 28, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Frances Jackson

. . . she asked the doll whether she loved her and the doll very clearly said yes

This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you a modern moral fable from the nationalist Czech writer and politician Viktor Dyk. In “The Death of the Doll,” a child copes with loneliness and perpetual familial strife by finding kinship and love in a cherished doll; in the child’s imagination, the doll even becomes a voiced character. Dyk’s prose is deceptively sparse, mimicking the naïve and heartbreaking simplicity of the child’s worldview, which is brilliantly contrasted with the vitriolic dialogue of the parents. Translator Frances Jackson writes: “In another writer’s hands this could have all too easily descended into melodrama, but instead there is something satisfyingly understated about the text.”

The doll was very beautiful, all slender and white in a little pink dress. Her name was Edda and she could move both her head and her eyes. She could be seen in the window from the street and often made passing children envious because of her great size and beauty. Otilka sat with her by the window for that very reason; it pleased her to know that, in spite of everything, someone could be envious of something of that belonged to her.

If it were not for the doll, Otilka would have been sad most of the time. The room was dim and gloomy; she did not like to be in here. The sun did not shine this way: there was a tall building directly opposite. And the street outside was straight and inhospitable. Really, Edda was all that she had.

Twice a day, of course, she had to take the dismal stairs to get to school. And it was always torture to Otilka. People frightened her and so did school. There was nobody there to play with, nobody who might comfort her; the other children did play games, but she didn’t like it when they did. The games were unpleasant and rough, and the children unpleasant and spiteful. It gave them pleasure to hurt her; Otilka often found herself crying. It was probably all down to the malice of a bad wizard who had cast her among bad people.

And lately, in particular, it was no different with her mother. She used to play with her sometimes, tell her fairy tales and would even laugh every now and again, but now it was as if she did not have any time or just a smile for Otilka. And yet it was just the three of them there. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “What I see” by Beatrice Cristalli

July 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe

You see, even if I don’t see you / I know you’re breathing inside of us.

Love in the time of lockdown is given voice in Beatrice Cristalli’s “What I see,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Written in response to the COVID-19 crisis in Italy, the poem’s speaker prefaces the piece with a philosophical declaration about fate—through subtle and clever enjambment (the power of the poem’s one punctuated line: “Right?”), this musing becomes the speaker’s guiding question. The poem flows through possibilities and memories, to and from that one pivotal inquiry. Seemingly mundane objects—a toothbrush, a comb, a jumper—are charged with new emotive meaning as they evoke the processes brought about by the lockdown: leaving. Absence. And remembering. The speaker, trapped in the moment when these objects were fixed in place by circumstance, longs for the safety of a missing love.

What I see 

They say all’s subjective
But things play parts in fate
Right?
READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Anatomy of a Servant” by Allan N. Derain

July 14, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Bernard Capinpin

“If you could only see me now, Mother,” she said to the only photograph stuck to the frame of her mirror.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a young woman’s sense of self-worth is prey to the forces of contemporary domestic servitude in Allan Derain’s “Anatomy of a Servant”. What begins as an endearing epistolary abruptly shifts to the perspective of our narrator, Asunta, as she seeks to build a better life for herself. The servant’s body becomes the target of dehumanization on the basis of class, gender, and nationality, until Asunta’s consciousness comes to internalize these repeated acts of violence as “necessary” and even “deserved”. Across these three short sections, Derain explores the classed anxieties of a dutiful daughter who longs for a brighter, freer future, though who also longs for home.


I. Empty-Headed

May 4, 2004

My Dear Asunta,

Before anything else, how is my good daughter? I hope you’re doing well. Are you eating on time? If you’re wondering, don’t worry about us. Marissa will be in high school the following school year. Your sister is looking for cash, so she now mans Tonga’s store. The money you have sent is enough, but we know that you are saving for something important. More people are asking me to sew, now that school is about to start.

You wrote in your last letter that the old man you attended to has already passed away. Does that mean that you can now come back home? Our fiesta will begin next week. I am part of the dancing group who will perform the Alembong in the parade. Don’t worry, and I’ll send you a picture so that it’ll be as if you were here in the fiesta . . .

This was what she always did: gazing out the window early in the morning. It was only yesterday she received the letter but by now, she had already read it countless of times as she faced the window. She glanced at her watch. She had thirty more minutes left to have the world to herself. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Flickers of Light” by Yasumi Tsuhara

July 7, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Toshiya Kamei

“In that case, you should avoid that tunnel. It’s known for ghost sightings.”

This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you a contemporary ghost story from best-selling author Yasumi Tsuhara. In “Flickers of Light,” our everyman protagonist believes he’s stumbled across a stroke of good fortune when the car of his dreams comes into his possession. But this supposed luck harbours a decidedly unlucky secret. Warned to avoid Kaerimi Tunnel, our protagonist finds himself encountering a chilling memory that may not actually be his own.

In Omiya lives a man dubbed “Count Dracula”—he goes by “Count” among his friends. He makes a living churning out mystery novels. They say he’s well known in his field; you might recognize his name if I were to mention it.

On the other hand, I’m a ne’er-do-well thirty-something man who has never held a regular job, partly because a succession of calamities befell me while I was still in my twenties. Needless to say, my life has nothing whatsoever to do with the publishing industry. Even so, whenever the Count and his hangers-on invite me to unofficial after-parties following movie premieres and award presentations named after somebody famous, I show up just for the fun of it, feeling like a fish out of water. Once I’m there, various hands shove their business cards into mine, dazing me with their illustrious names and titles, while I shove back my card that lists no job title and give them a self-mocking sneer while thinking my life isn’t bad at all.

Speaking of mystery, I met the Count under mysterious circumstances. I almost ran over him. Even though I wasn’t drunk or half asleep behind the wheel, I didn’t see him until it was almost too late. A tall, black-coated figure stood in the flood of crisscrossing headlights as if sprouting out of the road’s surface.

The near miss took place inside a tunnel on the outskirts of Omiya. I was on my way back to Tokyo after removing the sound equipment from an event site. I drove a company-branded Toyota HiAce that belonged to a former college classmate of mine. The president and only full-time employee, he often sent me to this kind of gig.

As I braked hard and skidded to a screeching halt, all the equipment went flying toward the driver’s seat. Even though the Count nimbly stepped aside, I ended up grazing him with the front bumper, pushing him down to the ground. When I jumped out of the car, he was already on his feet.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “On How to Be a Good Immigrant” by Elvira Mujčić

June 30, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

Don’t worry about it, somebody had to cry. What the heck kind of story on immigration would it be if nobody cried?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, two immigrants bare the wounds of their respective traumas in this excerpt from Elvira Mujčić’s novel On How to Be a Good Immigrant. Our narrator, a Bosnian immigrant haunted by the atrocities that robbed her of her family and her home, finds kinship with an immigrant from Mali, who opens up about the systemic racism he endures in Italy. Colarossi’s superb translation captures the subtleties of Mujčić’s prose: the uncomfortable silences, the hesitant divulgences, and the quiet pain that follows when the narrator’s emotional walls break down. A meditation on the myriad ways immigrants face trauma and are expected to appease Western stereotypes.

Chapter X

“Can you light a fire wherever you like in Italy?” asked Mele, a friend of my brother’s whom I had met the last time I was in Bosnia.

“What do you mean?” I asked surprised by the sudden turn the conversation had taken from the surreal dissertation on the non-existence of God of just a few minutes ago.

“I mean: can a man light a fire wherever he likes and cook lamb on a spit?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Well, life isn’t worth living in a country like that!”

Why did everything have to take a folkloristic hue, I wondered, annoyed and uncomfortable, like some sort of Austro-Hungarian elementary teacher sitting on an Oriental futon. I was going to meet Ismail when I remembered the incident. It was probably because of our last discussion and the African proverb with which we had greeted each other: “When you don’t know where you’re headed, remember where you came from.” You should have instructions on how to be a good immigrant when you go back to your homeland, I thought. And suddenly I realized that the longing I had felt for tens of years was gone, replaced with a renewed curiosity for that country’s present. But I only loved it if it was set in the past, because it couldn’t harm me from that distant place. My curiosity was not, however, light and untroubled: it was often laden with overwhelming sorrow and paralyzing fear. It was a visceral bond I could do absolutely nothing about, an incessant alternating of thoughts that went from the conviction that I had left something there that I absolutely needed to find, and the realization that what I was looking for was made of the same substance as fog. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Sentimental Education in March” by Pavel Vilikovský

June 23, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Charles Sabatos

We’ve all dreamed about it before. At least it seems like it. Falling from a tower. Down the stairs. From the bottom.

This week’s Translation Tuesday honours one of Slovakia’s greatest writers on the eve of what would have been his seventy-ninth birthday (June 27). Translator Charles Sabatos writes:

The title story of Pavel Vilikovský‘s debut collection, A Sentimental Education in March (Citová výchova v marci, 1965), translated here for the first time, features the introspective meditation on everyday events that can be found in his later work, but in a more fragmentary style.  A group of young people take a trip to Popradské pleso, a lake resort in the Tatra mountains, where two of them have a brief sexual encounter that leaves the young man disillusioned with intimacy and alienated from reality.

Pavel Vilikovský (1941-2020) had a distinctively ironic style that was rooted in Central European culture yet parodied the national myths of the region. He spent most of his life in Bratislava, although he briefly studied film in Prague before returning to Slovakia, where he became an editor and translator from English. During the “normalization” period of the 1970s and 1980s, Vilikovský preferred self-imposed silence to self-censorship, although he was never officially banned.  He made up for this period of near invisibility with the appearance of three volumes during the last months of the Communist regime in 1989, including Ever Green is . . . (Večne je zelený) and A Horse Upstairs, a Blind Man in Vráble (Kôň na poschodí, slepec vo Vrábľoch), his first works translated into English (by Charles Sabatos for Northwestern University Press in 2002). His collection An Escalation of Feeling (Eskalácia citu), also published that year, was a mix of new and previously published stories, including a slightly revised version of “A Sentimental Education in March.” This reappearance was followed by three decades of prolific output, during which he won the prestigious Anasoft Litera award twice. Perhaps the most acclaimed of his later works was Fleeting Snow (Letmý sneh, 2014, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood for Istros Books in 2018) which depicts a narrator dealing with his wife’s gradual loss of memory.  After writing five novels between 2013 and 2018, the last of which was The Thrill is Gone (RAJc je preč, 2018), Vilikovský (who always resisted technology and never used the internet) lost a completed text due to a computer error, leaving him so demoralized that he stopped writing entirely. Upon his death a few months later, friends and colleagues remembered his lifelong modesty and generosity along with his artistic brilliance. According to the critic Peter Darovec, Vilikovský “never stopped viewing sentiment as the most important part of how a person functions, whether in communicating with others or with the world. He was able to rationalize it, to think about it analytically . . . Before him no one else had managed that in Slovak literature, no one had even come close.”

At the station, they were waiting. Waiting and waiting.

“One, two, three,” cried the black locomotives. “Ohh. Ohh.”

“Then I cried,” he said. “I cried up there in that cottage, at the lake in the mountains, and it flowed down the Váh River. She told me no, I can’t, no. Then: those three years. That was in the hallway. She went up the steps. Yes? I asked. Yes. Then I cried. Those three years. Those three years. It all froze down my cheeks.”

They stopped to get some water. “Whoo-hoo,” cried the locomotive.

“When I cried,” he said, “everyone saw it. All night. Yes? Yes. And up the steps. And down my cheeks.” READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

June 20, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Sarah Moses

The mind is a strange and powerful mollusk, a flexible thing that gropes around in the depths until it takes hold.

As life—though never aptly described by that inadequate adjective, “normal”—begins its uneasy adjustment into a new reality, we here at Asymptote are wrapping up In This Together. Though the world has by no means seen the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are proud to have collected a selection of literature that bears witness to its beginning, and we continue to look forward to the texts that will surely continue to bring enlightenment and poetry to our circumstances. For our final edition, we present a text by Argentinian author and journalist, Cristina Macjus. Sarah Moses, translator, writer, and Asymptote’s co-Editor-at-Large for Argentina, introduces the piece:

In confinement in Buenos Aires, Cristina Macjus travels far from her apartment in the city via long-distance conversations with a high school friend. They imagine a return to their hometown in the northeast of the country, to the scents and sights that remain intact in their memory, though the town has long since changed. An acclaimed author of numerous books for children and young adults, Macjus began keeping a diary on March 20, when Argentina entered into quarantine in the early stages of the pandemic. “Walking with Agustín” brings together excerpts she wrote in lockdown, which continues to this day in the country.

Walking with Agustín

By Cristina Macjus

When the president said “quarantine,” I went blank. I’d been feeling all manner of things since social distancing measures had been put into place, but on March 20, when mandatory isolation was announced, I could feel nothing more.

I was in a haze for the first few weeks. I spent long periods of time seated in front of the mirror looking at my birthmarks as one would a galaxy. My WhatsApp messages accumulated; I’d answer, but my voice was faint, as though my head were inside a pillow.

In this state, I began to go for walks with Agustín.

Agustín and I had gone to high school together in the town we grew up in, close to the Iguazú Falls. Later, he moved to Bariloche, and I to Buenos Aires, and we lost touch. We remain thousands of kilometres away from each other, but the pandemic reconnected us during those first moments of turmoil on social media when everyone was asking about those they knew. Right away, we began to talk about our hometown. It’s not that we’d been particularly good friends, it’s that we took to walking.

“Do you remember how if you turned left, you’d get to Julito’s house?”

“Oh yeah, the one with that evil dog!”

“That’s the one. And if you kept going along that street you’d reach the park.”

This went on for hours over WhatsApp. We know, because others have told us so, that the town has changed, but since neither of us has returned, our memories remain intact. We walked each of our favourite routes. For example, the dirt road I’d bike along to get to English class. It was a good dusty run downhill followed immediately by a curve to the left where the pine forest began, the temperature changed, the air turned damp and smelled of resin, and you had to be careful so your bike wouldn’t slip on the red earth, which along that stretch of the road seemed a piece of recently polished ceramic. I can remember each of the turns in the road perfectly with my body; I could mould the topography in plasticine. Agustín remembers it as well. Together, the two of us possess a town that’s real, we confirm it to one another, and yet it no longer exists. His favourite spot is the country club, so we leave the town and walk the five kilometres it takes to get there, the final stretch along Highway 12 is one of the most dangerous in the province because of the trucks that drive by transporting logs. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Daughter from Jannina” by Vassilis Alexakis

June 16, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Rebecca Dehner-Armand

It feels as if I’m using this story just to see if I am able to write a more personal piece.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a proposed coffee date unearths secrets and regrets in Vassilis Alexakis’ “The Daughter from Jannina.” Our protagonist is a journalist awaiting the arrival of a young woman claiming to be his daughter. A conversation about the veracity of the woman’s claim reveals a bittersweet history of personal mistakes. Here we have the trademarks of Alexakis’ writing: straightforward exposition, quotidian detail, and a dryly comic voice, all of which belie a deeply complex interiority and emotional self-awareness. With emotional subtlety and humour, our protagonist weighs the importance of love and family life against the backdrop of national displacement. Translator Rebecca Dehner-Armand writes: “[Alexakis] has composed a singular œuvre, marked by his particular staccato and wry style, that illuminates the experience of a growing sector of French society: immigrants, exiles, and foreigners.” 

A cloud of smoke floats above the ping-pong table. I am seated at my desk, at the other end of the room. At the moment, I am not smoking. On the ping-pong table there is a mostly used-up roll of toilet paper, a paddle, and Lina’s camera, as well as a Tupperware container that I should return to Grigoris’ mother. A few days ago, she brought me some garbanzo bean soup in this container. Where has the other paddle gone? I don’t see the ball either. I played ping-pong last night with Vasso. The match was shit. Lina came over afterwards, around midnight. She slept here last night. It hasn’t been long now since she left.

I am listening to The Turk in Italy, a joyful opera by Rossini. The Turk falls in love with a married Italian woman and begins plotting to purchase her. She gently explains to him that this type of transaction is not done in Italy. In reality, I am not really paying attention to the opera. My mind is elsewhere. It seems the cloud of smoke is headed for the open French doors. It is quite chilly, but I don’t have the strength to get up and close the doors. Lina will no doubt come by sometime during the day to pick up her camera.

Normally, I should be prepping for my TV show by now – I am going to be interviewing the minister of maritime trade—or writing my column for The Investor. These notes surprise me; I am not used to recording my comings and goings. I am writing in pencil, which surprises me even more: for a long time now, I’ve typed out everything. Maybe I chose a pencil precisely because I ascribe no importance to this story, because I can envision a quick abandonment. I can see myself throwing it in the trash after ripping it to shreds. A little piece of paper will fall to the floor. Once I bend to pick it up, there will be a knock at my door: it will be Stavroula, this young girl who was not at our get-together last night and who thinks she’s my daughter. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

June 13, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Jennifer Feeley

You see she has ginger and scallions stuck in her teeth, but still, you think how elegant and beautiful she is.

In this week’s edition of In This Together, a curated column bringing you literature in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Asymptote is proud to present a short story by the Hong Kong writer, Wong Yi. Below, translator Jennifer Feeley discusses Wong’s work:

This story is part of Wong Yi’s ongoing fiction series Ways to Love in a Crowded City, which captures how ordinary Hong Kong residents compress and contort their love lives in the face of various constraints. Aside from the title story, the short pieces that make up this series have been published in her online columns for the Hong Kong periodicals Ming Pao Weekly and Fleurs des lettres, with a famous painting inspiring each story.

When Wong Yi began this series in March 2019, she was initially interested in exploring how physical space and work culture impact Hongkongers’ romantic lives, but as protests escalated throughout the city later that year, she began writing stories capturing people’s changing behavior and attitudes, highlighting their feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger. Wong Yi explains, “It was my way of coping with a very challenging period of time, and keeping record of the unimaginable things that were happening. Unusual circumstances and political events had become another category of constraints on people’s lives and love.”

In early 2020, the pandemic broke out, superseding the protests as the new “unusual circumstance” affecting Hongkongers’ lives, and she ended up writing “Patient” shortly after her friend moved back to Hong Kong from Australia during the height of the outbreak. As the virus spread throughout the world, people began referring to themselves as being in Edward Hopper paintings, prompting Wong Yi to pair her story with Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M. Whereas being physically together typically is regarded as an act of love, the story demonstrates how during a pandemic, having the patience to stay physically apart becomes a new way to demonstrate one’s love.

Patient

by Wong Yi

(After Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926)

eleven-am

I’m back in town, you say. It’s good you’re back, she says. But it’s not good, you think. During the past two months, the virus has spread throughout Hong Kong. She and others who’ve been living in the city have moved past the initial frenzy of shock and panic buying, gradually adapting to daily life under the pandemic. They’ve even started letting down their guard, loosening their masks and venturing out on the streets again; you’d been in Australia, listening to her report such things for two months, always taking on the role of comforting her, constantly offering to send her hand sanitizer or a small gift to cheer her up, urging her to stay home as much as possible to avoid infection, and then, in mid-March, not long after White Day, the outbreak in Australia finally began to worry you both. When people all over the world started buying up toilet paper and advocating staying at home to fight the pandemic, your roles were reversed. Have you bought enough food? she asked. Can you buy masks in Australia? she asked. Australia’s customs restrictions are so stringent—I can’t send you any food. Please take good care of yourself, she said. You solemnly promised her, I will. I’ll make it through graduation, and then I’ll come back to Hong Kong and we’ll “sweep street,” hitting up all the good food places. I’m going to eat fried stuffed three treasures, mango pomelo sago, buttered pineapple buns, and rice noodle rolls with sweet sauce, you said. Okay, when the outbreak is over, we’ll go eat, she said. You talked to her over video, virtually hooking pinkies. A few days later, while you were still contemplating whether to be a dutiful daughter and heed your mother’s advice to buy a plane ticket back to Hong Kong, seeking refuge like other overseas students, she said she saw that confirmed cases in Australia were continuing to climb, and she was concerned for your safety, and so that very day, you made up your mind to pack up your belongings and booked a room in a Hong Kong hotel that previously had been used to quarantine university students returning to the city from the mainland. The next day, you cocooned yourself in a windbreaker, gloves, glasses, and a mask and flew back to Hong Kong, every nerve on edge, embarking on your life of fourteen days of hotel self-quarantine.

It’s good you’re back, she says. You feel the same way when you close the hotel door. A few days later, Qantas goes as far as grounding all international flights—if you hadn’t already returned to Hong Kong, you probably would’ve had to swim back. At least now you’re both in the same city. Even if the whole world is caught in the same war-like disaster that’s turned the planet on its head with absolutely no end in sight, at least you’re back, and from now on you can live and die alongside her within the borders of the same city. She makes you promise her you won’t set even half a foot outside the hotel for fourteen days. She’d rather use up a mask shopping for the numerous Hong Kong snacks and soft drinks you told her are your favorites, dropping them off at your hotel and asking the staff to deliver them to your door, tucking inside a few extra goodies to brighten your hotel stay: a card to boost your spirits, hand sanitizer, Japanese sheet masks, and nail polish. When you open the overstuffed plastic grocery bag, you can’t help but sweetly smile and tear up at the same time: Doll pickled vegetable and pork instant rice noodles, Four Seas toasted seaweed, Sze Hing Loong dried seasoned cuttlefish, Vita lemon tea, and Garden Lemon Puff cookies—she’s remembered them all. She says, C’mon, of course I remember! You think your hunch is really spot-on; she must like you too, since she remembers every word you’ve said, and you remember every word she’s said. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases” by Amarji

June 9, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Sean McDonagh

from my creaking nocturnal crib / i saw the white and luminous beak of the kite / lacerate the pink skin of dawn

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Syrian poet Amarji chronicles the cycle of the moon with visceral surreality in “Another Biography of the Lunar Phases.” Through the imagery of growth and decay, our speaker takes us through nine phases, each new phase unleashing a barrage of dreamlike (or perhaps nightmarish) scenes. We begin with the “nourishment” of a milk that stains the world, and we return to this bodily metaphor as it tarnishes the speaker’s very being. There are shades of Celan’s sublime and terrifying beauty; here the ‘black milk’ is persistent, its repetition adding a dizzying mantra-like meditation on death and the consumability of the body.

1. New Moon

black milk drizzles on the windows. it trickles on the northern forest. first on the sharp needles of the cedar and those blunt on the fir, and then on the other lesser kinds. black milk trickles on all of the families and all of the species. [nothing vanishes in front of the vanished white eye of the exposed black milk] as you see, as you don’t, the black milk makes everything tremble. one drop makes a blue roller tremble. one drop makes a cotoneaster tremble. one drop makes a squirrel tremble. one drop makes a blue rock thrush tremble. one drop makes a blue tit tremble. one drop makes an ash leaf tremble. one drop makes a maple leaf tremble. one drop makes a checker leaf tremble. one drop makes a thread of lichen tremble.
a black, black, black milk.
on the barbary nut iris: black milk. on the prostrate cherry tree: black milk. on the peony
flowers: black milk.
black milk that spreads and coagulates on everything.
black milk that coagulates on the bones of a dead lynx. black milk that coagulates on the skin
of a dying roebuck.
black milk on the corners of my mouth, on my Adam’s apple, and on my chest.
black milk that spills on all of the world, on all of my body:
as i, with my mouth, i pull towards the window and i suck
the black nipple of the night. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

June 6, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

After many decades I am once again standing in a queue outside a shop. Spine-chilling memories come flooding back. I welcome them.

As the daily grim statistics recorded a growing global death toll from COVID-19, one small country in Central Europe prided itself on having one of the lowest, if not the lowest, mortality rates from the disease. Slovakia has attributed its success in fighting the pandemic to introducing a strict lockdown soon after the first cases were detected. At the time when the UK government was advising people to merely avoid going to pubs, all of Slovakia’s bars, cafés, and restaurants were ordered to close or switch to take-out service. However, this highly beneficial public health measure had at least one unintended consequence: it deprived an acclaimed Slovak writer (and past Asymptote contributor) of his favourite places to write. Balla, the author of a dozen collections of short stories and two short novels has often been compared to Franz Kafka, though Asymptote assistant editor Andreea Scridon has argued that he “might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret, given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work.” While this is certainly an apt definition of his writing, another reason why Kafka’s name keeps cropping up is the fact that Balla has never given up his day job in the audit department of the council office in his home town of Nové Zámky where he continues to live, drawing inspiration from the humdrum life of the people around him as well as his own. What makes the absurd stories of petty bureaucrats, blinkered nationalists, frustrated wives, neglectful husbands, and bullying fathers, as well as dishevelled publishers and burned-out writers so true to life is Balla’s uncanny ability to capture their voices, overheard in cafés and pubs. Balla’s translator and Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, wondered how he coped with being cut off from his source of inspiration and asked him to describe his life in the time of COVID-19 for this column. Balla obliged in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, blending fact and fiction. (N.B. since the time of writing, cafés in Slovakia have reopened.)

On the pandemic

by Balla

1.

Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been to the woods twice. I wanted to take a solitary walk among the trees. With my face mask on. But there were people everywhere. Our woods are small. And everyone has the same goal, a solitary walk among the trees. So here we all are, walking around, except we’re wearing face masks and we’re not solitary. After a while I start suffocating under my mask. I venture deeper into the woods. It’s muddy and smelly. I’m approaching the sewer where wastewater from the city pipes is discharged. This is where I spent my childhood. This kind of place is a source of amazement for a child. My mother warned me to stay away from the sewage-filled drain. Here I’m finally alone. I take a bottle of whisky out of my bag, take a drink and realise again that it’s not alcohol that I’ve been missing, it’s a café, complete with people, conversations, bad music, the tinkling of spoons, glasses, cups, and saucers.
I put the bottle away in disgust.
Obviously, only after I’ve emptied it: whisky is whisky after all.
But what about the trees?
The bushes?
The sewage?
I’m not interested in any of them.
I’ve seen these trees, these bushes and this sewage at least a thousand times before. The woods at the edge of town are small. They seem to be getting smaller and smaller. This is an objective fact: the woods are full of cottages, rubbish dumps, paths, clearings; there’s even a tiny pseudo-zoo, where I love the boar because of its positive relationship to the mud. But what I really love is the din of streets, cars, motorbikes, and pubs, roaring rock, blues, ferocious free jazz. The holiday destination of my dreams is a smog-bound city further west. Staying on the first floor of a boarding house in the city centre, on a noisy boulevard and with a pub on the ground floor that has nonstop live music. That’s where I would like to relax, write, reflect; these are the ideal conditions for me.
The woods are an alien, dangerous place.
Birds gawp at you from the branches and don’t understand you.
I’m standing under a tree watching a bumblebee as it climbs up its trunk, wondering when it will decide to climb on top of me, and thinking about ordinary people. Things are not that difficult for ordinary people at the moment, they’ve always lived like this. From work they head straight back to their flats or houses with the same flatmates, husbands, wives, children, do the same house chores, followed by TV, then go to sleep in the same bed with the same occupants. They live a life in permanent quarantine and state of emergency. Provided, of course, they haven’t lost their job because of the pandemic. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Some say that everything will have to change once the pandemic is over, we shouldn’t go back to the old world as it used to be.
I see their point.

2.

On Monday morning the porter didn’t let me into my office building.
I wasn’t wearing a face mask.
Who would have thought that one day I’d end up having to force my way in there?
Actually, I don’t mind face masks. All my life I’ve felt self-conscious about my face, my huge nose, my chaotically uneven teeth: now there’s finally a chance to cover up this handicap. I have plenty of those. For people like me the best thing would be for the state to order all men to wear male burkas. But the state has failed to provide the citizens with face masks, just told us to wear them, so it’s unlikely we would ever be issued with burkas. My girlfriend has sewn some face masks for me, but she’s stuck in another town and is justifiably scared of travelling so she’s sent them by post.
But you’re not allowed to go to the post office without a face mask.
I’m stuck right in the middle of an absurd drama.
This is my preferred kind of literature. It’s the only kind that still manages to capture some of what’s going on here. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Bestiary” by Mike L. Bigornia

June 2, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Bernard Capinpin

And for the first time, she felt throbbing from inside her chest.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a wish bestows the meaning of life in this allegorical prose poem by Mike L. Bigornia, excerpted from his award-winning collection, Dark Prose. A Diwata, a divine spirit of precolonial Filipino theology, grants a wish to the World of Beings, which includes the moon, the stars, the stone, and the wind. But the river wishes for something unusual—and she might not be the only one making the request. “Bestiary” is a thoughtful modern-day creation fable about the primacy of human intimacy. 

This was the one and fateful hour. Though the Diwata be gracious, this was set to happen for the first and final time in the World of Beings.

Every being could make a wish to the Diwata but only once. Each granting of a wish lasts an entire night. So each wish should be of value; each fulfillment enough to stand the test of time.

That night, the Diwata went around the woods and listened to the wishes of the beings.

The moon made a wish and the Diwata giggled. The stone made a wish and it nodded. The wind made a wish and it puffed its cheeks. The stars made a wish and its eyes shone.

Until it saw the anxious river. “What is your wish, Beloved Child?”

“I want to know the meaning of life, Diwata. I believe I would find it once you give me breath.” The Diwata looked back, as if it had remembered something and gazed at the distance. But only for a moment. After, it smiled and turned back toward its companion.

Before the Diwata vanished, all the beings had made their wish. And before midnight, the river had now transformed to a beautiful maiden. Her complexion unblemished, fresh. Her hair flowed lavishly like waves. Under tonight’s unbelievable light from the clouds, her body seemed to glide through the woods.

What rare features, what rare sight! By her charm that surpasses the jasmine and the ilang-ilang, the cicadas resounded, the owls aroused in half-sleep, the civet made to sing. READ MORE…

In This Together: Writers From Around the World Respond to the COVID-19 Outbreak

May 30, 2020  |  in In This Together, Translations  |  by Lawrence Schimel

We spend days between four walls, but nobody said anything about nights.

Bringing you translated literature from around the world during troubling times, this week’s In This Together presents a selection of Spanish writer Jordi Doce’s journals. Translator Lawrence Schimel introduces this work and its significance below:

These entries come from Spanish poet, translator, and critic Jordi Doce’s careful attention to and recording of the minutiae of life under quarantine, his looking inward (while at the same time observing the world around him) just as Madrid began that explosive & expansive flourishing that is Springtime.

Originally published on his blog, forty entries (the literal “forty days” of the Italian “quarantena” that ships suspected of carrying disease were required to be isolated before passengers and crew were allowed to disembark) spanning eight weeks—Sunday, March 15th through Monday, May 11—are about to be published in book form under the title La vida en suspenso (Life on Hold), by Fórcola, in June 2020.

Jordi has been a steady if intermittent diarist since the Spring of 1997, as he notes in La puerta del año. Enero-febrero 2004 (The Year’s Gate: January-February 2004), the first of his diaries to be published in book form. He continues to write his diaries, first and foremost “out of a need to order my thoughts, to soothe them, but also with a will of lightness, almost weightlessness, as if wanting to remove the thorns of reality.” Sometimes (as in the case of these entries) he also shares them online or in book format, when the observations can stand on their own or make a sort of thematic sense or unity.

I began translating these entries into English while Jordi was still writing them—a curious twist which perhaps helped him at a dark moment. As he noted, “the tone has grown darker and even bitter with the days. I guess it was inevitable, but I resist. I don’t want to turn these notes into an account of aggravations and laments.”

He wrote: “If these notes brought a bit of serenity to friends, a bit of patience and good humor, I’d be satisfied.” Hopefully, his satisfaction is even greater as these notes and observations are now available to an even broader audience, in English translation.

Confinement Notebook

by Jordi Doce

Confinement Notebook 8
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

The midday sun (a clean sun, like one between storms) warms the large cauldron of the patio. One can see clothes hung out to dry at the rears of buildings and people (few) working on their balconies. Others simply emerge to get some air or smoke a cigarette. The light falls directly on the window and dazzles me. I’ve had to lower the blind. In the street it’s cool, but here I note how the studio heats up in just a few minutes. I feel the urge to greet the sun, like in Frank O’Hara’s poem, but I don’t yet have the necessary level of intimacy. I prefer to celebrate it with words. READ MORE…