Posts featuring Augusto de Campos

Eat Their Words: On the Translator’s Appetites

January 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Stories and poems can be shared, but voices cannot; languages can be shared, but consciousnesses cannot.

In this essay, translation is explored as a physical, materialist phenomenon. In comparing the craft of language-transformation to the corporeality of eating and digesting, the role of the translator is expanded beyond a secondary conduit of texts, and posited instead as the owners of a unique, private production.

In her Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag coined the word ‘cosmophagy’, defined as ‘the devouring of the world by consciousness.’ That neologism, physiological instead of cerebral, underscores the appetite so inherent within the act of thinking, a hunger that represents the need to absorb and to take in, but also to digest and to integrate—the outside brought inside, the other made into the self. In considering the relationship between eating and reading, the most common notion is the idea of literature as somehow satiating, or the insistence that books are an essential part of livelihood—but beyond the simplistic conjecture of text as food, correlating the two human acts invites the assertion of the self as a desiring presence, and the body as a capacious methodology of transformation. By affecting our hunger onto the world, we claim a type of ownership over it, and once the materials of the world enter the realm of our senses, they change—becoming irreducibly ours.

Translators are likely to be familiar with this textual ingestion, having spent more time chewing on their words than most. After taking their meal, they are the ones who make a home for the text, carrying it for months or years, witnessing it seep into their own voice, their own imagination. ‘A translator is a professional schizophrenic. . .’ the Hungarian writer Zoltán Pék stated. ‘He is operating in an elevated state of mind,’ which is to say, a state of harbouring multiple minds. When they are humble, many translators will use terms such as I hope or I tried to speak of their work, positioning themselves as simply one flawed interpreter, seeking the approval of the authors that still live inside their heads. This lack of vanity is essential to the craft, which often forces oneself to confront one’s lack of knowledge, fluency, originality, or ability—but it must also work to emphasise the singular inventiveness of each individual translational attempt. The author may be in there, a wonderfully influential companion, but at the end of the day, it’s still your head. READ MORE…

Poetry Beyond Words: An Interview with Patrícia Lino

February 8, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . .the traditional academic essay will never be able to say so clearly what the “infraleitura” does not say.

In this whirlwind and evocative interview, Asymptote contributor Alan Mendoza Sosa sits down with poet and professor Patrícia Lino to discuss just one of her many innovative approaches to poetry critique and response, the “infraleitura.” Based in expanded poetry, in which the word is not the ultimate form of expression, the “infraleitura” bypasses text to reach a visual, sonic, and tactile dialogue between poetic works as well as between poets. The “infraleitura” is ultimately a work of community; here, we are brought into the dialogue with a call to—in Lino’s words—“use it and transform it endlessly.”

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AMS): Could you tell our readers who are unfamiliar with expanded poetry what it is? 

Patrícia Lino (PL): On the one hand, the association of the terms “poetry” and “expanded” is paradoxical. Poetry, since its beginnings, has always been expanded and has been linked to the idea of ​​making something both corporally and intermedially. On the other hand, the association between “poetry” and “expanded” contradicts the logocentric and occidental tendency of modern poetry and reminds us, at the same time, of the importance and validity of the plural, unoriginal, and infinite qualities and possibilities of the poem, which, in addition to being verbal, can be visual, audiovisual, three-dimensional, performative, interactive, olfactory, gustative, or cinematographically conceived—as is the case for the poem in comics. In other words, the expanded poem is a composition contrary to the hierarchy of expressions, in which the word traditionally (and colonially) occupies the top, and image, sound, or gesture are relegated to, respectively, second, third, and fourth places.

AMS: You coined the term “infraleitura”; what does it mean and how does it relate to expanded poetry?

PL: The analytical tools of traditional literary criticism, which developed in the context of the aforementioned logocentric inclination, do not, by focusing primarily on the word, account for the various dimensions and materials of the expanded poem. The “infraleitura” arises, against interpretation, to respond to the absence of a bodily and decolonial way of reading poetry. It could be defined as an-impossible-to-define form of intermedial and creative essay, in which, as well as the poet’s body that expands to make the poem, the essayist’s body expands itself to understand. This other method of comprehension considers not only the word, but also any other useful means to grasp the poem in analysis. It is about reading with the whole body.

READ MORE…

Winter 2015: We Almost Didn’t Make It

September 17, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Victoria Livingstone

Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.

If you’re just joining us, we invite you to revisit our first 16 issues via our #30issues30days showcase here. In honor of our milestone 30th edition, we’ll shortly be launching a contest giveaway with a top prize of $200, so watch this space!

2015 was a milestone year for Asymptote: We won a London Book Fair award and partnered with The Guardian. But only Asymptote staff back then know we almost didn’t make it past January. On 15 December 2014, despairing of the lack of progress in fundraising, I wrote the following (lightly edited) email: 

“Hello team, I’ve been reassessing the situation. It seems I underestimated the support for the magazine and it doesn’t look as if we’re going to hit our campaign target by December 19. Therefore, we’ll be extending the deadline to January 29, 2015. Our January issue will be pushed back to January 30, the very date of our debut in 2011, four years ago, so that we’ll have come full circle. If we don’t hit the target on January 29, we will announce in the editorial that the Jan 2015 issue will be our very last. Social media and blog activities (including the podcast, very sadly) shall cease with effect from 1 Feb. The magazine will fold. Planning for all activities after January should be halted with immediate effect. Please respect this. Section editors, please do not communicate any more acceptances, and please be prepared to rescind your acceptances for anything after the January issue on the event of our closure, if it does come to that. As promised, we will break for the holidays. (I’ll hold the fort on social media during this time.) In January, we will prioritize work on the January edition as well as the two January events. As for those who are willing to help, we will keep publicizing the IndieGoGo campaign and sending out appeals. We’ll see if the magazine can be saved. (During a recent discussion with the senior editors, the question did arise about whether to shield all of you from the hard reality in front of us. But I don’t think it’s good to keep mum, for morale’s sake; also, I would not be so cruel as to ask you to continue working on projects that may not see the light of publication, or events that have to be cancelled. The reality is that I am simply out of funds, and also depleted in other ways. If we don’t hit the IndieGoGo target, I would prefer to end on a high note and move on.)”

Here to introduce our Winter 2015 issue, released one day after 287 supporters brought us past the finish line of $25,000, please welcome Assistant Editor Victoria Livingstone. 

“I am always trying to push the market very hard,” David Damrosch told Asymptote contributing editor Dylan Suher in an interview included in the Winter 2015 issue. The Harvard professor of comparative literature explained that he strives to bring so-called minor literatures into the canon of world literature by translating, anthologizing, and teaching works from underrepresented regions and languages.

Asymptote has been similarly pushing against the market since Lee Yew Leong founded the journal in 2011. When the Winter 2015 issue was published, I was finishing my doctoral work, which focused on connections between political contexts and translated literature. As I was immersed in the work of critics such as Damrosch, I was also reading Asymptote, and I recognized then that that the journal was doing something different. Rather than reproducing the inequalities of what Pascale Casanova calls “the world republic of letters,” Asymptote was giving—and continues to give—voice to languages and regions across the globe without ever lowering the curatorial bar.  READ MORE…