Posts featuring Daniil Kharms

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 29, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Julia Sherwood, and Peera Songkünnatham

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

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Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 21, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood, Lou Sarabadzic, Poupeh Missaghi, and Shelly Bhoil

Get close up and personal with global literary happenings.

Let language be free! This week, our editors are reporting on a myriad of literary news including the exclusion of Persian/Farsi language services on Amazon Kindle, the vibrant and extensive poetry market in Paris, a Czech book fair with an incredibly diverse setlist, and a poetry festival in São Paolo that thrills in originality. At the root of all these geographically disparate events is one common cause: that literature be accessible, inclusive, and for the greater good. 

Poupeh Missaghi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from New York City

Iranians have faced many ups and downs over the years in their access to international culture and information services, directly or indirectly as a result of sanctions; these have included limitations for publishers wanting to secure copyrights, membership services for journals or websites, access to phone applications, and even postal services for the delivery of goods, including books.

In a recent event, according to Radio Farda, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing stopped providing Persian/Farsi language services for direct publishing in November 2018. (You can find a list of supported languages here.) This affects many Iranian and Afghan writers and readers who have used the services as a means to publish and access literature free of censorship. Many speculate that this, while Arabic language services are still available, is due to Amazon wanting to avoid any legal penalties related to the latest rounds of severe sanctions imposed on Iran by the U.S.

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In Conversation: Alexander Cigale

March 26, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Cigale and Alexander Dickow

Mandelstam's “argument” is inseparable from his music and, for me, it is that music that has always been primary.

The post-symbolist Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, as dazzling and immediate as he is daunting and complex, is best known in English for the early formal work of Stone (1913) and Tristia (1922). Mandelstam would mature into a poet of visionary modernity in the late 1920s and 1930s. Translator Alexander Cigale is working on an as yet unpublished new volume of selected works by Mandelstam and considers himself part of a Silver Age of Mandelstam translation, after the Golden Age of the 1980s and 90s. While earlier translations established Mandelstam’s reputation in English principally through Tristia and Stone, Cigale chooses to render many of the middle-period “Moscow” poems by Mandelstam, written in the late 1920s and 1930s, and heretofore less well-known in English.  

Cigale has also translated Daniil Kharms, a contemporary of Mandelstam and a poet of nonsense and absurdity akin to Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett, a poet who seems, at first blush, almost diametrically opposed to Mandelstam in temperament and aesthetic. Both Mandelstam and Kharms have become pillars of Russian twentieth-century poetry. Since publishing a volume of selected works by Kharms in 2017, Cigale seems poised to become an esteemed translator of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth Century—and, perhaps, of the twenty-first, since Cigale is also at work on the contemporary poet Mikhail Eremin thanks to an NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation.  

As a longtime reader of Mandelstam and Kharms, poet Alexander Dickow asks Cigale about the difficulties and rewards of scaling the highest peaks of Russian poetry, and especially that of Mandelstam’s glittering verse.

Alexander Dickow (AD): Alex, you just published in February 2017 a new translation of selected work by the OBERIU (Russian absurdist) writer Daniil Kharms, Russian Absurd: Selected Writings, from Northwestern University Press. Your latest project is a volume of selected poems by the celebrated Acmeist Osip Mandelstam. I’d like to start with a question about the historical situation of these writers who both reached their poetic maturity in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Kharms and Mandelstam were both destroyed by Stalin. How do you think this manifests differently in these poets’ work?

Alexander Cigale (AC): Stalin was cognizant of and acknowledged the genius of Mandelstam (in a phone conversation with Pasternak). I’m not sure Kharms was on anyone’s radar. He outlived most of his friends because the authorities dismissed him for a madman.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

November 17, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Cassie Lawrence, Julia Sherwood, Kelsey Woodburn, and Paul M. Worley

The most important literary news from Slovakia, the UK, Mexico and Guatemala.

This week brings us some exciting news from Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and Mexico, thanks to Editors-at-Large Julia Sherwood, Paul Worley, and Kelsey Woodburn as well as Senior Executive Assistant, Cassie Lawrence. Here’s to another week!

Julia Sherwood, Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Slovakia:

Two festivals concluded the hectic literary festival season in Slovakia. LiKE 2017, a contemporary literature and multimedia festival was held in Košice, the eastern metropolis, running parallel with the 14th Žilina Literature Festival in the country’s north. The latter, held from September 28 to October 8 in the repurposed New Synagogue and entitled Fakt?Fakt! (Fictitious Truth or Truthful Fiction?), focused on the alarming spread of disinformation, pre-empting the decision by Collins Dictionary to declare “fake news” the official word of the year 2017. The programme featured student discussions, workshops on how to distinguish fact from fiction, as well as readings and meetings with literary critics and writers. Michal Hvorecký discussed his latest novel, Trol (The Troll), a dark dystopia set in the murky world of Russian fake news factories, which has acquired a frightening new relevance far exceeding what the author had anticipated when he set out to write his book a few years ago.

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