Spring 2022: Highlights from the Team

May 2, 2022 | in News | by AM Ringwalt, Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, José García Escobar, and Liam Sprod

Still don’t know where to start with our latest edition? Here are some more entry points, courtesy of our generous multicontinental team!

I felt that the Spring Asymptote was an incredibly timely and unsettling issue and I hope that broader readers can use it as a lens to think about ongoing dynamics of imperialism, capitalism, and more. I was drawn immediately to Kim Hyesoon’s poems from The Hell of That Star (tr. Cindy Juyoung Ok), with its overwhelming and abundant female presence that kept mutating. In Signe Gjessing’s poems from Tractatus (tr. Denise Newman), I really enjoyed the tension between the abstract and the material—for example, the fact that shampoo is able to exist alongside transcendence. The voice of Nina Yargekov’s “The Obedient Little Girl” (tr. Charles Lee) was immediately disarming! I was delighted by the emphasis on disobedience at the end. Last but not least, I enjoyed reading Agnieszka Taborska’s The World Has Gone Mad: A Surrealist Handbook How to Survive (tr. Soren Gauger). Leonora Carrington is my favorite artist and writer (I actually have a tattoo of one of her paintings); it was exciting to see her mentioned at the conclusion. I also enjoyed the automatic writing components. This is a text I do need to spend more time with and I am so glad that it was included in this issue.

—AM Ringwalt, Educational Arm Assistant

I have a love for Nordic literature in general, there is something about its directness and its simplicity, and yet at the same time its ability to confront existential issues through the details of the everyday. As I live in Sweden and yet am not Swedish, I see literature as a way into understanding the place and society where I am. I was struck by how so many of the pieces in the Swedish special feature confronted the deep hypocrisy that is there in Sweden’s self-presentation as a tolerant, progressive, consensual, and equal society: The uncovering of misogyny and violence against women in the Kristina Lugn (tr. Zach Maher), Lina Hagelbäck (tr. Freke Räihä) and Hanna Nordenhök (tr. Saskia Vogel) (there is a reason that the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor [Men Who Hate Women]); or history of institutionalized homophobia in the Jonas Gardell (tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel); and racism in the Majgull Axelsson (tr. Kathy Saranpa). These all show that there is something deeply troubling in the supposedly comfortable Swedish society that people here live in. And yet, for all this social awareness, these texts are not themselves sanctimonious or worthy. There is a distinct existential edge in each of them, they show how these social issues penetrate deep down into the world of the characters affected by them. Oppression is not an accident or mistake that can be simply rectified or remedied, it is a constitutive fact of the world as it exists and is revealed and experienced: violence, oppression, and torment penetrate and persist right through the world, into each blade of grass, bunch of flowers, childhood memory, or everyday action, and all this writing captures something of that pain and its penetration. This is the world. And it needs to be shown and seen again, recognized for what it is, as it is in this writing; and through the seeing again that this writing provides, it can also be recreated as other than it is.

—Liam Sprod, Copy Editor

Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s As Bombs Fall (tr. Matthew Hyde) made me cry. This account of daily life in Kharkiv made me think of my grandmother living in Rome under Nazi occupation—the immediacy of daily life while the world crumbles around you. Accounts such as this allow us a window into the individual human impact of war that newspaper reportage does not. Johannes Lilleøre’s My Sick Friend (tr. Sharon E. Rhodes) read like prose poetry. I love the way it plays with time: we move through a life, and then once illness strikes, time slows down. The taut, matter-of-fact sentences, with their seemingly throwaway observations and details, evoke not just the immediacy created by bodily illness and suffering, but also convey the pain and helplessness of the narrator. Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins discusses so many vital questions, for example: what responsibility do we children of the diaspora have to our homelands? How much is our image of homeland shaped by the trauma of our parents and grandparents?

—Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor

How Should We Review Translations? Part III

September 26, 2019 | in Essays, Reviews | by Ellen Jones, Johannes Göransson, and Katherine Hedeen

Reviewing poetry in translation means writing about the power of art. It means writing about something the market doesn’t want us to write about.

In this third and final installment, we hear from Johannes Göransson and Katherine Hedeen, both of whom direct our attention to what we should consider when engaging with poetry in translation. Göransson details the idea of a deformation zone that disorients our conventional understanding of the relationship between the original and the translation. Calling on us to care about poetry in translation precisely because the market does not care about it, Hedeen envisions the practice of reviewing these translations as an act of subversion and as a gesture of solidarity. Be sure to check out parts I and II if you missed them. And if you’re interested in reading even more, at the end of today’s installment, Criticism Editor Ellen Jones has offered a list of other contributions to this ongoing and important conversation on what it means to review translations.

Deformationszon

Viltstängslet har upphört
fladdermusar fittar sig
kring krubbet
Vårt pösmunkfetto slaggar
I sin goda roa,
som stötdämpad
av svallningar
I knubbet

— Aase Berg

Deformation Zone

The wilderness fence has ceased
flutterbats cunt
around the grub
Our doughnutfatso slops
in peace and quiet,
as if shockmuffled
by ripples
in the plump.

— Translated by Johannes Göransson

1.

Anybody who is willing to engage deeply with a foreign text in translation can write a review of such a work. And it’s important that you do. You don’t need specialist knowledge of the foreign culture, nor do you need to be able to read the original. All you need to do is to open yourself up to poetry—even poetry that may come out of traditions different from those you are used to. READ MORE…

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How Should We Review Translations? Part II

September 25, 2019 | in Essays, Reviews | by Lauren Albin, Matt Reeck, and Sue Hyon Bae

Above all, the translated poem allows us into its world—which exists somewhere between a language we don’t know and a language that we do.

In this second installment of our forum on reviewing translations, Lauren Albin and Sue Hyon Bae, two of the translators of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, reflect on their engagements with both the poet’s work and the culture in which it was produced. They highlight the dangers of adopting the role of an interrogator and emphasize the need for good faith in any encounter with a translated work. Today we also feature a contribution from Matt Reeck, who takes the opportunity to reflect on the ways that reviews might take into account contexts of reception and underscores how the idea of world literature can restrict our ability to understand local specificity as it attempts to develop a global framework. If you missed the first installment of this forum, be sure to check it out here, and stay tuned for tomorrow’s contributions from Katherine Hedeen and Johannes Göransson.

I want to point out this sentence in Matt Reeck’s review of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, which becomes the foregrounding reason for his question of whether Korean poetry should be made more Korean in translation: “Kim’s poems are not confessional (which might make them indicative of the writer’s life and culture), nor are they written in a style that’s reflective of a social reality.” The reviewer’s desire for the poet’s confession quickly brings to mind one of the seminal poems of Kim’s collection—“Cultural Revolution in My Dream”—where Ms. Photon, a symbol of the bright light used by an interrogator to extract confessions, uploads a confessional software to the poet’s body. What I mean to say in drawing this comparison is that, Reeck got it wrong. Kim’s poems are confessional, but perhaps, they are not the confession that the reviewer wishes to hear—a situation that recalls Ms. Photon, who keeps on interrogating the poet even after there are no real crimes left but only a continuously generated confession. Therefore, the reviewer rejects Kim’s poems and along with them he rejects Kim’s social reality and Kim’s Korea, asking for translations that are more Korean than the originals and pressing for a false confession.

Moving away from Reeck’s review, when the reviewer of translated work plays at interrogator, the perspective of the translated poet is immediately endangered. The interrogator is a figure employed by repressive regimes to reconstruct narratives, to revise the truth, to rewrite what actually happened, and to reconstruct history. Interrogators often already know what story they wish to tell and work to illuminate only that reality. An interrogator is also someone who has inherent power over another. While Ms. Photon extracts false confessions, the sun, in Kim’s “Lady Yuhwa,” “streaming like a searchlight / pursues and violates the woman” of the poem. A reviewer who steps into the role of interrogator assumes power over the poem and violates it intentionally or unintentionally by forcing it to conform to their own ideas about what it should be; silencing the poem, instead of allowing the work to speak in its own language of idea, even when that language seems to push at the boundaries of our minds. READ MORE…

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Korean

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The Summer 2019 Issue Is Here!

July 18, 2019 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

Dive into new work from 30 countries!

Wake up where the clouds are far with Asymptote’s Summer 2019 edition—“Dreams and Reality” brings you stunning vistas from 30 countries, including new fiction from Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, an exclusive interview with Edith Grossman, translator of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and never-before-published translations of Nicole Brossard, recent winner of Canada’s Lifetime Griffin Trust Award for Poetry. In our Special Feature on Yiddish writing, published with the generous support from the Yiddish Book Center, you’ll find everything from Isaac Berliner’s dreams of ancient South America to Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s modern-day America.

In Leonardo Sanhueza’s retelling of intimate life before, during, and after Chile’s Civil War, each poem an unforgettable portrait of a colonist, dreams are harbingers of death. In “A Rainy Tuesday,” Bijan Najdi’s nonlinear journey of grief, on the other hand, dreams are bulwarks against the almost certain demise of missing loved ones. When the veil breaks, the real returns. Internationally acclaimed Korean poet Kim Hyesoon tackles the reality of violence head-on in her latest collection, reviewed by Matt Reeck. For artist Jorge Wellesley, the emptiness of slogans lies exposed in images of rotting, blurred, or blank billboards. In a candid essay, Fausto Alzati Fernández confesses to the rituals of drug addiction, some of which attempt “to grab hold of reality and strip it.”

What’s New in Translation? June 2016

June 23, 2016 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Alexis Almeida, Hannah Berk, and Poupeh Missaghi

This month's hottest titles—in translation

The Clouds by Juan José Saer, tr. Hillary Vaughn Dobel, Open Letter Books. Review: Hannah Berk, Digital Editor

The Clouds begins with the destruction of a mental asylum and ends with an arrival at its threshold. Its central journey takes place across a vast expanse of flatlands, every horizon so much the same that progressing and doubling back lose their distinction. This is a novel of contingent geometries. In some respects, it is linear: there is a journey in which a doctor leads a crew of five mental patients, two escort soldiers, and a guide across a desert to a mental hospital. At the same time, it carves layer upon layer into itself. The manuscript we read is a file on a floppy disk being read by one Pinchón Garay in a Paris apartment, haphazardly annotated by the man into whose hands the thing haphazardly fell.

Our narrator is Dr. Real, who works under a psychologist renowned for experimental treatment methods that mostly seem to entail allowing the mad live their lives just like anyone else. He is tasked with leading a group of patients on a long journey to a mental health facility in 1804 Argentina. His charges include a delusional narcissist, a nun convinced that the only way to approach consummate divinity is by consummating as many earthly relationships as possible, two brothers as incapable of communication as they are of silence, and a distraught philosophy student unable to unfurl his fists. Dr. Real promises a scientific account of their ailments at the outset, but the moment their journey begins, we are forced to question whether their responses are so outlandish for their circumstances, or, at their core, much different from our own.