Posts featuring Paul Celan

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

December 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Len Sander, Liliana Torpey, and Regan Mies

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

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What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, NYRB, 2024 READ MORE…

The Burden of Bearing Witness: In Conversation with Burmese Poets

November 27, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Charlie Robertshaw

The possibility of a non-political Burmese literature gaining a foothold was brought to a halt overnight by the military's February 2021 coup.

In the following essay, Charlie Robertshaw analyses the influence of Myanmar’s civil war on Burmese poetry, interrogating the expectation for writers and poets to bear “witness” to atrocities. Robertshaw concludes the essay in dialogue with eight Burmese poets, discussing the advent of the internet, gender and sexuality, and censorship in Myanmar’s literary scene. 

For a more detailed historical overview of Burmese poetry, Robertshaw recommends Ruth Padel’s preface and Zeyar Lynn’s introduction to Bones Will Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry, selections of which have been published in Asymptote.

No one
bears witness for the
witness.

— Paul Celan (“Aschenglorie/Ashglory.” Trans. Pierre Joris, 1942) 

Are you still a writer if you don’t publish? Are you still a writer if you keep your writing locked in a drawer and only show it to people you trust? Are you still a writer if you destroy every word you write?

— Eula Biss (“The Price of Poetry.” The Massachusetts Review 42.1 (2001): 9-11)

 For Burmese poets, to be able to fly the little kite ‘poetry’ high in the sky, they must start from very far away.  

— Anonymous Burmese poet (personal interview, 2022)

The shock of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup has faded and global media attention has waned, but within the country, economic turmoil, forced recruitment, and the junta’s atrocities persist. As part of an ongoing campaign to intimidate, disgust, and dishearten onlookers, in October 2024 soldiers displayed the heads and limbs of dismembered civilians on stakes outside Si Par village, Budalin township, Sagaing division. Even recounting these atrocities provokes conflicting impulses—to “look” or to “look away”—and in the background, the longstanding ethical question, particularly prominent today as the the Gazan genocide is essentially livestreamed: what responsibility do we have to witness the suffering of others?

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and MARGENTO

News from Spain and Nicaragua!

This week, our editors bring us news from their respective literary horizons and the many exciting publications being released to the delight of readers. In Spain, Romanian literature hits the spotlight as a the first text of a new series is released, covering the nineteenth century through to World War II. In Nicaragua, the lauded poet and author Gioconda Belli has announced her latest work. Read on to find out more! 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain

Within international contexts, the most important literary event of the past few months is the release of Grandes escritores rumanos (Great Romanian Writers), a collection edited by Alba Diz Villanueva and past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, and published by Huerga & Fierro (Madrid, Spain). The anthology is the first instalment of a series projected to cover Romanian literature chronologically, and samples the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, through to World War II. Numbering over three hundred pages, it starts off with both the original and the Spanish translation of the “great [three] Romanian classics”: the eruditely eclectic, formally exhaustive Renaissance man and “national poet,” Eminescu; the proverbially language-bending, comedic, and politically sarcastic playwright and short-story writer Caragiale (whom Eugène Ionesco referred to as his master, making him the true forerunner of the theatre of the absurd); and the linguistically-Gargantuan, (faux-)folkloric raconteur, Creangă. Among the featured twentieth century writers are the paradoxically modernist-traditionalist poet Tudor Arghezi, modernist-expressionist poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga, iconic Symbolist George Bacovia, landmark novelists Mihail Sadoveanu and Liviu Rebreanu, alongside significant women poets and fiction writers including Magda Isanos, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Henriette Yvonne Stahl, and Cella Serghi.

An impressive number of translators contributed to this literary tour de force—no less than sixteen—and the editors have structured the collection in a quite complex and polyvalent way. The subtitle reads Antología didáctica (course reference book), and indeed, in a Norton-anthology style, every section comes with a short introduction presenting each writer’s main stylistic features and contextualizing their contribution to the evolution of Romanian letters. Even more distinctively, at the back are quizzes addressing the writers’ style and language, as well as a rich “Further Reading” section providing more detailed bios, aesthetic commentary, and relevant historical background—plus comprehensive annotated bibliographies which act as a great resource for students but also scholars and literati, as they highlight the richness of relevant translations and criticism in both Romanian and Spanish (in Spain and Ibero-America). READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada

July 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Xiao Yue Shan

Tawada’s music-prose is a testament to the spirit of collaboration. . .

Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, presents us with the anatomy of a mind consumed by passion for a dead poet’s oeuvre. Ostensibly narrating the tale of a literary scholar mired in pandemic-era depression, the text expands into a reflection on various forms of friendship—and, one might venture, redemption—that might inhere between readers. At the same time, Tawada deftly traverses voice and perspective to meditate on language as pastiche, ventriloquizing another’s words within the space of one’s own consciousness. With this mysterious work, the German-Japanese author furthers her interest in questions of alienation and affinity across interpersonal, cultural, and temporal realms—polyvocal inheritances that are evocatively staged in Susan Bernofsky’s layered translation from the German. To enact and pay tribute to Tawada’s dialogic style through the spirit of collaboration, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan and Assistant Managing Editor Alex Tan decided—for the first time in the Asymptote Book Club’s history—to co-write this following review.

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 USD20 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. 

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions (US) and Dialogue Books (UK), 2024

Paul Celan’s is a poetry riddled with hiatus and dislocation. Words are condensed into weighty German compounds or displaced into shreds, as if in a dream; adverbs are turned into nouns, and pronouns and prefixes are broken off, left stranded on the blank page. In the shadow of the Holocaust, his language concurrently reached for and estranged the singularity of experience, resulting in a body of work that yearns for nothing so much as silence—for that which writing itself would annul: something “absolutely untouched by language,” in philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase. Poetry, as gesture, becomes nothing but the contour of an intention to speak, against which presence is felt only as a silhouette.

For the writer Yoko Tawada, Celan’s poems are less storehouses than “openings,” thresholds onto the inexpressible. What she gravitates toward, in the compact verse, is everything that resists and goes beyond the flatly nationalistic, the “typically German.” In her own literary production, she toggles adroitly between German and Japanese, writing across the two; her earlier novel The Naked Eye, for instance, was originally composed in both languages. Not only does Tawada seek unanticipated constellations of affinity with the foreign, she also refutes the common instinct to read literary texts for ethnographic value, consistently underscoring the mutability of selfhood, its unfixed boundaries.

Her latest novel, the pandemic-inflected Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, draws on the surrealist toolbox to sketch a solipsistic, obsessive mind haunted by Celan’s turns of phrase, floating through the ghostly streets of Berlin. Imprisoned in alienation and “intermission-loneliness,” he is known to us initially as “the patient,” his identity tethered to an unspecified malady. His name Patrik arrives almost as an afterthought several pages in, amid scrambled reflections on the pronouns with which he designates himself in his interior soliloquies. In his vacillations between the first person and third person, he is perhaps heart-sick, struggling to survive and bear with the burden of himself: “Opening hurts. Closing brings comfort.” READ MORE…

Against Containment, Attracting Meaning: Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine M. Hedeen discuss midnight minutes

June 6, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Pazen

. . . I don’t want any borders in poetry. I want to continue the lines, continue the poems, continue this flow. It’s a current of meaning.

In the roughly two decades since Víctor Rodríguez Núñez began writing the antinationalist salvo actas de medianoche and Katherine M. Hedeen began its translation, both have published numerous award-winning works and gained international recognition for their poetry and translations. But despite their acclaim and the widespread success of the poem in the Spanish-speaking world through various prizes and publications (Valladolid, Soria, La Habana), traditional English-language publishers resisted considering the poem and its defiance of  preconceived notions of Cuban and Latin American poetry—until this April, when the book-length poem, midnight minutes, was published in full with Action Books. 

Spanning over 2000 lines, midnight minutes challenges the formation of the traditional poem on the page and the formation of borders of all kinds. Rodríguez Núñez reinvents the sonnet as it curves between the rural towns of his life, from Cayama, Cuba, to Gambier, Ohio, where he lives together with Hedeen, embracing the night as homeland in “one long, dark breath.” Hailed as one of his most influential works in the Spanish-speaking world, actas de medianoche marked a new, experimental turn in both Rodríguez Núñez’s poetics and Latin American poetry overall, now extending into the English for the first time in full with midnight minutes. 

I interviewed Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez about the significance of the translation’s publication today, the contemporary long poem and sonnet in Spanish and in English, their influences from Cesár Vallejo to Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan, and how Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez transform the poetic subject and the object of desire. 

The following dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Pazen (SP): You both have spoken about how, despite the impact of actas de medianoche in the Spanish-speaking world since its initial publication, presses in the United States were overwhelmingly resistant to publishing the English translation, midnight minutes. This was often because of how it defies preconceived ideas of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, poetry. Why do you think right now is finally when these translations are being published? 

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (VRN): Let’s talk a bit about why there was resistance. There is a problem with long poems. Many magazines don’t publish them. Each canto in midnight minutes has fourteen stanzas. The book has more than two thousand lines. And it’s not a book about any explicit Cuban-related theme. It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about. 

Borges, for instance, didn’t like Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. He didn’t like Federico García Lorca’s poetry. I am not in agreement with him in either case, but the reason why is compelling to me. He said that Gabriela Mistral was a professional Chilean. And he didn’t like Garcia Lorca’s poetry because he said that he was a professional Andalusian. “El andalus profesional, la chilena profesional.” I am not a professional Cuban. 

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Palestinian Poetry is Poetry for All Time: An Interview with Huda J. Fakhreddine 

April 3, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine, Interviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Palestinian poetry is not only poetry for times of crisis. It is not breaking news or soundbites for the media. It is poetry for all time . . .

From our Winter 2024 issue, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People”, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, was voted the number one piece by our internal team. It’s easy to understand why—not only is the poem a stunning work that aligns its vivid, rhythmic language with the devastations and violences of our present moment, it is also translated with great sensitivity and emotionality into an English that corresponds with a tremendous inherited archive, and all the individuals who are keeping it—and the landscape—alive. In the following interview, Fakhreddine speaks to us about how this poem moves from hopelessness to resistance, from the great wound of war to the intimate determinations of the Palestinian people.

Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Reading your translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” is striking, as one gets the sense that this is the closest we might get to putting into words the unspeakable horror that is occurring currently in Gaza. What led you to decide to translate this poem in particular? What was your relationship with Hawwash’s work before you decided to translate “My People”?

Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): I have been unable to do anything other than follow the news from Gaza and try my best to stay afloat in these dark times, especially when I, and others like me in American institutions, are facing pressures and intimidation for merely protesting this ongoing genocide. Since last fall, we have been threatened and exposed to vicious campaigns for merely celebrating Palestinian literature and studying Arabic culture with integrity. If we accept the fact that we are expected to be silent when more than 30,000 Palestinians are genocidally murdered, and accept the false claim that this does not necessarily fall within the purview of our intellectual interests, we are nothing but hypocrites and opportunists.

I find a selfish consolation amid all this in translating poems from and about Gaza. I need these poems. They don’t need me. Samer shared this poem with me before he published it in Arabic, and it arrested me. It so simply and directly contends with the unspeakable, with the horrifying facts of the Palestinian experience. Samer confronts the unspeakable head on and spells it out as a matter of fact. This paradox of a reality that is at once unimaginable and a matter of fact is what makes this poem. Samer achieves poetry with a simple, unpretentious language like a clear pane of glass that frames a scene, arranges it, and transparently lets it speak for itself.

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The Indeterminacy of the Human: An Interview with Rainer Hanshe of Contra Mundum Press

March 31, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Rachel Allen

. . . we say to read for difference, for dissonance; read not to identify, or to sympathize, but from a principle of fascination.

Contra Mundum is a New York-based independent publishing house expressly committed to Modernist work and principles. Its catalog includes the dramatic writings and theatre criticism of Robert Musil; Celan’s posthumous prose as translated by Pierre Joris; two “pre-heteronymic” works from Pessoa; the generously-illustrated Letters of Otto Dix; and a late film script from Marguerite Duras. Preference is given texts with limited circulation, the under-translated and outré in particular. 

In 2012, for instance, Contra Mundum published Marginalia on Casanova, Tim Wilkinson’s rendering of Volume 1 in Miklós Szentkuthy’s cathedral-commentary-catalogus rerum, St. Orpheus Breviary. Contra Mundum is now five books into its tremendous project, bringing into English an immense cosmophagic-and-collapsing body of prose from a modernist still known as the “sacred monster” of Hungarian letters. In addition to works from the Breviary, Contra Mundum has so far contributed translations of Prae and Toward the One & Only Metaphor (also translated by Wilkinson, who died in October of 2020) and Chapter on Love (translated by Erika Mihálycsa, who will continue as translator for subsequent Szentkuthy works). That CMP should be the publisher to finally give Anglophone readers an adequate Szentkuthy is fitting: press and author share an understanding of zeitgeists alive—in art, in language—across history, unthreatened by chronology or multilingualism. Contra Mundum too experiences its periodic connection to modernism(s) without—or with different—temporal allegiances. In addition to Musil and Pessoa, CMP has published not only Baudelaire and Wordsworth and the Ghérasim Luca of Mary Ann Caws, but also Iceberg Slim, a new Gilgamesh (Stuart Kendall’s), Ahmad Shamlou, Maura Del Serra, and the collected prose of Robert Kelly. Many texts converge around performance, whether onstage, on screens, or in person(ae): CMP has published Elio Petri, Richard Foreman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Rédoine Faïd, and Carmelo Bene. Adjacent to this swirl of codexical text and idea is Hyperion, CMP’s in-house and aptly subtitled journal: On the Future of Aesthetics.

Rainer J. Hanshe is the founder, editor, and publisher of Contra Mundum Press, as well as the author of two CMP titles, Shattering the Muses and The Abdication, and the translator of its three works by Baudelaire. We spoke recently about the nature of (his) modernism and its role in contemporary literature. Deviation, ambition, and heteroglossia were our major subthemes.

Rachel Allen (RA): How does Contra Mundum understand “modernism”? How do you recognize modernist work when you encounter it? (Is modernism limited, temporally? Geographically? Relationally? Formally? To whom is it available to be modernist?)

Rainer Hanshe (RJH): Although Modernism does occur within a specific epochal moment, I don’t see it as bound to that cluster of time, nor do I see it in absolute or purist terms. There is no kind of totemic Modernism with a unified set of precepts that every modernist abides by. Any kind of doctrinaire, sectarian, or dogmatic form of something cannot be abided. We are advancing modernism more as a kind of mobile act or event, like a type of living roving machine (not in a mechanistic sense but as a generative force) or combustion furnace and monster of energy. It is a question of extracting from any period, any event, any moment, its active, productive elements, like taking an arrow shot by Nature, picking it up where it has fallen, and shooting it in new directions, as Deleuze said of Nietzsche.

In that way, art is no different from science in terms of advancements—once a certain insight or knowledge has been developed, there is no reason to abandon it, let alone restrict it to its original moment. Modernism (let’s avoid the term neo-Modernism) is to us protean and metamorphic, an open, indeterminate constellation. Beyond seeing it solely as a specific movement in time then, consider its principal elements as if they were discoveries: a conscious break with tradition (abandoning outmoded elements of classicism); a rejection of historicism and the grand narratives of Western metaphysics, not to speak of its morals and values; the displacement of reason as a ruling force (the curse of the Enlightenment) and fostering in its stead a chiasmic fusion of the rational and the irrational; an abandonment of bankrupt forms of art, such as naturalism and realism (and so representation), which different scientific developments essentially undermined, and Enlightenment-type encyclopaedic projects of totality; related to consciousness and new conceptions of the self and the indeterminacy of the human: interior monologues; stream of consciousness; perspectivalist viewpoints; fracturedness, fragmentation, heteroglossic language, en plus.

It is a literature of incommensurabilities, of a dynamism in signification, of a rejection of absolute truths, of an embracing of dissonance. A literature that is aware of language’s limits, of its fissures, of its cul-de-sacs and cracks, and it vigorously pursues such. Flaubert’s book about nothing; Mallarme’s Le Livre; Beckett’s search for a literature of the unword; et cetera. Modernism understands language as Bakhtin spoke of it: a dynamic entity consisting of an interplay between centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. The combustive furnace. Heteroglossia. An amalgam of linguistic registers. The Tower of Babel is not a curse. READ MORE…

Twenty Poems and Two Women: Kathrin Schmidt and Sue Vickerman

March 4, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon

Schmidt is determined to use the most searing images to jolt the reader into the reality she has been forced to live in.

Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt, translated from the German by Sue Vickerman, Arc Publications, 2020

Born in the former GDR and now of Berlin, Kathrin Schmidt is a renowned poet and novelist. Notorious in her native Germany as a competitor of Herta Müller (since beating the celebrated writer for the 2009 German Book Prize), she is a strong and serious voice of what translator Sue Vickerman terms “the left-behind east.” Schmidt, who has worked as an editor and a child psychologist, has published six poetry books and five volumes of fiction in German. A versatile author whose own interior and external experience stands at the base of her writings, Schmidt continually broaches contemporary topics, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to migration in the era of the internet, with relentless perspicacity and humor.

An excellent translator doesn’t necessarily have to be a writer, but when an exceptional translator is an exceptional writer in his or her own right, as is the case with poet-translator Sue Vickerman, the experiment takes on a new aura, advancing transcultural dialogue and culture itself. In her introduction to Kathrin Schmidt: Twenty Poems (the author’s first collection in English), Vickerman draws the reader into her own personal experience of translating Schmidt, a project she completed with obsessive attention to detail and superhuman dedication.

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In Conversation: Ghayath Almadhoun

March 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sohini Basak

My poems are full of death, but that’s because they are also full of life.

Describing Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry in Adrenalin is anything but easy. The blurbs on the book call the collection ‘crucial political poetry’, ‘urgent and necessary’, ‘passionate and acerbic’, and ‘our wake-up call’, although we find out that Almadhoun’s own views on his poetry are slightly different. Written in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland, the poems in Adrenaline are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive. In a voice that is, in equal measure, full of wonder and irreverence for the turn the world has taken, Adrenalin dwells on war, empathy, displacement, suffering, love, and hatred unapologetically. Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and released by Action Books last November, this is the poet’s first selection of poems to be published in English.

The collection starts with the poem ‘Massacre’ (which can be read at our Guardian Translation Tuesday showcase), with the unforgettable lines: “Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired.”

Born in Damascus, the Palestinian poet Almadhoun has been living in Stockholm since 2008. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sohini Basak (SB): As a point of departure, could you tell us which writers you have been reading these days? And are you working on something new?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GB): I am now re-reading Tarafah ibn al-Abd. He was so young when he died, in the sixth century (around twenty-six years old). He is a great poet and could be described as pre-postmodern as he was ahead of his times. I’m also reading Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

About my work, I have begun a new project—my fifth poetry book. I find myself in front of the question that I faced when I started writing more than twenty years ago: will I survive this time? Will I be able to write something new? And, like always, I punch the world in the face and continue writing.

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In Conversation: Christopher Merrill, Director of The International Writing Program

November 29, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Claire Jacobson

What persists through every job I have held...is my love of reading and writing, which at every turn has helped me to navigate my time here below

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are
     with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I
     translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This is perhaps the most appropriate introduction to Christopher Merrill, the award-winning poet and translator from Slovenian and Korean who directs the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. Gifted with a style that frequently combines, as Kirkus Reviews called it, “Merrill-the-poet’s gorgeous writing, and Merrill-the-reporter’s sharp eye,” he has risen to greater international prominence in part through his involvement with the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and extensive cultural diplomacy engagement all over the world.

In his recent memoir Self-Portrait with Dogwood, Merrill writes: “The invention of language made possible what we imagine to comprise human experience, for good or ill—agriculture, warfare, religion, government, poetry, philosophy, art, and science, not to mention the emotions that drive individuals, societies, and civilizations. Long ago, under a tree, we learned to express ourselves in a new key, building structures of meaning word by word, phrase by phrase, alert to the necessities of living, to the varieties of love and grief, to the mysteries of faith, quirks of nature, and consolations of storytelling… The musical possibilities encoded in language expanded our understanding of the worlds without and within, giving birth to poetry—and so much more.”

Claire Jacobson: Can you tell me how you got started writing poetry, and translating, and being involved in the international writing community? Basically, what is the origin story of Christopher Merrill?

Christopher Merrill: A writer’s origin story may change over time, especially if the writer’s life takes many forms, as mine has. Thus at different points along the way I have dated the beginning of my literary vocation to a love affair; a serious illness at the age of twenty-four; working as a war correspondent in the Balkans; making pilgrimages on the Holy Mountain of Athos; and so on. But the most enduring story is that as a teenager in New Jersey I wanted to be a soccer player and a poet: two career paths that did not sit well with my parents—which only enhanced their appeal. When I matriculated at Middlebury College, where I was recruited to play soccer and intended to be a French major, I had the good luck to take a poetry workshop with the novelist Thomas Gavin, who became a lifelong friend; his encouragement inspired me to serve what turned into an unusual literary apprenticeship, which included stints as a graduate student, nurseryman, college soccer coach, caretaker, bookstore clerk, director of writers’ conferences, and freelance journalist. What persists through every job I have held, each of which I viewed as a gift regardless of the pay or working conditions, is my love of reading and writing, which at every turn has helped me to navigate my time here below.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 13, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moses, Tomás Cohen, and Tse Hao Guang

Your news from the literary world, all in one place.

Here we are with this week’s news on exciting developments in the world of literature! Our Editor-At-Large for Singapore, Tse Hao Guang, updates us on new translation initiatives and experimental literary events. Sarah Moses, our Editor-At-Large for Argentina and Uruguay, fills us in on recent literary festivals and on an event honoring everyone’s favorite cartoon cynic. Finally, Tomás Cohen, our Editor-At-Large for Chile, tells us about some exciting new publications appearing in the region.

Tse Hao Guang, Editor-At-Large, with the latest updates from Singapore: 

In the spirit of experimentation, stalwart independent bookstore Booksactually devised a Book Prescription Day (Sep 30) in conjunction with #BuySingLit, inviting the public to meet seven authors one-on-one as they administered literary balm to all manner of ailments. Literary nonprofit Sing Lit Station put on a zany, rave-reviewed, pro-wrestling-meets-spoken-word spectacle Sing Lit Body Slam (October 6-7), selling out on opening night. Sing Lit Station also announced the 2018 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry, awarding the best poems published by SEA-affiliated journals to a combined tune of SGD$2500 (USD$1800). Finally, Singapore played host to the 2nd Asian Women Writers’ Festival (September 29-30), with Singaporean novelists Balli Kaur Jaswal and Nuraliah Norasid speaking alongside other writers from the UK, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India.

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Translator’s Diary: Vincent Kling

June 29, 2017  |  in Essays, Translator's Diary  |  by Vincent Kling

​Like most other translators, I’m plagued by the feeling that it can be done better, though not by me, not here, not now.

This week we bring you the sixth installment of Translator’s Diary, a column by Vincent Kling, winner of the 2013 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. As Kling translates the 909-page  Die Strudlhofstiege by Heimito von Doderer for New York Review Books, he allows us to peek into the translation process, including the anxieties of the translator. You might like to revisit the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth installments to follow his progress.  

Same Thomism, Different Place: Last month I wrote from Ghent, New York, where ten translators had gathered for a week of all-day workshop sessions. Warm thanks to Shelley Frisch and Karen Nölle for their expert guidance. Now I’m in Straelen, Germany until late June, at the European Translators’ Colloquium, meeting colleagues from all over (Turkey, Japan, Italy, Albania, Canada, and more) and free to concentrate on Strudlhofstiege. That’s just as well, because I’m at a very difficult place, working even more slowly than usual. My colleagues keep saying, “Es wird schon”—“It’ll turn out fine,” but it doesn’t feel that way.

And while I want to get back to specifics of Doderer’s novel, I’m finding more to say about Thomism, since I’m starting to consider the influence of Aquinas more and more central to my understanding of what happens in Strudlhofstiege—what happens and how it happens.

The Word Made Flesh: To a Thomistic-minded creative writer, every use of words is an incarnation (capital ‘I’ included), an exercise in logos. All creation came about through God’s words: “‘Let there be light’: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3-5). No gap, no sequence, no first and second steps. Logos makes the word and the deed, the name of the thing and the thing itself, indissolubly identical. From the moment God gave Adam the power of naming the animals, a shadow of logos (Genesis 2:19-20); in the rapture empowering Coleridge’s Kubla Khan simply to “decree” a pleasure dome and make it rise; in the all-encompassing mythic vision of the America Hart Crane created in The Bridge; in the hermetic compression of Paul Celan’s late verse—threatening to enter a black hole of linguistic density—the dream of all writers has been to make the utterance the actuality, to make the word flesh. (The opening of John’s gospel is a kind of refresher course.)

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 27, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Flora Brandl, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Sarah Moses

Updates from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and Austria

Would you believe we have already reached the end of January? We’ve already brought you reports from eleven different nations so far this year, but we’re thrilled to share more literary news from South America and central Europe this week. Our Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, brings us news of literary greats’ passing, while her new colleague Maíra Mendes Galvão covers a number of exciting events in Brazil. Finally, a University College London student, Flora Brandl, has the latest from German and Austrian.

Asymptote’s Argentina Editor-at-Large, Sarah Moses, writes about the death of two remarkable authors:

The end of 2016 was marked by the loss of Argentinian writer Alberto Laiseca, who passed away in Buenos Aires on December 22 at the age of seventy-five. The author of more than twenty books across genres, Laiseca is perhaps best known for his novel Los Sorias (Simurg, 1st edition, 1998), which is regarded as one of the masterworks of Argentinian literature.

Laiseca also appeared on television programs and in films such as El artista (2008). For many years, he led writing workshops in Buenos Aires, and a long list of contemporary Argentinian writers honed their craft with him.

Some two weeks after Laiseca’s passing, on January 6, the global literary community lost another great with the death of Ricardo Piglia, also aged seventy-five. Piglia was a literary critic and the author of numerous short stories and novels, including Respiración artificial (Pomaire, 1st edition, 1980), which was published in translation in 1994 by Duke University Press.

The first installments of Piglia’s personal diaries, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi, were recently released by Anagrama and are the subject of the film 327 cuadernos, by Argentinian filmmaker Andrés Di Tella. The film was shown on January 26 as part of the Museo Casa de Ricardo Rojas’s summer series “La literatura en el cine: los autores,” which features five films on contemporary authors and poets, including Witold Gombrowicz and Alejandra Pizarnik.

On January 11, the U.S. press New Directions organized an event at the bookstore Eterna Cadencia in anticipation of the February release of A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero and translated by Frances Riddle. Guerriero discussed the book, which follows a malambo dancer as he trains for Argentina’s national competition, as well as her translation of works of non-fiction with fellow journalist and author Mariana Enriquez. Enriquez’s short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire (Hogarth), translated by Megan McDowell, will also appear in English in February.

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Highlights from the Asymptote Winter Issue

January 23, 2017  |  in News, Reviews  |  by Aditi Machado, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, and Theophilus Kwek

Our editors recommend their favorite pieces from the latest issue.

First off, we want to thank the five readers who heeded our appeal from our editor-in-chief and signed up to be sustaining members this past week. Welcome to the family, Justin Briggs, Gina Caputo, Monika Cassel, Michaela Jones, and Phillip Kim! For those who are still hesitating, take it from Lloyd Schwartz, who says, “Asymptote is one of the rare cultural enterprises that’s really worth supporting. It’s both a literary and a moral treasure.” If you’ve enjoyed our Winter 2017 issue, why not stand behind our mission by becoming a sustaining member today?

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One week after the launch of our massive Winter 2017 edition, we invited some section editors to talk up their favorite pieces:

Criticism Editor Ellen Jones on her favorite article:

My highlight from the Criticism section this January is Ottilie Mulzet’s review of Evelyn Dueck’s L’étranger intime, the work that gave us the title of this issue: ‘Intimate Strangers’. Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian, but (being prolifically multilingual) is also able to offer us a detailed, thoughtful, and well-informed review of a hefty work of French translation scholarship. Dueck’s book is a study of French translations of Paul Celan’s poetry from the 1970s to the present day (focussing on André du Bouchet, Michel Deguy, Marthine Broda, and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre) and is, in Mulzet’s estimation, ‘an indispensable map for the practice of the translator’s art’. One of this review’s many strengths is the way it positions Dueck’s book in relationship to its counterparts in Anglophone translation scholarship; another is its close reading of passages from individual poems in order to illustrate differences in approach among the translators; a third is the way Mulzet uses Dueck’s work as a springboard to do her own thinking about translational paratexts, and to offer potential areas for further research. The reviewer describes L’étranger intime as ‘stellar in every way’—the same might be said of the review, too.

Chief Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek, who stepped in to edit our Writers on Writers section for the current issue, had this to say: 

When asked to pick a highlight from this issue’s Writers on Writers feature, I was torn between Victoria Livingstone’s intimate exploration of Xánath Caraza’s fascinating oeuvre and Philip Holden’s searching essay on Singapore’s multilingual—even multivocal—literary history, but the latter finally won out for its sheer depth and detail. Moving from day-to-day encounters with language to literary landmarks of the page and stage, Holden surveys the city’s shifting tonalities with cinematic ease, achieving what he himself claims is impossible: representing a ‘polylingual lived reality’ to the unfamiliar reader. And as a Singaporean abroad myself, Holden’s conclusion sums it up perfectly: the piece is ‘a return to that language of the body, of the heart’.

Visual Editor Eva Heisler’s recommendation:

Indian artist Shilpa Gupta addresses issues of nationhood, cultural identity, diaspora, and globalization in complex inquiry-based and site-specific installations.  The experience of Gupta’s work is explored by Poorna Swami in her essay ‘Possessing Skies’, the title of which alludes to a work in which large LED light structures, installed across Bombay beaches, announce, in both English and Hindi, ‘I live under your sky too.’  Gupta’s work, Swami writes, ‘positions her spectator in an irresolvable conversation between the abstracted artwork and a tangible sense of the so-called real world, with all its ideologies, idiosyncrasies, and fragilities’.

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