Serpentine

June 24, 2024 | in Essays, Retellings | by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 4, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, and Eva Wissting

Ecopoetry and code-breaking are capturing readers around the world in this week's dispatches.

In this week’s dispatches, Bulgarian readers brave the winter for an event highlighting environmental literature, Sweden commemorates the beloved children’s book author, Astrid Lindgren, and Italy celebrates what would have been Umberto Eco’s 90^th birthday with a new publication. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Believe it or not—it is already February, and despite the cold weather in Bulgaria, various cultural events are popping up here and there. With an ever-increasing focus on climate change and the dire consequences we are already facing, different local artists are attempting to highlight the need for conscious, collective action.

One of the strategies employed to combat phenomena such as global warming constitutes the recycling of different materials. Interestingly enough, the whole concept also happens to be at the heart of literary critic and professor of literary theory Amelia Licheva’s latest poetry collection, The Need for Recycling, which considers the act through the prism of creative impulses and intuitive journeys through one’s feelings and experiences. The book, officially published by Lexicon Publishing House on Christmas Eve, 2021, also contains illustrations by the painter Veselin Pramatarov. In an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio, Licheva revealed that the title could be interpreted as “the search for lost meaning.” She is fully aware that the formula is far from light, but insists that the initial shock—bound to rock the reader’s inner world—is in fact a sought-after provocation of sorts.

The launch of the book, which took place not long ago at Sofia City Library, was attended by over fifty people eager to hear the poetess’s newest verses. The lively discussion was hosted by the prominent writer Georgi Gospodinov (whose works have previously appeared in Asymptote) and translator Daria Karapetkova, with the actress Snezhina Petrova was in charge of recitation. After the long-anticipated premiere, the author used her social media profile to extend her gratitude to “all of my colleagues, friends, and students who attended the debut of my poetry collection. Thank you for the solidarity and for the unique privilege to be able to feel like a part of a meaningful community.”

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A week ago today, on January 28, Sweden commemorated twenty years since the country’s most internationally known writer, Astrid Lindgren, passed away at the age of ninety-four. The creator of strong, ingenious, and unforgettable children’s book characters like Pippi Longstocking, Karlsson on the Roof, Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, and Lotta on Troublemaker Street, Lindgren has enthralled and inspired readers around the world for generations. Her books have been translated into 107 languages, including numerous translations into English by Joan Tate—who also has translated other significant Swedish writers like Ingmar Bergman, Kerstin Ekman, and P.C. Jersild. Lindgren has been awarded both national and international literary awards, as well as received honorary degrees from Linköping University in Sweden, the University of Leicester in the UK, and the University of Warsaw in Poland. On the year of her passing, the Swedish government instituted the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA), which awards a writer, illustrator, or promoter of reading in March every year. During her lifetime, Lindgren not only wrote for and about children, but she was also an activist for children’s rights––which is why the Astrid Lindgren estate today, together with Save the Children, continues to work on the Pippi of Today campaign for refugee girls. READ MORE…

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Translation Tuesday: “The Fox-Terrier” by Mempo Giardinelli

February 26, 2019 | in Translations | by Cameron Baumgartner

An even greater silence fell, as if all the sound and noise of the world had died in that plaza.

An impactful feature of “The Fox-Terrier” is the way in which the opening paragraph throws the boundary between fiction and nonfiction into doubt as the narrator mentions a personal detail which is also true of the author: that he has written a book called La revolución en bicicleta, which the real-life Mr. Giardinelli published in 1980. Although Mr. Giardinelli asserts that “The Fox-Terrier” is purely fictional, the use of this true detail as a framing device for the untrue narrative which follows lends the story’s climax a chilling believability. The reader is left wondering, Could it be that this terrible thing really happened? This question leads, in turn, to a larger consideration of human nature and its capacity for cruelty, and the way human evil returns again and again throughout history “like a neverending Piazzolla tango.”

—Translator Cameron Baumgartner

In This is Not the End of the Book, a conversation about books and reading by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, the authors mention a story by Restif de la Bretonne, a French novelist from the eighteenth century whom I haven’t read, that is similar to a story my father used to tell, and which in 1980 I almost included in my book La revolución en bicicleta.

Translator Profile: Jennifer Scappettone

November 13, 2017 | in Interviews, Translator's Profile | by Allegra Rosenbaum and Jennifer Scappettone

The notion of a unitary, homogenous, and monolingual “America” is as much an alternative fact as Spicer’s attendance numbers at the inauguration.

Former Asymptote blog editor Allegra Rosenbaum interviews translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose profile appeared in our Winter 2016 issue. Her translation of Italian poet Milli Graffi was featured on the Asymptote blog last week and her translation of F. T. Marinetti’s futurist poetry appeared in our Spring 2016 issue.

Who are you? What do you translate? (This is just a preliminary question! To be taken with an existential grain of salt.)

I am a poet and scholar of American and Italian nationalities who grew up in New York, across the street from a highly toxic landfill redolent of the family’s ancestral zone outside of Naples (laced with illegal poisonous dumps). I translate Fascists and anti-Fascists; Italian feminists and a single notorious misogynist; inheritors of Futurism and the historical avant-garde; and contemporary poets who are attempting to grapple with the millennial burden of the “Italian” language by channeling or annulling voices from Saint Francis through autonomia.