Posts featuring Wislawa Szymborska

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 5, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Rubén López, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest of literary news from Guatemala, China, and Japan!

In this week of literary updates, we discuss the blend of technology and literature around the globe—from a virtual imagining of the Popul Vuh in Guatemala, to the use of ChatGPT by the winner of a prestigious literary award in Japan, to an interactive exhibition of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry in Shanghai.

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

Despite having famously said, in an interview with Edward Hirsch, that “it isn’t possible to save mankind”, Wisława Szymborska displayed no shortage of compassion towards humanity and its messes, surging always towards a more enriched penetration into people, the layered fabric of their histories, and the immense variegations of their natures. In China, funnily enough, most people likely became aware of the Polish poet through a celebrated graphic novel by the Taiwanese artist Jimmy Liao;《往左走，往右走》(published in English as A Chance of Sunshine) is a story about destiny and its aloneness—depicting two individuals who walk separate paths but are unified by the same experiences. In it, Liao borrows the following lines from Szymborska’s “Love at First Sight”:

They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

That same tension between unity and undeniable difference is consistently offered through Szymborska’s corpus, and is central to a new exhibit in Shanghai centred around her works, held at Qiantan L+Plaza from April 1 to May 15. Composed of interactive installations, performances, and graphic poetic representations,  “我偏爱“ (I prefer) is a valiant effort to iterate the complexity of the poet’s exquisite awareness, and aspires towards both a sense of communion and a defense of individuality. True to its vision of dialogic action, as well as honouring literature’s confessional and communicative capacities, there are surveys to fill out, votes to cast, letters to open, and a telephone to pick up. READ MORE…

Reckoning With the Idea of the Canon: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part II

July 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

The tradition becomes this tidal flow that is always acting on us . . .

In the second part of a three-part series, Editor-at-Large Alan Mendoza Sosa continues his conversation with poet and translator Robin Myers. In this installment, they continue their discussion on multiplicity in translation, touching on canons in Spanish literature, conceptual writing, and collaboration. Read part one of the interview here.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): Have you felt that commercial interests interfere with what gets published and translated?

Robin Myers (RM): Always, although I find it hard to express exactly how, beyond my own intuitions and observations, you know? Definitely. I sense that certain authors become “hot” authors, and so other writers will get grouped together or hyped in response to them or in comparison to them. And of course authors in translation are very susceptible to being treated as automatically “representing” the country or even the region they come from, which is hugely problematic. Among many publishers there is a real interest in contemporary Latin American fiction writ large, which is obviously never a balanced playing field. With literature translated from Spanish to English, there are lots and lots of books being translated from Argentina, Chile, quite a few books from Mexico, and far fewer from other places. You know, very unequal.

AM: Usually very little, next to nothing from Central America, I would imagine.

RM: Totally, next to nothing. Yeah, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, I’d say.

AM: Sometimes Peru, maybe? Or not even.

RM: Yeah, Peru a little more recently. I’m thinking of Katya Aduai, Gabriela Wiener. But anyway, my hope is that as interest in translation as a field continues to grow, and with increasing advocacy for translators as artists, the range and multiplicity of authors who get translated will also keep growing. I think all of that is on the rise, which is thrilling.

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 5, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jiaoyang Li, and Julia Sherwood

This week's latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, and China!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Poland, Sweden, and China. In Poland, Anna Zaranko’s translation of Kornel Filipowicz was awarded the 2020 Found in Translation Award; in Sweden, an anthology will soon be released of writings on coronavirus, featuring many international writers including Olga Tokarczuk; and in China, bookshops are responding to challenging times by moving to online engagement with their reading community. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

Since she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, Wisława Szymborska’s poetry has been appreciated around the world, while the work of her partner of twenty-three years, the master story teller Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990) remained largely unknown outside Poland. Fortunately, this has changed with The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2019 in a translation by Anna Zaranko. On March 31, Zaranko received the 2020 Found in Translation Award in recognition of her “quietly understated yet immensely evocative rendering of Filipowicz’s prose, which The Sunday Times’s David Mills described as ‘provocative, troubling, awkward, a proper classic.’”

On May 27, the winner of the eleventh Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, awarded by the City of Warsaw, was announced online (the fourteen-minute video of the ceremony has English subtitles). The prize went to Katarzyna Kobylarczyk for Strup. Hiszpania rozdrapuje rany (The Scab. Spain Scratches its Wounds, 2019 Wydawnictwo Czarne), a book about grappling with historical memory. The jury praised it as “a fascinating story that blends the nightmarish and the grotesque, in which reality reveals its metaphorical dimension. It is proof that one can create real literature relying solely on facts.” READ MORE…

My 2019: Eva Wissting

December 25, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Eva Wissting

Staying involved with the Swedish literary scene is a way to stay connected to my home while abroad.

Next up in our A Year in Reading series is Eva Wissting, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Sweden. A book reviewer and an avid book club member when she is not contributing to Asymptote, Wissting shares with us the literary discoveries that lit up her 2019.

At the beginning of this year, I started reviewing books for a Swedish online site, Dagensbok, which has published one book review every single day since the year 2000. I first stopped by the office to pick up books to write about around this time of year, during what we in Sweden call “the middle days”—the slow and lazy days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve that feel like holidays, even though they’re not really. The entire office building appeared to be empty, except for me and the editor whom I was there to meet. To walk up to a filled bookshelf and be told that I could pick anything, get to write about it, and people, supposedly, would read what I’d written—this, for sure, was a second Christmas.

One of the books I picked up that day I most certainly wouldn’t have come across otherwise. It’s an amazing Finnish-Swedish poetry and graphic book by Jolin Slotte and Pauliina Pesonen, about finding your own words and your own voice in difficult circumstances, even when it labels you a traitor. The word-for-word translation of the Swedish title is All These Dead Eyes. The whole book is in black and white, and each right-hand side in Finnish is accompanied by a left-hand side in Swedish. I don’t speak or read Finnish, but this book is constructed so that you only need to understand one of the languages. And then, of course, the words are also accompanied by the beautifully drawn images, which is yet another language. Considering how many of us live with multiple languages—whether we fully master them or they exist more as a backdrop—it surprises me how rare truly multilingual books are.

Another book I discovered thanks to Dagensbok was Kristen Roupenian’s short story collection You Know You Want This, which I read and reviewed in the Swedish translation by Amanda Svensson. It wasn’t until I got to the story “Cat Person” that I realized I had read this author, and this short story, before—though by then I was already completely hooked on this careful study of evil. The stories are written with a great sense of craft, not only in carving out a narrative, but also in understanding how humans operate. These are also horror stories, though not the kind with monsters or ghosts or other supernatural elements; the evil in these short stories comes from within the relationships between people––normal, everyday people like you and I—which is the most horrifying kind of horror stories there are. “Cat Person” differs from the other stories in the collection in that the evil is not so clearly expressed. This is the short story that was published back in 2017 by The New Yorker and went viral. Not a lot of short stories go viral. Not a lot of emerging writers have their short stories published by The New Yorker and then have them go viral. This is certainly an author I look forward to following. READ MORE…

Olga Tokarczuk and Polish Literature’s Home Army

November 4, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Cynthia Gralla

Poland has been using art to revitalize—or reform—its postwar image.

“I and motherland are one. My name is Million, because for millions do I love and suffer agonies.” Adam Mickiewicz’s words from his dramatic cycle Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) are indicative of Poland’s long tradition of voicing resistance and examining its national identity through literature. Last month, acclaimed Polish writer and past Asymptote contributor Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, and yet has also outraged many conservatives in her own country. In this essay, Cynthia Gralla takes us through the history of resistance in Polish literature in the twentieth century, before examining Tokarczuk’s own challenge, defiance, and her place in such a history.

The past hundred years in Polish literature have been, by one reading, a history of resistance through weaponized words.

Poland has made resistance an art. Born into a Polish-American family, I have heard tales of my relatives’ wartime resistance work since childhood. Between 2012 and 2014, I lived in Lublin, Poland, conducting research into their activities during Nazi occupation with the help of a Fulbright grant. My relatives served as ski couriers in what eventually became known, in 1942, as the Armia Krajowa—literally “the Home Army.” Before that, it was called Związek Walki Zbrojnej, or “the Union of Armed Struggle”, and the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski, or “Polish Victory Service”. The name mattered little; all were incarnations of the Polish Resistance, the heart of a national body so conditioned by the vicissitudes of history and occupation that it began beating again as soon as Germany invaded. It also beat steadily throughout the nineteenth-century partitioning of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, in the classrooms of that century’s “flying university” (which educated luminaries like Marie Salomea Skłodowska, also known as Marie Curie, when teaching youth in Polish was forbidden,) and during the parched years of Communism. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “The Garden of Seven Twilights” by Miquel de Palol

October 24, 2017  |  in Translations  |  by Adrian West

I grew aware of the immense distances spread out in front of me, breathing for me.

“When I read Miquel de Palol,” says Mireira Vidal-Conte, “I see reflections of such authors as Claudio Magris, Robert Walser, Cortázar, Ray Bradbury, Clarice Lispector, Stendhal, Szymborska, Casares, Karel Čapek, Pessoa, Proust, Flaubert, or Novalis; but also of painters like Brueghel the Elder (the first of many predecessors of the surrealism of the detail) or the cinema of David Lynch, Fellini, or Wong Kar-wai. This is true irrespective of the genre, for the poet under discussion works not in a specific genre (save for that of language), but in the broader category of art. As a literary artist, he employs genre in the manner of a simple tool, employing the one that works or those occasions when it works. He is a poet when poetry is what is called for.” For this Translation Tuesday, we present an excerpt from The Garden of Seven Twilights, in which the great Miquel de Palol touches the real in all its vertiginous vastness in childhood moments spent face to face with the cosmos. This piece was first published last Thursday along with new work from thirty-one countries in our Fall 2017 issue.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

The Story of the Swing and the Stars

My American childhood, super-protected, closed in on itself, took place between Long Island and New England: Providence, Boston, Salem . . . Now they seem to me like places from a dream. My godfather Kaspar had a house on the outskirts of Boston, and I stayed there for long stretches in the summer, until my mother died.

There was a swing between two apple trees in the garden behind the house, but from a very young age, I preferred to kill time staring at the cockroaches and butterflies.

READ MORE…

My 2015

December 24, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Sohini Basak

The off-white of the page and the off-white of the walls. The world outside the door. And you reading.

What is the memory of reading? How do you remember reading? For me, I cannot simply recall the book in question, but also when I read it, why I had chosen to read it if there was a choice involved, or how I chanced upon it, and most significantly, where I read it: in which rooms and in which seats. I have moved around a lot this year, both travelling and relocating, but at the same time, my memories of reading certain books invoke stillness, the kind where you notice the slightest movement of daylight changing the hours. The off-white of the page and the off-white of the walls. The world outside the door. And you reading. And then there are some books that do not ask for a stupor, but an attention where you want to see or imagine it being made, you want to know what it looked like in its first stages and what conversations transformed it into its finished present state. Well-arranged poetry anthologies have this effect on me. When I heard Robert Chandler speak about The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry at the Place for Poetry conference, at Goldsmiths in London earlier this year, I knew I had to spend time looking at the way he had organized the contents and think back to what he had said about editorial choices, about being both editor and translator, and working with co-editors. How does one take on the challenge of representing 200 years of Russian poetry to be published in 2015 and under the banner of a Penguin Classic? The key, Chandler said was in striking a balance between what is available and what should ideally be available. So he had to go beyond the ‘seductive neatness’ of the four that most representation of Russian poetry is over-fixated on (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva), and include a few non-Russian poets, and have over fifty contemporary translators work on the anthology. READ MORE…