Monthly Archives: June 2021

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: FEM by Magda Cârneci

June 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Cârneci's protagonist is a modern Scheherazade—or is she?

The persuasive potentials of storytelling don’t always hold the life-or-death thrill that they did for the mythical Scheherazade, who spun her narratives to stay alive, but as the profundities of Magda Cârneci’s FEM prove, there is always an enchantment in speaking one’s own experiences to another. Exalted with Cârneci’s celebrated poetics and visceral in its discernment of gendered bodies, our Book Club selection for June is a novel that speaks to our evolving understandings of physicality, sexuality, and selfhood as refracted in societal prisms of sex, femininity, and myth.

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 Q&As with the author or the translator of each title!

FEM by Magda Cârneci, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, Deep Vellum, 2021

In the very first lines of FEM, the protagonist—a fictionalized version of author Magda Cârneci—compares herself to the mythical heroine Scheherazade, then immediately troubles the comparison: “A little, everyday Scheherazade in an ordinary neigh­borhood, in a provincial city; your personal Scheherazade, even if you won’t cut my head off in the morning, when I fail to keep you awake all night with extraordinary stories.”

How, then, is she like Scheherazade? She will indeed attempt to enchant her listener, a lover, with a string of stories—but are all women who tell stories like Scheherazade? It is not a simple affinity between the two women that gives meaning to the comparison, but, more fruitfully, the symmetry’s imprecision. Like the north ends of two magnets, the two storytellers’ refusal to meet tantalizes, inviting the reader into the no-man’s land, in which they may question—or even participate in this exchange of identities. Cârneci’s own active approach to living in a body, in fact, is exactly what she begs her listener/reader to adopt, and her appeal is so breathtaking, it’s a wonder anyone could refuse:

We are seeds sown into the brown-black loam of a terrestrial existence, and we must germinate and rise slowly from our fragile burgeoning, our green sprouting, through lay­ers of clay and stone, through bacteria, worms, and insects that wish to devour us, we must pierce through sheets of underground water and enemy root systems, our germi­nations are deviated by contrary forces, deceived by grav­itations and visions, by temptations and traps, but pulled upward by an atavistic, core instinct, along a fragile thread of light, pulled by an inverted, celestial gravity, we are tractable, attracted toward growth at any price . . .

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Leaf” by Azza Maghur

June 29, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Dr. Safa Elnaili

I feared if I touched the leaf, it would either sting me, or its light would run through my body and melt me instantly

Can the story of a life be told through a single moment? What would it mean to, in William Blake’s words, “see a World in a Grain of Sand”? In Azza Maghur’s story, a single luminous leaf from a man’s childhood comes to define his entire life. Maghur’s prose is spare and understated; it is given a lovely cadence in Dr. Safa Elnaili’s translation, which lures the reader into a moment of beauty that is given a telescopic significance in the narrator’s reminiscence. Published in Arabic at the start of this year, this quiet piece received much praise for its resonances with reader’s experiences of the pandemic—its sensitivity to the tactile world, for instance, when a world was reckoning with the potency of touch.

All the rays of sunlight that day filtered through the trees onto a single leaf.

I swore to Mother that the sun rested on one leaf. I witnessed it shine as brightly as day against the dimness of its mother tree.

Mother was standing in front of the kitchen sink. She pulled her wet hands from under the running faucet, wiped them on the sides of her dress, and then smiled. She told me I was a little boy with a wild imagination. I had no idea whether I should give rein to my imagination or let it take me away on its wings.

I tell you this story because that leaf and my soul have become inseparable since that day. I searched for it my entire life. It was the size of my hand or slightly bigger, dark green, and so thick that even light couldn’t pass through it. Water droplets could rest on it undisturbed.

My only recollection of the tree was that its aura was dim, almost black. I learned as I grew up It must’ve been an emerald green tree, but I only remember the one particular leaf that soaked in the sun and captured all its strings of light as if it were planning to make something out of them. I reckon it’s the reason the tree was so dim.

I’ve roamed this earth; I’ve visited cities, villages, farmlands, and forests in search of the leaf but never found or seen anything that resembled it.

The sun’s light is boundless. It shines on earth with a fair and steady rotation, inflames the edges of leaves and homes, and draws shapes on sidewalks and rooftops. Its light and warmth sneak into concrete buildings and even shine through the tiniest holes in shirts or carvings on the soles of shoes. It stretches into the entrance of a dark cave but never dares to travel beyond it. Its light wrestles shadows. When it’s time to set, it departs leisurely, and its rays shine over the horizon. It yawns with heavy eyes and then sleeps until dawn to rise again.

I drove my car, parked it in the shade under a tree, and hopelessly looked for the leaf. I walked into forests and farms and searched for it among trees and bushes and even between the leaves of fruits but could never find it. READ MORE…

Strangeness, Discovery, and Adventure: An Interview with Enchanted Lion’s Claudia Bedrick

June 28, 2021  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Anna Aresi

The publisher brings world literature to Anglophone children. Plus, three recommended titles.

Before 2020 became the annus horribilis, fans of Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari had awaited it with excitement, as it marked the one hundredth anniversary of Rodari’s birth. Countless events and celebration had been planned, many of which still took place virtually, but perhaps even more interestingly, new editions and translations of and about Rodari’s work were issued. Among these is the first complete English translation of Favole al telefono (Telephone Tales), translated by Antony Shugaar and illustrated by Valerio Vidali for the independent children’s press Enchanted Lion Books.

Although Rodari is arguably the greatest Italian children’s author and his fame extends well beyond Italy’s borders, especially in the former Soviet Union, Rodari was never read much in the United States and Anglophone world in general, partly because of his ties with the Communist Party. Intrigued by their choice to publish Telephone Tales now, I had a Zoom conversation with Claudia Bedrick, the publisher, editor, and art director at Enchanted Lion. We began by discussing Rodari and ended up talking about children’s literature in translation more generally.

Anna Aresi: How and why did you decide to publish Telephone Tales now? Of course there was the anniversary, but Rodari was never famous in the United States. Do you think readers are more receptive now? The book has been a great success!

Claudia Bedrick: Yes, maybe. In fact, it was only coincidentally that it was published for the anniversary. We thought it would be published a lot sooner. The translator and I started talking about Telephone Tales seven years ago, but there were delays and it just happened that it was published last year (in 2020). My interest in Rodari stems from The Grammar of Fantasy, which exists in English, translated by Jack Zipes. That’s a book that I’ve known for a long time, a book that I’ve read and relied upon in the formation of Enchanted Lion. So when the translator contacted me about Rodari and Telephone Tales, I was already familiar with him, and I think this was a major difference between me as an editor and other editors he had spoken with. Like you said, a lot of people in the English-speaking world have no idea who Rodari is, even though he is arguably the greatest children’s writer of Italian culture, or one of them in any case.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 25, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Thirangie Jayatilake

Literary news from Europe, Argentina, and Sri Lanka!

As the world slowly reopens to possibilities made anew by the subsiding of pandemic restrictions, our editors are bringing you the latest from a summer of potentialities. In Argentina, bookstores are spotlit for their role in creating cultural spaces and dialogues, and virtual stages take full opportunity of their wide reach. In Europe, a Belgian festival dedicated to avant-garde poetry is proceeding at full speed, and new and noteworthy publications are hitting the shelves. In Sri Lanka, annual literary forum New Ink debates the definitions and reach of their national literature. Our editors are here with the full scoop!

Allison Braden, assistant blog editor, reporting from Argentina

The Feria de Editores is now accepting entries for its Bookstore of the Year award; the organization, which will host its annual festival of independent publishers on October 1-3, seeks to recognize the work of booksellers throughout Argentina, acknowledging that their cultural and curatorial role goes far beyond merely selling books. The prize, open to all bookstores that have been open at least one year, will honor a shop whose leaders and employees have worked tirelessly to promote intercultural exchange both inside and outside its physical space. “Bookstores,” says the invitation to enter, “are a focal point for fostering local culture and connection to international thought.”

Bookstores in Argentina and beyond will soon stock commemorative editions of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, a book of profound influence on international thought about the legacy of exploitation in the region. Galeano, a journalist and novelist who hailed from across the Río de la Plata in Montevideo, Uruguay, published the work in 1971, when authoritarian regimes on the continent still held sway. The book was banned by some, and even Galeano eventually came to think of it as poorly researched and written, but it nevertheless became a leftist classic with enduring appeal: It’s been translated into more than a dozen languages and shot to number six on Amazon’s best-sellers list after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy to U.S. President Barack Obama. In Argentina, the book’s fiftieth anniversary has provoked reflection on the relevance of Galeano’s thesis today.

Fundación Andreani, an organization that promotes cultural and educational programs to improve quality of life, and Universidad Nacional de las Artes joined forces this month to launch Paraísos Artificiales. Antología de poesía en la web (Artificial Paradises. Online poetry anthology). The series celebrates the web’s potential for creative freedom and brings attention to digital poetry and “technopoetics.” The first season, released this month and inaugurated with a virtual presentation, consists of three episodes, which focus on artists with various approaches to visual poetry: Rafaël Rozendaal, Ana María Uribe, and Belén Gache. The series is fuel for the Feria de Editores claim that cultural influence, especially in the age of Zoom, goes far beyond bookstore walls. READ MORE…

How the Void Fills: Soje on Translating Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon

June 24, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

I hope that the books that I translate collectively present a tapestry of Koreanness that challenges and upends orientalist views of the country.

Though the pandemic that serves as the catalyzing disaster in Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon seems immediate to our times, the novel was actually published in 2017—indicating towards the larger, lasting ideas and occupations alive beneath the tide of current events. Indeed, as Choi’s sensitive, dreamy narrative unfolds, the uncanny nature of its topicality is overshadowed by its larger, human concerns of foreignness, settlement, and the way we meet one another. In the following interview, transcribed from a live Q&A hosted by Asymptote Book Club Manager Alexandra Irimia, Soje shares their thoughts on translating the unique novel, and the many invisible challenges of translating Korean into English.

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

Alexandra Irimia (AI): From Italian opera and sound of the ocean, to radio static and the rain, To the Warm Horizon shapes a unique soundscape. The narrative relies a lot on its sensorial, synesthetic cues which usually demand a lot of skill and craft to be put into words and conveyed convincingly. Besides, as a reader, I felt a lot of intentionality in the author’s use of silence. Did you feel in this novel—or in the rest of your body of work—that there was any challenge particular to translating the musicality of the prose from the Korean into English? 

Soje: What a beautiful question! Virtually every translator of Korean literature has commented on this at some point, but repetition is a big deal in Korean literature. In prose, it becomes more noticeable because we, as readers, expect that kind of musicality more from poetry. One of the main stylistic things I noticed was the way Choi Jin-young breaks her sentences in staccato declarations, especially towards the beginning of the book where Dori is narrating her past life in Korea and journey to Russia. And because the fragmented nature of these sentences reflects the character’s state of mind, I tried to replicate every single beat in my first draft. But upon rereading and revising, I found that these dramatic pauses felt more gimmicky in the English than in the Korean, so I had to find a balance between the rhythm of the Korean and what the English language wanted me to do. My reasoning for this partly boils to the fact that the word count expands about 1.5 times from Korean to English, so the rhythm will absolutely change in translation unless details are cut.

There are seven speech levels in Korean, mainly indicated by the verb conjugation which comes at the end of the sentence. Korean novels usually employ the 해라체 (haerache), which means that every declarative sentence ends in the same syllable, 다 (da). So there’s almost this concealed rhyme, and I used to be so fixated on it that many of my sentences in English tended to parallel in structure. Thankfully, my excellent editors at Honford Star and translators such as Emily Yae Won and Anton Hur taught me to vary my sentence structures—something that I’m still honing as an early career translator.

AI: You manage to convey into English an intuition of lyricism that I often associate with East Asian poetry, and which I can imagine is deeply embedded in the original text. Is this lyricism something that flows naturally in your translation—an effortless emanation from the original text—or something that requires a deliberate attempt to preserve in the English version?

Soje: Wow, effortless emanation? I think that’s every translator’s wish! I probably struggled with this more because Horizon happens to be my first full length translation—the two poetry collections that I translated just happened to come out earlier. In the three years that it took to get this published, I think I did three or four major revisions, each time returning to the text with the knowledge I gained from working on the poetry projects. So maybe there’s some relevance there. READ MORE…

One’s Own Desire: Arab Women Writers Speak for Themselves in We Wrote in Symbols

June 23, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Mariam Diefallah

This anthology provides a glimpse into a world that has been constantly made invisible or policed within systems of domestication and abuse.

We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, edited by Selma Dabbagh, Saqi Books, 2021

As an Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim woman, love and lust have largely occupied two separate worlds in my life. While I yearned for the elusive idea of love in my youth and pursued it in relationships, I had also deeply internalized that it had to end in heartbreak; I believed that love, like many ideas, could never be fully comprehended. But lust was different. Lust was an action—an action to avoid and repress, because it leads to sex, and sex is dangerous. When I started reading We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, I thought of my upbringing, of the two separate worlds I have built for love and lust, and the difficulties of reconciling them in my adult life. This anthology, edited by the British-Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh and published by Saqi books, includes one hundred and one pieces by seventy-five different women from the Middle East and North Africa region, as well as from the diaspora. Most of the pieces are translated from Arabic, many are originally written in English, and the minority are translated from French.

In the book’s introduction, Dabbagh explains that translating works about love and lust is difficult, though we do not learn about the ways in which the various translations could have impacted the anthology. This is especially pertinent in the cases of translations from Arabic to English, which represent the majority of the works in the text; Arabic can be seen as a unifying language, but the subtleties and differences between the dialects dictate different cultural specificities and reflect a stark diversity in both place and community. In other words, unless the place of origin is clear, the readers lose a sense of place with the absence of dialect, and different geographies and contexts start feeling neutral.

In the introduction, Dabbagh contextualizes the largely overlooked history of erotic female writers in Arabic literature. Although names of ancient goddesses of love and fertility in the Arab region—such as Isis and Ishtar—are well known, the topic of female Arab sexuality still comes as a novelty for many. Similarly, despite the fame of certain Abbasid poets such as Abu Nawas, female poets in elite Abbasid literary salons are not famous, if known at all. This lack of awareness is further complicated by the total disappearance of women erotic writings during the fall of Andalusia in 1492; Dabbagh clarifies that women writing on love and lust faced a blackout for almost half a millennia, reappearing only in the late nineteenth century. By then, authors and novelists—like Zaynab Fawwaz—began challenging common misogynistic practices such as arranged marriages, and therein paved the way for many women Arab writers to discuss sexuality in various literary forms today. Ranging over three millennia, the long span this anthology covers is indicative of the two interests of my review: what lies beyond the celebratory—especially in relation to difficult and/or painful lust—and the limitations of the narrative linking love and lust as two sides of the same coin.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Airports” by Daniel Saldaña París

June 22, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Louis Sanger

on horseback / caught between one era and another

Selected in 2017 as one out of thirty-nine most promising Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine, acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París is no stranger to our pages—read our review of his “exquisite” novel, Ramifications, for a start. This Translation Tuesday, we introduce to our readers another facet of Saldaña París, with a curious aviation-themed poem from the collection La máquina autobiográfica rendered in Louis Sanger’s translation. Curious because nothing takes flight: the poem’s airports are empty, its turbines are violent. What soars instead is the poem’s dynamic syntax which zigzags through a word’s widening valences, where Saldaña París defamiliarises for us the everyday uses of the word and the world. There is no timelier moment than today to reconsider what we know of the poem’s titular space.  

Airports

(1)

Empty airports.
Themselves, I mean.
But also: with hundreds.
Hundreds who could.
Or could have been, but weren’t.

Airports themselves, no?
containing all times.

What is there to say about “grain of the voice”—seed:
say the truth
about the unsaid. (Listen.)

For example, a voice that sows fields of sorghum
in front of
unorganized fields:
cities seen from above.
The plane does what it has to, like I said,
better late, even late in the day
with a sun that sets this late:
all I love
is visible, and growing old. READ MORE…

All Literature Is Worth Investigating: An Interview with Translator Stefan Rusinov

June 21, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

All cultures are exciting, both for their achievements and failures, for their beauty and nastiness.

In 1999, almost 170 years after his birth, Bulgaria honored publisher Hristo G. Danov’s legacy by establishing national literary awards in his name. In 2021, Stefan Rusinov, a translator who isn’t afraid to ask the important questions about the essence of his trade, won Best Fiction Translator for multiple books he had worked on over the course of twenty-four months. In addition to these admirable recent endeavors in Chinese prose, he juggles his work at Sofia University and his tasks as a freelance interpreter. Our conversation highlights his current projects, the importance of honest answers, and the value of simply “hanging out” with writers.

Andriana Hamas (AH): I would like to begin by asking you about your Бележка под линия (Footnote) podcast, thanks to which you meet fellow translators and discuss “behind-the-scenes torments,” the decisions they eventually have to make, and their inevitable missteps or failures. What have you learned so far?

Stefan Rusinov (SR): I’ve learned a lot, which was really the selfish reason to start this project to begin with. Private conversations with other translators and several years of translating gradually made me realize how case-specific this activity is and that mastery comes rather from accumulating solved problems than from learning universal principles (not to underestimate translation theory). That’s why I wanted to create a space where we won’t so much muse over the nature of translation and other such abstract questions, but we would dig into the specifics, where translators would be put in the position of explaining their considerations and decisions to someone who doesn’t know their working language. Nine episodes on, I’m even more certain that discussing actual problems encountered by translators from all kinds of languages is an important way to understand this activity (and also a major way to pump up my own translation skills).

I’ve learned, or rather, I’ve confirmed, that uncertainty is part of the game, and it should be. I find it very hard to trust a confident translator. There are tons of problems we need to solve and tons of decisions we need to make and, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s idea of interpretation, the mere existence of these cases means that we are bound to create a gap between the original and the translation. So, in a way, we are bad translators by default.

I also learned that in French unfuckable means “incomprehensible.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 18, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang and Suhasini Patni

Hear about some of the most recent literary news from Taiwan and India!

This week, find out from our editors-at-large what has been happening around the literary world. Taiwanese literature appears in French translation, introducing a diverse swathe of writers across Taiwan’s linguistic backgrounds to French readers. India continues to reel from the impact of the pandemic, as the literary community remembers the writers they’ve lost, and many organizations stepping up to advocate for pandemic relief work. Read on to learn more.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan 

In February, the French publishing company L’Asiatheque released Formosana: Stories of Democracy in Taiwan, a collection of nine short stories by contemporary Taiwanese writers. L’Asisatheque is focused on making available books in translation from Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South America, and Africa to French readers. In 2015, the company launched a “Taiwan Fiction” series, led by editor Gwennaël Gaffric, who is also a Chinese translator and professor in China Studies at the University of Lyon. The series seeks to amplify Taiwanese literature with themes of environmentalism, cultural identity, Taiwanese dialects, gender, postcolonialism, and the impacts of globalization. The series has published a number of modern classics of Taiwanese literature in French including A City of Sadness by Chu Tien-wen and Wu Nien-jen, The Membranes by past contributor Chi Ta-wei (recently reviewed in our blog), and multiple works by Wu Ming-yi, including The Man With the Compound Eyes and his novella, The Magician on the Catwalk.

In Formosana, the writers grapple with turbulent periods in Taiwanese history, including that of Japanese colonialism, the White Terror, martial law, and democratization. The stories also contend with social issues, such as nativist movements, LGBT rights, and environmentalism. In a recent interview, Gaffric discussed his choice of centering the collection on the theme of Taiwanese democracy. He believes that though there is increasing coverage of Taiwan in the French press, most French people do not understand its historical and cultural intricacies. He states: “We attempt to allow people to understand the fate of Taiwan from the past to the future, through various types of literary works which provide different channels and voices.” For his next book, Gaffric plans to publish the works of indigenous writer, Syaman Rapongan, to introduce indigenous writing to French readers.

On May 29, Taiwanese literature was also highlighted in France when Chi Ta-wei was invited to join the ninth annual “Nuit de la literature,” organized by the Forum of Foreign Cultural Institutes in Paris (FICEP). A reading of Chi’s “Pearls,” one of the stories from his eponymous science-fiction collection, was conducted in both English and Chinese at the virtual event with the author and Gaffric. READ MORE…

Good News: We’re Expanding!

June 17, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Come join us behind the scenes!

The sentiment with which he studied the maps came from his ambition to travel: He opened them with careful longing, as though he were unfolding the writings of a personal religion.

In his short story “The Foreigner” (first published in our Spring 2019 edition), Sergio Chejfec gives us an unforgettable portrait of a man who dedicates his whole life to anticipating his travels abroad—but, consumed by maps, never even succeeds in leaving the city before he dies.

At Asymptote, we take it for granted that there are no known lands, for even the familiar—let alone the vast expanse of underrepresented countries and languages—deserves to be explored with fresh eyes! Now you too can join our team of intrepid explorers without leaving your home: Just apply to our mid-year recruitment drive.

Read the testimonials by some former staff below, before checking out our newly advertised openings ranging from social media manager and marketing manager to copy editor and editor-at-large! But hurry! The deadline to send in an application is two Thursdays from now, July 1st. 

“Asymptote is the only literary magazine I’ve ever worked for or heard about that has the editorial brain-power and resource of generous and highly-talented translators to pull off a 20-language project in 10 days. This is what we did with our Mexican poetry project, which, thanks to the on-hand blog, graphic and social media team, caught the wave of worldwide solidarity for the victims of the Ayotzinapa massacre in September 2014 and the subsequent protests. It was shared in its thousands, including retweets by organizations like English PEN, Words Without Borders and Granta Magazine. I put the call out for translators for the project on a Wednesday and that same day received an offer of an introduction from NY-based Mexican author Valeria Luiselli and 9 offers of translators. One of the first messages came from our Israel editor-at-large, saying: “We all do our tiny little part in the world: mine is translating.” Asymptote does not only have impeccable taste in global literature (from ancient to contemporary), it also continues to prove, in a very tangible way, that translation is not tiny; it is a vital force for good in the world. I’m very proud to be editor-at-large for Mexico and can’t wait to see what we at Asymptote do next.”

—Sophie Hughes, former Editor-at-Large, Mexico

READ MORE…

Selfhood is a Queer Fiction: On The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

June 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Writing the self into being from a hodgepodge of cultural texts—that is what’s elemental to queer life

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, Columbia University Press, 2021

Dwelling on a female classmate’s romantic advances in her youth, and belatedly cognisant of her learned aversion towards all forms of intimacy, the thirty-year-old Momo realises the incongruence of the one self-guided decision she had made in her life—to become a dermal care technician: “She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist. Why did she have to choose a job reliant on intimacy?” It is the year 2100 and humanity, terrified of the ultraviolet rays seeping through the depleted ozone layer, has evacuated from land en masse to settle on the seabed. Amidst the residual trauma of the sun’s lethal rays, the dermal care trade booms and Momo climbs the profession steadily, eventually becoming the owner of Salon Canary and something of a celebrity in T City. As Momo spends her days massaging her wealthy clients with M skin—a technology that gives her access to their private lives—what she cannot shake off is the feeling that “there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world.”

In The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist (and past Asymptote contributor), tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan. Read together with works such as Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man or Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, English readers can now appreciate a fuller scope of the queer efflorescence unleashed in the experimental fiction of Taiwan’s nineties and the internal heterogeneity of its cultural moment. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation of Chi’s award-winning work comes a quarter of a century after its Chinese publication, but contemporary readers will relish going back to the future in a work that ventriloquises our present, its conjectures at once anachronistic and prophetic. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from I Will Not Go Back by Caspar Eric

June 15, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Matt Travers

I can say nothing / that he himself / couldn’t say better, / say angrier

When the coronavirus struck Denmark in the early months of 2020, award-winning poet Caspar Eric adopted the practice of writing a poem a day for eighty days. Published eventually in Danish as I Will Not Go Back (Gyldendal, 2020), Eric’s practice finds in poetry the potential for serving as a mode of immediate witness to the unfolding of pandemic time and its political contexts. This Translation Tuesday, Matt Travers translates the poem Eric had written on Day 56, which eulogises the suicide of the Danish-Palestinian poet and political activist, Yahya Hassan, whose writing is praised for attesting to the link between “local violence with global violence” in his nominee citation for the 2020 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Written in one long, unbroken stanza, Eric’s voice pulses with a sharp political grief, and is a moving document to Hassan’s enduring legacy in literature as in politics.

DAY 56                                      228 hospitalised

I have to remind myself
that the crisis is here,
I cannot just
jump on the train to Aarhus.
They streamed Yahya’s funeral
on ekstrabladet.dk,
my thoughts are with his family,
my thoughts are with his loved ones.
And fuck those idiots
who whined on Facebook
about people not appearing
to keep proper distance.
Even on the day of mourning
Muslims are being shamed.
The racist narratives
lurking under the LCD,
fuck those people,
fuck their logics.
A hand in the air
for the poems of the impossible,
it is impossible to aim
towards the sentimental
without limiting
a boy to a poet
or to limit
the poet to a boy.
Nothing will ever be
the same again.
The moon’s corona
shone spiteful and beautiful.
I hammered down on the table,
dull tears,
in his own “Moonpoem,”
as salve and salvation,
he would not be killed
for nothing.
No, no one should die
for the majority’s peace.
I can say nothing
that he himself
couldn’t say better,
say angrier,
underneath his fury
a furious love.
I have already
quarreled with Ada
about what we can say
how it should be said.
It is a poor consolation
that everything has now changed.
What I miss
is also a young
human’s future,
the violence in the poems.
But the violence in the poems
is not only of the poems,
they are also the boy’s
and also his hands.
Everyone wants
A more real reality;
windows in the forehead,
concrete in the mouth.
Then they complain of the pain,
then they want it raw.
In with the shit
in the broken literature,
as long as the break
remains in the lines,
so we can stand on the sides
and clap very softly.
In these lonely minutes
it is a Brøndby fan,
let’s just call him Pervez,
who is my biggest ally.
Now we must lay
the identities in a coma,
try to find
a community
while the fire still
burns wildly.
Never let it go out,
never let it heat up.
Never let it heat up
a political project
if the project isn’t
also of doubt,
also of poetry,
like smoke forcing itself
down in the lungs,
forcing them to hack up
new melodies
in the petrified voices.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Caspar Eric was born in 1987 and studied Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He has written five collections of poetry (7/11, Nike, Avatar, All What You Own, and I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19), and written a well-received experimental pop adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (#amlet). Nike, his long autobiographical poem whose starting point began with his own handicap and which reflects on the value of living with a disability in a hyper-mediated society, won the Danish Michael Strunge Prize, and Sherilyn Hellberg’s English translation won the Leif & Inger Sjöberg Award from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Eric’s fifth collection, I Will Not Go Back — Poems from the days with COVID-19, published in November 2020, aimed to outlast the COVID disaster with one poem a day for the first eighty days. He has also translated Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel into Danish. 

Matt Travers is a writer based in Aarhus, Denmark. He has published poetry, reviews and translations with 3:AM Magazine, Zarf Poetry, Overground Underground, Firmament, and is currently working on the English translation of Søren R. Fauth’s Moloch: The Story Of My Rage.

*****

Read more from Translation Tuesday on the Asymptote blog:

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

foucault

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 11, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Jacqueline Leung

Catch up on the latest literary news from Palestine, Sweden, and Hong Kong!

This week, Gaza’s reading community reels from the devastating loss of a beloved bookstore, and Sweden debates a new library to promote freedom of expression. In Hong Kong, leading literary voices pay homage on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, even as the annual Victoria Park vigil was canceled due to coronavirus concerns. Tour the literary world without leaving home; Asymptote‘s editors-at-large will punch your passport.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

When his mobile phone rang at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, May 18, Samir Mansour was not asleep anyway, as the bombardment of Gaza was still on. The caller, the Israeli military, was asking if Mansour was inside his bookshop and publishing house, as they “didn’t want to hurt” him. They hung up, and shortly after, their shells reduced what was once “happy and loving memories” to a pile of rubble.

The beloved local bookshop, which stood on the ground floor of a larger building, was one of the two blockaded Gaza Strip’s largest sellers of books. The other bookshop, owned by Shaban Aslim, was also destroyed by an airstrike the same week. Mr. Aslim spoke of the work he put into creating his store in an interview, saying “this was my dream that cost me so much.”

To Palestinians living in Gaza, the two bookstores played a key role as a center of intellectual ‎life, and their destruction represents the wider loss of culture in Gaza.‎ Mansour’s bookshop, located near several universities, ‎was also the unofficial home of several English-‎language book clubs, and printed and published works by local authors for the past twenty-one years. “Books are my life,” said Mansour, who would like to rebuild his store one day. Hopes are high that the bookstore will be rebuilt with donations after an online fundraiser was set up and managed by human rights lawyers.

A post to the bookshop’s Instagram page laments the loss of the sense of ‎community the store offered to people in Gaza. But not all stories are lost! Tareq Hajjaj’s piece in Middle East Eye gives a glimpse of fear and loathing in Gaza from before the latest war. The Palestine Book Award, now celebrating its tenth year, is publishing Writing Palestine, with Arabic and English texts, which “uniquely brings together revered names.” The Award’s list of winners honors and endorses the best written in English on Palestine. And do not miss M. Lynx Qualey’s list of seventeen new books by Palestinian writers worth reading. READ MORE…