Literature in translation: Asymptote January 2019 highlights

[breathedout]

As part of my attempt to read more widely outside the US this year, I subscribed to the journal Asymptote, which is run out of London and devoted to literature in translation. Their scope is broader than just reviews or catalogs of books coming out, though there are those: they also publish original translations of poetry, essays, novel and drama fragments, and so on. So it's a bit meatier than Lambda Literary, which is my go-to source for new queer content. I really enjoyed looking through the January issue, which I browsed non-methodically, reading a few lines of this and that and continuing on if the piece caught my attention. I haven't got to everything, but here are some of my favorites thus far, with excerpts from each piece under cuts:

• Dive, by Rodrigo Fuentes, trans. from the Spanish by Ellen Jones. This little story packs a punch, and I love the narrative voice: conversational, familiar, with an addressed "you" assumed to have some knowledge of the narrator's past. It creates a very interesting level of narrative distance: at a remove of years, the narrator is telling a story about his brother, after said brother has died of prolonged drug use. The story he tells is not the story of the brother's death, but it is a story overshadowed by that death. This creates a unique emotional space: a kind of weathered grief which is also capable of containing amusement, frustration, and a host of other shades of emotion.
  
  

  The lake trip I was telling you about was after Christmas. Mati had graduated from high school the year before—I remember exactly when, because he’d just pulled one of his little stunts. You know he used to disappear two, three, four weeks at a time, sometimes more. But it was already December and we hadn’t seen him for a month, so my parents decided the three of us would spend Christmas in Antigua. When we got back to the city, my mum turned on the lights and we discovered in the middle of the garden the old ceiba, same as always, except it had been turned into a Christmas tree. Mati had taken all the shoes out of our wardrobes and used them to decorate it. There were shoes right at the top, I’ve no idea how he managed it. My trainers were hanging off a twisted branch, and on another one further over I could see a pair of my mum’s heels dangling precariously. She stood for a while looking at it all and then turned and went into her room. But my dad stayed there contemplating the tree, trying to decipher some meaning in the decorations, I guess, and when he turned to look at me he said, well, doesn’t look half bad, does it?
  
  That was the kind of thing my brother used to do.

  
  
  And I love the note on which Fuentes leaves us: literally hanging in mid-air, despite the fact that we know at least the bare bones of how this specific anecdote must end. The book in which this story appears, Trout, Belly Up is going to be released by Charco Press in February of this year, and I preordered it.



• Fashioning a Wardrobe in the Languages of God by SJ Pearce is a fascinating short essay about the religious-linguistic context of, and sartorial symbolism within, a poem written by a Jewish woman living in medieval Spain about the moment of bidding farewell to her courtier husband, who was fleeing the country for his life. In the process Pearce delves a bit into the divided existence of Hebrew-speaking Jews in the medieval Islamic world:
  
  

  The native language of these poets was Arabic, but they wrote poetry in Hebrew, at least in part to prove that their sacred language could do everything that the divine language of their Muslim neighbors could. They were the first poets to take techniques that had been used only by Arabic-language poets—poetic tools such as rhyme and quantitative meter and metaphor through which poets could show off their technical skills—and adapt them for writing poetry in Hebrew. Although Dunash is credited with the innovation, his wife is seen as the more skillful practitioner, mimicking the formal elements of Arabic poetics more closely than any other writer in those early days.
  
  Jews living in the Islamic world spoke Arabic although they did not believe, as their Muslim neighbors did, that it was the language that God himself spoke. They struggled to define their place in a world in which they shared their native tongue with a vision of God they did not accept as their own. At first they reacted by writing polemics that both praised the utility and beauty of the Hebrew language and criticized Islamic theology. Then they began explicitly to imitate the Arabic literary forms that were sources of cultural prestige in the urban centers they inhabited.

  
  
  Pearce goes on to dissect the significance of the bracelets and cloaks exchanged in the poem, at which point I may have teared up.



• Six Poems by Asmaa Azaizeh, trans. from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale. I posted one of these poems already, but they're all striking. Azaizeh's prickly relationship with language and representation is compelling, and the more time I spend with each of these, the more it grows. Here's another one, the prose poem "Myth":
  
  

  The Arabs derived the word ustura, myth, from the Latin istoria, history. It was the most intelligent thing they did.
  
  History was a dog tied to a tree. Passers-by felt sorry for its freedom, whose saliva seeped out from the corners of its mouth. They muttered a few words and moved on. Others came near and stroked its back, but their intentions started barking and they took off in fright. Then there were others who kicked it like a stumbling block, but it licked their feet and they tasted sweet. All it was thinking was how it could become the tree, and tie the passers-by to its trunk.




• This review by Rachel Hill of Hwang Jungeun's I'll Go On (trans. from the Korean by Emily Yae Won) is intriguing to me both for its coverage of this book in particular (despite the inclusion of what looks at first glance like a trademark Tragic Queer), and also for its references to Hwang's previous novel, One Hundred Shadows. Both apparently contrast South Korea's working-class tragedy and mundanity with the shiny affluent surfaces omnipresent in the official accounts of the country, but One Hundred Shadows sounds like it has a surreal, semi-fantastical bent that's appealing. I'll Go On offers instead three intertwined narratives of the same events, and an obsessive interest in the abilities and shortfalls of storytelling itself:
  
  

  Rather than cohesive and continuous, as a subject [the novel's first narrator] Sora is full of voids and ellipses, and she demonstrates how the novel's storytelling strategies can both constrict and liberate, but only ever in partial, incomplete ways. Hwang’s fractured characters also use stories to try to tease out their own and others’ motivations—which often remain opaque—to form imperfect but functional forms of mutual understanding. [... T]hroughout the novel, the sometimes seductive “machinery” of storytelling is placed front and centre, particularly its function of bolstering societal metanarratives about family and gender.

  
  
  They're both of interest!



• The Next Word by María Sánchez (trans. from the Spanish by Bella Bosworth. This is a lovely little piece, a series of letters which Sánchez used as "a kind of warm-up, a way of shedding the fear of the blank page" but which end up as a series of poetic, sharply-observed mini-essays treating of her life, her work, her reading and writing and translation, and her reflections on the world around her, both natural and political. Her consciousness is very steeped in the art and literature of Spanish and Portuguese artists (most of them female), whom she references frequently; so I also discovered several new-to-me names to investigate further.
  
  

  Yesterday, eating at the bar under my house, a woman—smiling, a little nervous—asked me if I would please keep an eye on her parents; she couldn’t be sure of them. She was going to the bathroom, but she would worry if she left them on their own. That combination of terror and tenderness on her face stayed with me for the rest of the day, and I am still thinking about it today. The way she moved her hands, her joy on coming back and seeing her doddery old parents, it was like it was the first time she had seen them in such a long time.
  
  I don’t know where I’ll get with these letters, if they’ll count for anything, provide pleasure, company, or simply end up in the spam folders of multiple inboxes.
  
  For now, I hold on to this line I translated from María Gabriela Llansol:
  
  "Is surviving by writing to be a blind way of serving humanity?"

Anyway, check it out! I'd be interested to know what other pieces from the issue folks love, that I missed.

Comments

[breathedout]

I too choose to / would prefer to believe that she was a woman, and real, as you say. I was utterly fascinated by the entire essay, so I'm glad you enjoyed it too! It's a time period and cultural milieu about which I know almost nothing, so I was especially excited to find that Pearce has published an entire book on the Jews of Islamic Spain, and their Hebrew-language literature.

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, that is so right up my alley.