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