Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 20, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Carol Khoury, MARGENTO, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and Romania!

This week, our editors-at-large take us from memorial ceremonies in Kenya to a colloquium in Brussels, exploring the life and legacy of celebrated literary figures, exciting prize nominations, and cross-cultural events. Read on to find out more!

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

Palestinian writer and poet Ibrahim Nasrallah has been nominated to the longlist for the 2026 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, better known as the “American Nobel” for its global reputation and the extent of its sway in the world of literature. Nasrallah’s much-acclaimed novel, Time of White Horses, stands as the only Arabic-language novel among this year’s nine distinguished finalists, another significant achievement for Arabic literature in the international arena.

Presented biannially by the University of Oklahoma’s World Literature Today, the Neustadt Prize recognizes outstanding literary achievement in all genres and languages. The winner, who will receive a $50,000 award, will be announced at the Neustadt Lit Fest in October 2025.

Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses is a sweeping narrative charting the course of Palestine from the twilight of Ottoman rule to the earth-shattering convulsions of the 1948 Nakba, all refracted through the lens of an imaginary village. The book, celebrated for its blend of documentary realism and imaginative storytelling, has previously been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and is celebrated for its nuanced analysis of collective memory and identity. READ MORE…

Echoes in the Dome: A Review of Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome

June 19, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Linnea Gradin

Radiation—its violent atomic instability—acts as a metaphor for this unresolved history.

Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

Yuko Tsushima, perhaps one of Japan’s most quietly radical literary voices, is best known to English readers for Territory of Light and Woman Running in the Mountains—her early, semi-autofictional novels made up of domestic scenes of motherhood and explorations of non-reproductive female sexuality. In her later works, however, she turned away from the spare style that characterized her early work and towards larger-scale examinations of post-war Japan. Her newest book in translation, Wildcat Dome, in a graceful translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, introduces English-language readers to these powerful historical reckonings.

Originally published in 2013, in the wake of the tsunami that triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Wildcat Dome is both a sweeping epic and a thoughtful meditation on memory, grief, and the unfinished business of history. Told through shifting narrative voices, the novel starts with a buzzing energy: a swarm of scarab beetles consuming leaves in an eerie forest, their appetite so immense that “time flows on and on, a river of emerald.” It’s a place where “insect time” collides with human time, and the buzzing doesn’t stop.

At the novel’s center are Mitch and Kazu—two children born to Japanese mothers and American GIs, then abandoned at an orphanage—and their friend Yonko, the niece of the woman who runs the orphanage. Throughout their lives, the three children, now adults, carry with them the weight of vague memories and a diffuse “prophecy.” This cryptic warning seems linked to a traumatic event that continues to haunt them into adulthood: the mysterious drowning of a fourth child, Miki-chan, a fellow orphan. As witnesses to the event, their young ages and fallible memories keep the circumstances of her death shrouded in mystery. Was it an accident, a crime, or something else? What about the strange boy, Tabo, who, unlike Mitch, Kazu, and Miki-chan, is “fully” Japanese and has a mother who will do anything to protect him—including covering his potential crimes? As the novel investigates the contradiction between the relentless passing of time and the stand-still of a history that has not been properly addressed, the prophecy shifts and mutates. Its warning comes to function as a narrative refrain rather than a concrete plot device, keeping the three main characters forever anchored to their pasts, unsettling any attempt at closure. READ MORE…

A Word Misunderstood, A Siege: An Interview with Maria Borio on the Italian Lyric

June 18, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation is, rhythmically, a second twin birth.

Plunging into poet and literary historian Maria Borio’s Italian-language collection, Trasparenza (2019), one finds a riveting poetic study on the human gaze, dis/connections of touch, and visual intimacies of modernity. This collection was later brought to the Anglosphere as Transparencies (2022/2025) in Danielle Pieratti’s translation for World Poetry Books. In Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), the celebrated scholar Arnaldo Colasanti painted an intriguing portraiture of Trasparenza, describing a blend of the pure and the impure, like the digital screen, an evocation of the imagistic clarity of snow and glass, ether and windows. For Colasanti, Trasparenza reveals desire only for it to be erased and emptied. However, he cautions against reading Dr. Borio’s poetry merely as abstract and argues instead that her work presents a resistance against the concrete, existing in a space that is tactile yet fleeting, spiriting language away towards solitude, lyrical disunity, and oblivion.

In this conversation thoughtfully translated from the Italian into English by Danielle Pieratti, I spoke with Dr. Borio, currently in the central Italian city of Perugia, on her poetry collections, particularly Trasparenza (Transparencies), and the poets and critics that define the Italian lyric tradition.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut into the Anglosphere, Transparencies (trans. Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2022), saw a re-edition in May 2025. Could you tell us what your creative ethos was when writing the poems in Trasparenza (2019)?

Maria Borio (MB): The English translation of Trasparenza led to a book that is slightly different from the Italian original; in fact, we even reconsidered the order of the poems and their division into sections. I would say that it became a transcontinental collection or, if you could call it this, a form of transatlantic poetry. I believe that the book’s core—thinking about transparence in our time—resonated naturally in response to these changes. How can poetry represent certain issues pertaining to those who live in the Western part of the planet—a realm in the midst of redefinition? Transparence connotes our relationships, real and mediated, as well as our way of living, of constructing, of being in the world. Isn’t the language of algorithms also presented as transparent? And can’t we say the same about AI? With one provision: taking care to avoid reducing our relationships and actions to a surface-lacking substance, which has only instrumental ends. From Italian to English, therefore, the book’s interrogation of these problems intensified: how do we avoid making transparence a double game? How do we prevent ourselves from getting caught up in common sense, or slipping into hypocrisy (even when we need it to survive…), or forgetting what responsibility means—and not just responsibility to ourselves.

AMMD: Looking back at your first poetry collection, L’altro limite (2017), and then to Trasparenza, what would you say are the most notable shifts in your poetic vision and approach to writing? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Elements

June 17, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Michelle Clayton

I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.

Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.

—Michelle Clayton, translator

“The Comet”

I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 13, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and Latin America!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on the global literary scene. In the Philippines we celebrate the anniversary of the country’s most significant superheroine, and in the United States scholars of Latin American and Caribbean literature convene to discuss methods of promoting alternative and countercultural literary production.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the Philippines

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the Philippines’ iconic komiks superheroine Darna, honouring a dramatis personae turned cultural cornerstone. Created by writer Mars Ravelo (1916-1988) and artist Nestor Redondo (1928-1995), Darna debuted on 13 May 1950 in Pilipino Komiks #77 during the ‘Golden Age of Comic Books.’ The character has since headlined fifteen movies, four primetime television series, stage plays, video games, and more, securing her status as a queer pop icon and an emblem of the nation’s unyielding spirit.

The story centres on Narda, a working-class girl with mobility impairment who transfigures into a flying superheroine by swallowing a stone carved with ‘Darna’ and shouting her name. The stone, originally from another planet, remains in her body, with only her grandmother and younger brother Ding, her sidekick, knowing her secret. José B. Capino, in Contemporary Asian Cinema (2006), outlines Darna as ‘arguably one of local cinema’s most popular and representative figures,’ comparing her with America’s Wonder Woman. Unlike Diana’s aristocratic (even demigod) roots, Narda’s working-class, disabled background reflects her Global South origins.

Born out of the idea of the Superman-inspired Varga in 1947 for Bulaklak Magazine, Darna was Ravelo’s artistic response to the Philippines’ cultural imperative for a homegrown hero after the Second World War. The period, according to scholars Kristine Michelle Santos and Febriani Sihombing, saw komiks burgeon with stories rooted in indigenous folklore. After the Philippines gained independence from the United States in 1946, komiks pivoted to local culture. Santos, in Queer Southeast Asia (2023), adds that in the next decades, publishers greenlit commercially viable stories to elude government censorship.

Darna’s story transitioned to cinema on 31 May 1951, before the 28-issue comic run ended, with Filipino-American actress Rosa del Rosario starring in the first movie produced by Royal Productions under actor-turned-director Fernando Poe Sr. In 1973 and 1975, the performance by Vilma Santos, later an acclaimed actress and politician, redefined Darna: Narda became Darna, spitting out the stone to revert and swallowing it to transform, now a Warrior of Light rather than an alien. Only Ding knew her secret, and her catchphrase, ‘Ding, ang bato!’ (‘Ding, [give me] the stone!’) achieved legendary status, inseparable from the heroine itself.

The superheroine’s reach extends beyond any single form of media, encompassing a 1977 television series starring Lorna Tolentino on RPN, a 1986 animated series on GMA, a 2003 National Book Award-winning miniseries by Mango Comics, among others. Theatre productions include a 1993 musical, a 2003 ballet, and a 2018 play, Ding, Ang Bato!, which mingles with Filipino Sign Language. Darna has also been the lead character in an animated short, a battle royale game, a webcomic, a rock song, commercials, and a Funko Pop! figure.

Ravelo created Darna to inspirit hope amid the aftermath of the war, a mission the superheroine continues 75 years later, representing resolve and rebellion for Filipinos facing the ongoing crises of our time.

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor at Large, Reporting for Latin America 

Last month, the 70th annual conference of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) took place in New York City, bringing together a mix of librarians, scholars, archivists, and writers. The focus this year was on countercultures, spotlighting the ways in which marginalized and underground cultural production across Latin America and the Caribbean can be preserved and studied.

In a partnership with NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, along with Columbia University Libraries, the City University of New York, and the New York Public Library, the conference welcomed papers that dealt with “the myriad ways we can and should work to ensure we are preserving and making accessible narratives that challenge prevailing hegemonic understandings.” Some of the possibilities included the collection of ephemeral or nontraditional materials such as zines and pamphlets, alternative genres in music and literature, critical literacy instruction on using countercultural materials, and the promotion of minority languages.

The conference comes at a crucial time in history. As authoritarianism gains traction in parts of the region and state funding for arts and education shrinks both in Latin America and the United States, preserving alternative narratives has become both a cultural and political act. Therefore, SALALM 70 was also about using archives, books, and libraries as a form of resistance. By focusing on non-canonical forms of literature and academia, SALALM is reshaping what counts as literature and who gets to decide.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

 

When There’s No Fog: Translating Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Rosa Mistika

June 12, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

I have to look back across a foggy channel of my own to explain how I came to translate this classic Swahili novel. . .

Tanzanian writer Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) was a pioneer—for being one of the first Swahili poets to publish a collection in free verse, for greatly influencing the direction of the novel’s development in East Africa, for his efforts to “dismantle the resemblance of language to the world” by creating “a language whose foundation is being.” However, among East African readers, he is perhaps most known for his 1971 novel, Rosa Mistika, and the controversy that followed its publication; despite addressing the urgent themes of sexuality, violence, and women’s liberation with deftness and complex imagery, the book was temporarily banned due to its lack of moralizing on the part of the narrator. Now, over fifty years later, the English-language world will finally be able to read this stirring, poignant tale in Jay Boss Rubin’s deeply considered translation, out June 17 from Yale University Press.

In the following essay, Rubin ruminates on the iconic opening sentence of Rosa Mistika and takes us through some of the twists and turns in his translation process—illuminating also the long journey that each translator takes through the landscape of their vocation.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: My Tender Matador

June 11, 2025  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Georgina Fooks, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Xiao Yue Shan

Lemebel clearly also believed in the power of the image . . . but the film does have to contend with a material reality. . .

Pedro Lemebel, the iconic Chilean activist, essayist, and artist, wrote only one novel in his lifetime: My Tender Matador, a gloriously romantic narrative of repression, radicalisation, and infatuation. It tells the story of a trans woman—named only as the Queen of the Corner—and her brief love affair with a leftist guerilla named Carlos, taking place amidst the waning years of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime. Juxtaposed with comic passages that satirise the shallowness and greed of the dictator and his wife, the novel is a bold expression of selfhood and resilience that incisively wields Lemebel’s entrancing prose against the ugliness of tyranny.

Nearly two decades later, in 2020, Rodrigo Sepúlveda took this subversive novel to the screen, with Alfredo Castro starring as the exuberant Queen. Commenting on the material’s continual legacy and relevance, the director decisively noted Lemebel’s revered status and pivotal role: “If civil unions exist today and gay marriage is being discussed in Chile, it’s because of how Lemebel fought during the dictatorship.” One year after the film was released, Chile passed its legislation of marriage equality with an overwhelming majority.

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we discuss these two works in conversation, conjunction, and deviation, with the mediums of literature and cinema making their distinct determinations on the narrative’s conceptualisations of beauty, politicisation, and imagination.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): My tender matador! From the original Tengo miedo torero, Katherine Silver gives us an English title that preserves sound over literality, with the Spanish meaning something more like: ‘I’m afraid, bullfighter.’ These beautiful [t] and [m] alliterations anticipate the lush whirl of images that unfurl in both Pedro Lemebel’s 2001 novel—’Like drawing a sheer cloth over the past, a flaming curtain fluttering out the open window of that house in the spring of 1986. . .’—and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s 2020 film adaptation.

Like Silver’s title, the film’s opening scene translates Lemebel’s plot for beauty over ‘faithfulness’: the scene is Sepúlveda’s own creation. It starts in media res with a drag performance in a discothèque in Santiago, Chile—all sequins, jewel-toned light, and close-ups of the enraptured, laughing audience. They include our protagonists, the Queen of the Corner and the young, mysterious, militant Carlos, who meet for the first time later that night when he saves her during a police chase.

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Talk about an elegant set-up: Sepúlveda effectively foregrounds the story’s central conflicts—on both personal and political axes—within the context of queerness and resistance in Pinochet’s authoritarian Chile, in less than a minute and in a setting that Lemebel did not write, but left to the reader’s mind. The beauty of Sepúlveda’s translation for the screen, a medium that serves visibility, hearing, and action, is also its concision. What other methods have you noticed Sepúlveda use to translate Lemebel’s text? How else has My Tender Matador molded to film?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Proper Lady” by Arbër Selmani 

June 10, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Suzana Vuljevic

Come with us, let’s shapeshift, let’s resist the expectation to be beautiful in front of the cameras

“A proper lady” (Zonja, in Albanian) is many things, but more than any other, she is expected to be obedient. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an incendiary prose-poem against the patriarchy, written by the queer Kosovar poet Arbër Selmani and translated by Suzana Vuljevic. In this mordant poem, a chorus of unnamed women turn society’s expectations upside down, their harsh refrain of “if we were proper ladies” calling attention to the abuse and exploitation inherent in the class aspiration of being “a proper lady.” In the words of the translator: “Proper ladies in the context of the poem largely refers to the kind of women that are forced to follow the rules as it were, becoming inured to male dominion, fulfilling a submissive, obedient role, and falling prey to misogynistic men. At the same time, there is an overtly rebellious undercurrent that calls out the indecencies of societies that take advantage of, abuse and demean women.” Implicit in the poem’s collective point-of-view is an alternative aspiration, a solidarity that can resist the oppression of a misogynist society. Read on!

If we were dignified ladies, we’d have to wake up at the crack of dawn and wash the feet of the patriarchy. If we were proper ladies, we’d be off filling jugs with water, heating them up with the dark bits of our souls. If we were ladies, we’d have to be sure not to make a sound at night. We’d have to fake orgasms, swallow the pain, and then go on to tell ourselves we had it coming. If we were the kinds of ladies society wanted us to be, we’d be in the habit of rolling our eyes and accepting our husbands’ slaps like ordinary boxes of chocolate. If we were ladies, we’d have to cook around the clock to fill the hairy bellies of wretched husbands—husbands long ago turned masters.

READ MORE…

A Metaphorical Middle Finger: A Review of Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

June 9, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Linnea Gradin

She rejects the roles typically thrust on disabled people, refusing to be either an inspiration or a villain. . .

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Hogarth, 2025

Saou Ichikawa is the first disabled author to win the prestigious Akutagawa prize. The protagonist of her prize-winning novella, Hunchback, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, is Shaka, a woman who shares the same disability as the author herself: myotubular myopathy—a condition where the muscles can’t grow, preventing heart and lungs from maintaining normal oxygen saturation levels. The parallels between Shaka and the author don’t stop there but Hunchback is far from autobiographical. According to Ichikawa’s own calculations, only about 30% of the plot is based on her life; a mathematical balance that lends true authenticity to the writing, while also leaving plenty of room to push the boundaries of what the characters can say or do. And it is this blending of fact and fiction that allows debut author Ichikawa to engage in the interesting philosophical quandaries that Hunchback posits, offering a nuanced and transgressive take on disability rights, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and class. In a society that largely ignores the existence of disabled people, Hunchback demands to be heard and serves as a start to a much larger conversation about how to reconcile the freedom of choice with the freedom to a dignified life—and who gets to define what that means.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 6, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

In this week’s round-up, our editors discuss the continual relevance and essentiality of literary criticism, new projects to promote literature in translation, and a memoir that reneges on skepticism to embrace interconnectivity. 

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting for China

Last week, the ceremony of the fourteenth Tang Tao Youth Literary Research Awards took place in Shanghai, honouring five young scholars and their articles in the field of criticism, with subjects ranging from the re-interpretation of classics to the analysis of contemporary intersections between textual practice and artificial intelligence. The list of awardees included Li Jing on academic systems and knowledge transformation in the digital age; Wang Xuesong on visual forms and the construction of new poetic genres; Han Songgong on the works of novelist Bi Feiyu and their analysis of human nature; Wang Bingzhong on Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q and the procession of character development through spiritual awakening; and Li Zhuang on Cai Chongda’s “Hometown Trilogy” and the potentiality of literature being a point of stability amidst a fractured era.

The award, established by the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature and given annually to scholars under the age of forty-five, has done much to nurture emerging critics and academics since its inauguration. Named after the great twentieth-century essayist, historian, and Lu Xun expert Tang Tao, the prize aims to promote innovation and passionate diligence in the field of literary studies—qualities that awardee Wang Xuesong saw as emblematic of youth itself, commenting that scholars should continually aim for the same persistence, enthusiasm, and warmth with which they began their careers (presumably before they’re crushed by the relentless pressures and depressions of academic bureaucracy).

Literary criticism can seem elitist at best and masturbatory at worst, but anyone who’s a fan will likely understand that the hermeneutics and analysis of texts are in fact interpretations and inquisitions into our most basic interests: life, reality, and the human desire for creation. To see how we continually re-engage with classical works and their sociohistorical context with the illumination of contemporary understanding, or to gauge how our faculties of intelligence and critical thinking may be altered or recalibrated with technological developments—these are pivotal questions that move beyond the page to address themes of social conflict, societal evolution, and the ever-changing modes and methodologies of expression. In substantiating the importance of these practices, judge and professor Chen Sihe noted: ‘AI has created a greater expectation for the humanities, and only when our studies prove themselves to be irreplaceable, can they have an independent and individual existence.’ It calls into question what would qualify literary criticism to be seen as irreplaceable in the greater scope of things; anyone reading this, or anyone present for Chen’s speech that evening, would certainly agree that these studies already are irreplaceable—after all, what’s more worth studying that our most integral art of communication?—but as the underfunding of the humanities continues the legacy of scholars working in uncertainty and abject poverty, and the monstrous figure of AI continues to encroach, the growing smallness of our minority cannot be denied. READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter V Space

June 5, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Drawing the sun and the moon at the same time, drawing emptiness and fullness.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Space. Fall in.

 

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Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.

But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?

Yes.

–Kimura Kyoho in Kenjutsu Fushigi Hen (On the Mysteries of Swordsmanship), 1768, epigraph found
in Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style

 

Drukpa Kunley, the Master of Truth, himself said,
‘If you think I have revealed any secrets, I apologise;
If you think this a medley of nonsense, just enjoy it!’
Such sentiments, here, I fully endorse!

–The Divine Madman, The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley, compiled by Geshe Chaphu,
translated from the Tibetan by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor

READ MORE…

Death Will Come in a Single Reckoning: An Interview with Oisín Breen on the Irish Avant-Garde

June 4, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

People do, in fact, want to read and hear work that is pursuing art, first and foremost. . .

Irish poet and performer Oisín Breen’s second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was released in 2023 by Downingfield Press and has been highly praised by World Literature Today, The Scotsman, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. The collection draws on the sagas of the goddess Étaín from Irish mythology, weaving together a brocade where the mythic past meets an experimentalist future. Breen describes his work as employing ‘a smattering of other languages’ alongside English, most notably his Irish native-tongue.

Born in Dublin, Breen has established himself as a prominent voice in the Irish avant-garde, with his work featured in more than a hundred literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across over two dozen countries. He is a poet at home in the so-called ‘world republic of letters’, connecting the local with the universal. His next book, The Kerygma, is due in September through Salmon Poetry.

 In this interview, I spoke with Breen, currently in Edinburgh, about Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, his creative process, his use of language, and the intersection of myth and modernity in his work.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was re-released last year by the Melbourne-based Downingfield Press. Could you tell me about how you wrote the title poem?

Oisín Breen (OB): The title poem, ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín’, owes its genesis to the moment the curtain fell at the committal of my oldest and dearest friend’s mother.

My friend was so strong throughout the day, and in the run-up, joking, sharing, helping, always there for all those who loved his mother—including many who knew the iterations of her long before my friend was a glint in her eye. She was wise, kind, deeply loving, spiritual, playful, cheeky, mischievous, and passionate. Yet when the curtain fell, well, I saw my friend shatter, briefly, into so many pieces; but it was the way he shattered that was astoundingly beautiful. The word that came immediately to mind was ‘Godstruck’.

I knew then that I had to write this physical reality, this metaphysical reality. It had the awe of a medieval painting. It was inspiring in the truest sense of the word. So, write it I did, in my own way, weaving together myth, narrative, and a long meditation on the way in which iterations of ourselves through time form a communal being that perennially negotiates its own status as an identity creature/function/process. And then juxtaposing that with the total awegrief at a funeral, at a death, when one is present to a whole human for the first time, as they cohere slowly into a single vanished point that then branches out again into so many new forms. The fact that she who had passed was not only a mother, or a friend, she was a lover, she was sexual, she was playful, she probably carried a million doubts, and a million seeds of friendships, some of which bloomed, and some that didn’t—it is all this that I worked to try and capture, to hew and to weave, and I do hope that, in some small measure, I did. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Park Ju-taek

June 3, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Heinz Insu Fenkl

In the night, all arustle with flights of falling leaves, / the wind opens its mouth to read my eulogy / and blows my will away.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we’re presenting two highly evocative poems by Korean poet Park Ju-taek. The first, “Missteps”, portrays a group of men, “hard as insomniac stones”, whose fragile companionship seems to be threatened by an overwhelming yet nebulous existential dread. “I Am Not an Atheist” forcefully buffets us with its speaker’s emotional turmoil; a hyperawareness of “the cyanic death that comes with mortality” provokes a confrontation with the divine. But the poems escape clear interpretation, and perhaps feel most similar to paintings—the mysterious cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico or Edward Hopper come to mind. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s sensuously renders Park’s distinctive atmospheres, bringing his unsettling afterimages into high relief.

Missteps

No one kept track of the time.
The men who needed a long talk did not return to their homes.
A car drove by, its headlights on.
And then—those men of few words—disappeared into a bar;
a brief silence settled in.
It was a starless night,
our natures hard as insomniac stones
and tainted, just like the world.
One man stepped out of the bar,
and as he walked along the visible street—
the dark street, with its open lips—
he saw shadows still trapped in the bar
and insects dead on the cement floor.
The wind blew. The remaining men all rose.
Afterwards, darkness engulfed
the street toward which they walked,
their many hands fluttering in the air.

READ MORE…