Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Kenya, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

This week, our editors-at-large report on clashes between writers and politics, recent awards, and exciting events. From Pippi Longstocking’s 80th birthday to a brand-new book fair, read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Venko Andonovski was recently named the most influential writer and educator of 2024 by TRI, the renowned, Skopje-based publishing house. Andonovski, whose novels and plays have been translated into twelve languages, is known as “the most widely read Macedonian writer and the most performed Macedonian novelist in the last twenty years.” Despite his fame, he is generous with both the public and his colleagues: he taught six writing workshops in 2024 and made a statement congratulating fellow Macedonian author Rumena Bužarovska on being named TRI’s most-read author of 2024, and condemning the “culture of silence” surrounding the accomplishments of domestic authors in the same breath. Andonovski termed the disinterest demonstrated by Macedonian politicians towards the literary scene “an embarrassment”, adding that the situation is exacerbated by authors who are equally silent about their colleagues’ attainments, and whose “bodies are 80% water and souls are 80% vanity.” Adding that “if we remain a culture of silence, our culture is bound to remain in silence [on the world stage]”, Andonovski posed a question that is both incisive and (unfortunately) relevant: “If we do not appreciate ourselves, who will appreciate us?” READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse

February 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

One of the pleasures of Mountainish is how its fragments flow together according to an obscure, free-associative logic.

Wandering, dizzying, echoing, gorgeous—spending time with Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is not unlike being four thousand metres above sea level; the book conjures both the vastness and the minute details of the Alps with lyrical intuition, while constantly introducing surprising insights into the peaks’ social presentation. Through both a study of mountains and a poetic testament of the mind inside all that landscape, Gahse takes us across what it means to look, listen, feel, and think—with all the awe, fear, beauty, and inequity that is inseparable from our regard of worldly wonders. We are delighted to introduce Mountainish as our Book Club selection for the month, and to be travelling together along the excursions and perceptions of this singular work’s pursuit.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, Prototype, 2025

At some point while reading this strange, moreish book, one is likely to suddenly snap out of the trance it has induced, prompting a question into what this work does, and how it exerts its mesmerising effects.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a series of numbered notes, 515 in total. Certain sections appear to have come from a diary, while other parts resemble the scrambled embryo of a more substantial literary project—a travelogue, perhaps, or a parody of one. But very often, the notes never coalesce into anything; Mountainish might be best understood as the miscellaneous lint of a compulsive writer, a hodge-podge of scenes, sketches, proddings and testings of turns of phrase. This is not to say, however, that the book is lost to chaos. The numbers appended to the notes provide a semblance of order, and oblique patterns slowly emerge and disperse along the reading. Brief, slight, and faintly whimsical, the notes float by like cloud puffs, and if you look at them for long enough, they take on vaguely recognisable shapes. Within its diaphanous structure, the usual anchors to time and place—chronology, for instance—are done away with completely, leaving the book hovering ambiguously over its subject. READ MORE…

Return to the Prodigal Country: Gilbert Ahnee and Ariel Saramandi on the Mauritian Novel

February 26, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

As a writer, translator and most of all reader, I appreciate it tremendously when I see characters speaking in a way that feels true to themselves.

In 1989, Gilbert Ahnee, a then-rising figure of Mauritian journalism, ventured into the world of fiction with the release of Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel to date. Published by Éditions du Centre de Recherches Indianocéanique, Exils is an intimate inquiry into self-banishment and belonging, described by Charles Bonn and Xavier Garnier in Littérature francophone: Le roman (Éditions Hatier, 1997) as a largely autobiographical novel that was written upon Ahnee’s return to Mauritius after a period of study in France, illustrating the sense of exile that is felt even by those living in the very heart of the homeland—the novel being an explicit cri d’amour, or cry for love, for the French language.  

Thirty-five years later, in 2024, Exils was introduced to the Anglosphere when The White Review, a London literary magazine, included a translated excerpt in an anthology celebrating fiction and nonfiction prose from across the world. The translator, Ariel Saramandi, is a British-Mauritian essayist whose book Portrait of an Island on Fire (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June 2025) was described as ‘a searing account of Mauritius’. Her translation offers a delicate rendering of Ahnee’s prose, sustaining its emotional nuances while opening it up to a new audience. 

In this interview, I spoke with Ahnee and Saramandi, both in Mauritius, on the resonances of Exils in today’s world and the evolving legacy of exile in Francophone Mauritian novels.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The excerpt of Exils (Exiles) published in The White Review’s ‘Writing in Translation’ anthology (in Ariel Saramandi’s translation) bespeaks alienation—cultural, geolinguistic, spiritual—mixed up with indifference, boredom, and frustration. I love that we have the character Jean Louise, in his quarter-life crisis, who embodies how exile gnawingly takes on different shapes:  

But I felt that true apathy of not being able to share in their pleasures. I was indifferent to the sea. The sea and its transient vehemence, always the same.

Gilbert, could you take us back to the years leading up to the novel’s publication in 1989? Could you share insights into your creative process?

Gilbert Ahnee (GA): When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, I was 16. I felt, deeply, that my generation would make an unprecedented, but as yet undefined, contribution to our country’s evolution. As a matter of fact, the most groundbreaking changes of the time—political, societal, cultural—were brought about by those who came back from university.  My high school classmates were preparing to go abroad, but my family couldn’t afford to sponsor my university education and so I landed a secondary teaching job as an undergraduate physics teacher. In class I taught physics to young boys and adolescents, but in the staff room I benefited from senior colleagues’ advice as regards to literature. I first started by reading nineteenth-century authors: a few English writers, but many more French and Russian novelists such as Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. That was my first real exposure to the novel. Over the years, I kept on consolidating that interest for novels from around the world, from Truman Capote to William Boyd, Mark Behr to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mario Vargas Llosa to Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk to Pierre Lemaitre. My curiosity for novels is unquenchable. I’m happy that readers noticed, in Exils, allusions to the world of Camus and Proust.

AMMD: Ariel, what inspired you to translate Exils, a French novel published nearly four decades ago, into English? What significance does the novel hold for you as a British-Mauritian writer who grew up in Mauritius?

Ariel Saramandi (AS): This is such a wonderful, intricate question! So perhaps, to start: I’ve used ‘British-Mauritian’ a lot in describing myself abroad, not so much out of a sense of dual nationality—though I am indeed both British and Mauritian—but because all the essays I produced until November 2024 were written under an autocratic government regime. Saying I was ‘British’, even if I never really felt British, was a way for me to signal—hopefully!—that I couldn’t be charged with defamation or imprisoned without the British embassy knowing about it. Asserting my dual nationality in that way felt like a ‘word of warning’ to Mauritian authorities, a ‘technique’ that felt ridiculous—I’ve never been to the British embassy in my life or know anyone who works there. But I’ve also never been troubled, politically, for my work. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A New System” by Ahmad Al-Khamisi

February 25, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Huwaida Issa

"I must live as if nothing has happened, while acknowledging that something has indeed occurred."

In a repressive regime, freedom of speech is one of the first casualties. But what happens when we simply can’t help ourselves? This Kafkaesque short story, by Egyptian writer Ahmad Al-Khamisi, follows an Egyptian academic, Dr. Fakhry, who speaks out and ends up facing unexpected charges. Rather than traditional imprisonment, he is thrust into something far more complex, and far more insidious—the “new system,” where those deemed criminal continue their daily lives without physical confinement, bound only by the knowledge of their status. As Dr. Fakhry struggles to comprehend his ambiguous position, he grows increasingly paranoid, scrutinizing strangers for signs of similar captivity. Translated from the Arabic by Huwaida Issa, this haunting tale reveals how systems of oppression don’t need physical barriers; the mere suggestion of surveillance can transform citizens into their own jailers.

Dr. Fakhry Al-Fayyoumi regarded anyone who spoke to him with deep suspicion, his gaze as wary as someone inspecting a dubious commodity. On rare occasions, he would cautiously venture to ask, in a low, polite voice: Are you, sir, a new system?

To which the other, in confusion, would respond: A new system? What do you mean?

Dr. Fakhry lowered his eyes with a faint, bitter smile, as if silently saying: “Leave this meanness behind,” and then murmured: “The current system.”

In most cases, he received the same response, tinged with surprise: What do you mean? I don’t understand!

Dr. Fakhry grew silent, focusing inward and folding into his perplexity, before he changed subtly the subject of the conversation.

The story of suspicion began six months ago when Dr. Fakhry was unexpectedly subpoenaed by the General Directorate of Investigation. This followed a tense university meeting, where in a moment of fervour, zeal pulled him aside and made a few remarks that crossed well beyond the bounds of what was acceptable. He deeply regretted it afterward. His wife said to him: “You, Fakhry, you’re a renowned professor with your books and research. Why do you concern yourself with the talk of the young?” He responded: “You’re right.” On the appointed day of his subpoena, he arrived at the Interior Office building on time, where a polite and kind officer greeted him and escorted him to a small room. In an apologetic tone, the officer said: “Dr.…I’m very sorry…We’re obliged to arrest you!”

READ MORE…

Taking a Stand: How the Jaipur Literature Festival Fails to Deliver as A Space For Dialogue

February 24, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

The question thus becomes whether the JLF . . . will continue to grow into an increasingly overt vehicle of privilege, elitism, and capitalism.

Branded as “the world’s grandest celebration of books and ideas” and “the greatest literary show on earth,” the Jaipur Literature Festival has grand ambitions for storming the world stage as a thoughtful and progressive interchange of literary excellence and social engagement. Now in its eighteenth edition, however, the festival has shifted towards an alignment with pro-establishment sponsors and government entities, initiating questions on how a necessarily commercial event can serve to dismantle exclusive hierarchies and status quos. In the following dispatch, Matilde Riberio discusses the various shortcomings of the festival in its conduct and programming, as well as its ideological evolution over the years.

The Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), India’s largest literary event and one of its first to attract an international audience, has long positioned itself as a confluence of ideas, texts, narratives, and genres—a place where, as the academic Soni Wadhwa wrote after the 2024 edition: “Nobody tries to distance themselves from it. All are welcome.” At the same time, the festival has always been a space of political contest, and nearly every edition has been caught up in controversies involving the stifling of free speech, corporate sponsorship by companies with markedly unethical practices, and sexual misconduct allegations against various panelists and the cofounder, William Dalrymple.

The question thus becomes whether the JLF can transcend these roots to actually become a junction of subcontinental voices, or whether it will continue to grow into an increasingly overt vehicle of privilege, elitism, and capitalism as the years pass. Unfortunately, the issues that have mired the 2025 edition, taking place over January 30 to February 3, suggest that the festival may have finally shed any pretensions of being anything other than a business-friendly, upper-caste Hindu-dominated, and state-sanctioned “tamasha,” as the journalist and activist Aakar Patel described an earlier edition, using the Hindi and Urdu word for “spectacle.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

Our editors bring you the latest from India, Mexico, and Romanian letters.

A vital new project to resurrect the works of a great Romanian poet in the English language, a slew of ambitious and global-minded book festivals in India, and a fair to highlight Oaxacan writing and languages in Mexico—our editors are bringing you the latest from a literary landscape that continues to expand in richness, variety, and intercultural exange.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

In 1889, Mihai Eminescu—the iconic late romantic/early modernist Romanian poet—died at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind only one published collection but tens of thousands of unreleased manuscripts. As they were gradually unearthed and released over the decades following his death, the posthumous publications only increased Eminescu’s fame and critical acclaim. Despite this unparalleled stature in Romanian literary history, however, the poet is relatively unknown to English-language readers—an issue that paradoxically has nothing to do with a lack of translations. In fact, a sizeable portion of Romanian and Anglophone translators and writers have tried their hand at this hugely demanding task, but they’ve all largely failed in two essential respects (to smaller or larger extents): first, in rendering the oceanic vastness and depth of the oeuvre, and, second, in capturing the exquisite euphony to an extent by which a non-Romanian reader could sense the original’s inescapable fascination.

One of the most important recent events in Romanian letters has now set out to address both those shortcomings in a spectacular fashion; K.V. Twain (Diana Cârligeanu’s pen-name), a young poet, writer, and translator educated in the US and Japan, has undertaken the task of translating Eminescu’s collected poems in an eight-volume series to be published by Eikon Press, and the first instalment was launched in January under the aegis of the Romanian Literary Translators Association in Bucharest. The association’s director, multilingual poet and performer Peter Sragher, was the event’s enthusiastic host, while literary critics Christian Crăciun and Vianu Mureșan contributed generous praise for the project.  READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Samuel Bollier

February 20, 2025  |  in Podcast  |  by Vincent Hostak

Our first podcast episode of the year features Samuel Bollier, who translated Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” for our Winter issue.

Ever think of running away from mundane existence to join the circus? Imagine if, one day, after watching the circus, the circus director comes over to recruit you for an unusual role in the spectacle and pageantry you have just witnessed. This is what happens in Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” from our Winter 2025 issue, a witty short story filled with dry humor that gently questions what we hold to be reality. Join Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak for a fascinating conversation with its translator Samuel Bollier for an entrypoint into Salem’s surreal fictional universe, as well as the broader challenges of translating Arabic fiction into English.

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Play as Criticism, Curiosity, and Sense-Making: An Interview with Ena Selimović and Maša Kolanović

February 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

The world of grown-ups is so violent and boring, with nothing but news and politics, and [the children are] resisting this absurdist language. . .

In the wartime world of Underground Barbie, our January Book Club selection, Croatian writer Maša Kolanović vivifies another realm that is both an escape and a radical interpretation of daily horrors: the playtime conjurings of children. With its many inventions playing out in the basements of houses and the corners of rooms, the scenarios of childhood imagination both mirror and refract the way conflict and nationalism intercept daily life, articulating a more intuitive, unfettered interpretation of ongoing events. The novel is translated with a deft attention to the prose’s texture and humor by Ena Selimović, and in this interview, both author and translator speak to us on working with this text and its singular voice, the transformation of pop objects across cultural divides, and how the language of play can speaks to its context.

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 USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to start us off by asking you, Ena, about your history with Underground Barbie. How did you come across the book, and what drew you to translate it?

Ena Selimović (ES): The book and I share a ten-year history. Back when I was finishing my dissertation in comparative literature, a lot of the books that I was working from were not translated into English, so I found myself having to translate all these passages that were in my chapters. Underground Barbie, for me, was such a no-brainer because my dissertation was on the relationship between American and Balkan racialization—in other words, putting the perception of race in both places in dialogue with one another. In the Balkans people tend to think there is no such thing as race, but there very much is, and Underground Barbie really shows how race functions in times of war, because it depicts how children are remapping what it means to be pure Croatian.

Everything started there, and in 2019, Maša came to a conference in San Francisco, where I was then living. At that time I had written a plea for other translators to translate the book, but not thinking of myself as a potential translator at all. I didn’t think that was a career or something that I could pursue, because I’m not a native speaker of English. I also had the experience going back to Bosnia as a child and a teenager, and everyone would make fun of me for my American accent in Bosnian. It just felt like I couldn’t win. READ MORE…

Taipei Travelogue: On the Taipei International Book Exhibition 2025

February 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

What historical and cultural pressures have shaped these literatures into their current forms and dynamics?

For its thirty-third edition this year, the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) filled a hall of the Taipei World Trade Center from February 4 to 9. The exhibition’s theme—「閱讀異世界」 ‘Follow Your Fancy in Reading’—celebrated the「異」or the ‘other’ in global literature, drawing authors from as far as Italy (this year’s guest of honour) and Czechia, and as near as Japan and Hong Kong. Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor for fiction, Michelle Chan Schmidt, was one of the translators, editors, publishers, and readers who flocked to the fascinating six-day event to learn more about Taiwanese literature in translation.

Alongside the meticulous preparations of lóo-bah and bah-sò rice, yamagawa pot, or the Taiwanese iterations of yōshoku curry, translation is one of the crafts in Taiwan Travelogue that combine to give Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novel the complexity and richness of a twelve-course feast. When our Japanese narrator Aoyama Chizuko arrives in Taiwan—a then-Japanese colony—in 1938, Ông Tshian-hóh, also known as Ō Chizuru or Chi-chan, is the young local woman assigned to serve as her Taiwanese interpreter. It takes only a quarter of the meticulously structured novel for Chizuko, increasingly enraptured with Chi-chan, to realize her hidden dream: ‘Wait, I know what your ambition is! It’s to become a professional translator—of novels, isn’t it?’

On the opening day of the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Yáng and Taiwan Travelogue’s translator, Lin King, spoke at length in Mandarin about the layers of translation saturating this brilliant novel, beginning with its ‘translate-ception’ structure: Yáng’s narrative masquerades as an original piece of 1930s Japanese travel writing that her authorial persona purports to have translated into Taiwanese Chinese. To write the novel, Yáng and her sister delved into the immense archives concerning the Japanese colonization of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, which enabled them to filter Taiwan Travelogue through Chizuko’s Japanese eyes. It was a kind of pain, says Yáng, to not be able to write in a Taiwanese voice in the novel. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Mighty Gaucho” by Tamara Silva Bernaschina

February 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Tim Benjamin

For Vicente, the mighty Gaucho is all the terrors of this world in a single individual.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant story of youth, manhood, and mental illness by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, translated by Tim Benjamin. Young Vicente lives with his family in a small town, right across the street from the Gaucho—”all the terrors of this world in a single individual”—a gigantic man famed for his physical strength and rumored cruelty to children. Yet even as Vicente’s uncle and mother threaten him with stories about the Gaucho, the only violence Vicente has seen from him is self-directed: he has repeatedly attempted to hang himself from the tree outside his house. When the Carnival comes to Vicente’s town and Vicente finally experiences the violence and recklessness that have made the Gaucho a figure of local legend, he makes a choice that, small as it may seem, will change both their lives forever. Read on!

They’re going to ask me why.
—José Watanabe

I
He liked to wonder if the moments when his dad had to sprint across the street, wrestle down the enormous Gaucho from the tree from which he’d once again hung himself, were moments of life in the world, or of death. There must have been minutes that ticked by in which more people were born than died. And vice versa. Someone, somewhere, must be keeping count. This is what he thinks, he’s got an image in his head of a little bead with the Gaucho’s name on it attached to a wooden abacus, swinging back and forth between dead and alive. He watches the Gaucho through the kitchen window, big, gigantic, now crumpled in the dirt and gasping for breath, like Aunt Ermilda’s epileptic dog. His mother and Uncle Thomas are there too, standing behind him, breathing down his neck as they watch his dad and the Gaucho disappear into the little shack across the street, and then they all sit back down at the kitchen table and wait for him to come back with the details. His father comes through the door in a state, sweat soaking through the front of his shirt, glazing his brow. He wipes away the sweat and they all stare at him as he mumbles an I’m coming or something like that but none of them totally understand what he says, and nobody responds. Finally, he sits back down at the table, takes a knife to the food on his plate.

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Complex Entanglements: A Review of Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo

February 17, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Lian Sing

Arasahas shows us not just how to hold multiple truths at once, but also how to embrace uncertainty. . .

Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo, translated from the Filipino by Christian Jil Benitez, PAWA Press in association with Paloma Press, 2024

My initial encounter with Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas (Savage Mind Books, 2023) was primal. The title, a Bikolano word deliberately left unchanged by Christian Jil Benitez in his debut translation with PAWA Press, depicts a sensory experience; roughly translated from one of nearly two hundred languages in the Philippines, arasahas describes the warm, humid weather central to life in the tropics. My skin tingles when I read the word, and I recall the inescapable, invisible stickiness that life in the Philippines is steeped in. To the English reader, the word arasahas hisses, sizzles—even without its meaning, its sound, by virtue of the repeating a and s, coils and lingers in the ear. It clings.

A sharp poetic decision by both author and translator, the title invites the reader back into their body, and it is from the body that we approach the text. This is vital, because Arasahas is a collection that dances around what is almost, if not absolutely, unnamable but deeply palpable. It is a book of vivid, concrete images—a perfume bottle breaking, a bird’s nest delicacy, the tugging of “something within”—to allude not just to the abstract, but also the spiritual. In these acts of gesturing is the sense that there is something more, be it the supernatural or divine, that seeps into and transforms the everyday. I am reminded of how humidity, the invisible but ever-present water in the air, is fundamental to the proliferation of life. Similarly, Jacobo’s allusions and references perforate the text, and within these chasms are the hints at meaning that Arasahas alchemizes. Boundaries are challenged; left porous. In Arasahas, this simultaneity of meaning is not mere technique, but a sensibility formed by the lived experience of the poet. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Miranda Mazariegos

Dispatches on the latest in literature from Palestine, Sweden, and Colombia!

In this week’s roundup, from Palestine is a report on the recent raid of a Palestinian bookstore in Jerusalem; from Sweden, the nominees for a prestigious literary award; and from Latin America, coverage of the most recent edition of the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias.

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

In a striking escalation of censorship and cultural suppression, the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem—a revered institution for intellectual exchange and a cultural cornerstone for Palestinians—was the target of an Israeli police raid. Exactly three years ago (read the AWS dispatch here), this gem on Salah al-Deen al-Ayoubi street was celebrated for its role in publishing the first-ever Arabic edition of Granta, titled “Escape.” Today, however, the narrative has shifted from escape to arrest.

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Ten Thousand Burdens: Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ on the Hanmun

February 13, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the language is not working in a literal sense; it’s trying to evoke an imaginary landscape, and do so aesthetically.

Translators Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ have forged a remarkable partnership in bringing the timeless beauty of classical Korean poetry to English readers. Their work spans centuries, breathing new life into poetic masterpieces originally composed in hanmun, or ‘literary Sinitic’, the written language of Korea’s past. Together, they have delivered evocative English renditions of Borderland Roads (2009) by Hŏ Kyun and Magnolia and Lotus (2013) by Hyesim—both of which were catalogued in The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (2022). Their more recent projects include Ch’oŭi’s meditative An Homage to Green Tea (2024) and the eagerly anticipated Spring Mountain (forthcoming June 2025) by the poet Nansŏrhŏn, all from White Pine Press, a New York-based publisher.

Through their Korean Voices series, White Pine Press has long been a bridge between Korean literary tradition and global readership, featuring works by writers Park Bum-shin, Ra Heeduk, Park Wan-suh, Shim Bo-seon, Eun Heekyung, and translators Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee, Suh Ji-Moon, Kyoung-Lee Park, and Amber Kim, further cementing its role as a vital conduit for transcultural dialogue.

In this interview, I spoke with both Ian, based in Ramstein, Germany, and T’aeyong, in Pusan, Korea, on translating poetry originally written in hanmun, as well as the historical and contemporary divides between what’s revered as cosmopolitan and what’s relegated as vernacular—in language and broader cultural contexts.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): For readers who can read Korean literature only through translation, could you briefly explain what hanmun is? Why did Korean poets, before the invention of the Korean script (kungmun or chosŏnmun) in the mid-fifteenth century, write in this orthography? Additionally, how distinct are classical and contemporary language, ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ language, and written and spoken language in the modern Korean literary landscape?

Ian Haight (IH): Hanmun is the Korean use of classical Chinese to write literature. Kungmun is an older term for what we now call hangul in South Korea, which is the contemporary written language of South Korea. Chosŏnmun is pretty much the same thing as hangul, but it is for North Korea. There are some regional dialectical differences between chosŏnmun and hangul, and owing to the political ideologies of North and South Korea, there are also some differences in the words and how some words are written.

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Mario dell’Arco’s Colossal Miniatures

February 12, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jason Gordy Walker

. . . dell’Arco has no problem poking fun . . . but as with the best comics, an edge of seriousness lurks under the poetry’s surface gloss.

Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems by Mario dell’Arco, translated from the Romanesco by Marc Alan Di Martino, World Poetry Books, 2024.

In his homeland of Italy, Mario dell’Arco’s stature rivals that of the greatest Romanesco poets: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Cesare Pascarella, Crescenzo Del Monte, Trilussa, Giggi Zanazzo. Despite this, he has long been ignored in the English-speaking world, but that is due to change with World Poetry’s recent release of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems, a healthy folio of work that spans the poet’s twenty-nine collections, starting with 1946’s Red Inside and ending with 1991’s Roma Romae. All translated by Marc Alan Di Martino (a talented poet whose most recent collection is Still Life with City), the poems are by turns lively, melancholic, curious, strange, beautiful, humorous, sardonic, and pithy, rendered in a way that moves the reader to savor them like a fine Genzano wine—or, if you prefer, “the whole green meadow” of a pistachio ice cream.

In 1905, Mario dell’Arco was born as Mario Fagiolo. Around age seven, he began writing poems in his native Roman dialect, and placed his first piece—a sonnet—in Nino Ilari’s L’Amico Cerasa when he was just a teenager. Later, as he became an architect and helped design such structures as the post office in Piazza Bologna and the Zodiac Fountain in Terni, he invented a pseudonym that would reference this vocation: “Archi-tect, arch, dell’Arco.”

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