It’s time for Asymptote’s monthly community news roundup, featuring our fantastic editors’ latest accomplishments. Learn what Croatian novel to read this weekend, what to do Friday night in Philadelphia, where to catch a play set in neo-Elizabethan Appalachia, and who is Asymptote’s Guest Artist for the April issue…
Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor, met extraordinary success with her translation from the Croatian of Daša Drndić’s Trieste. The novel deals “unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste” (Amazon) and the Nazi occupation in northern Italy. The New York Times writes, “Even at their most lurid, Drndić’s sentences remain coldly dignified. And so does Ellen Elias-Bursac’s imperturbably elegant translation: There isn’t a sentence that you would guess had been born in another language.”—Wow!
Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Editor, was chosen to be one of the four 2014 UNESCO Laureate Artists in Creative Writing. As part of the bursary, he will be spending several months this year on a writing residency at the Dar Al Ma’Mûn in Morocco, finishing Redacted Mind: A Novel.
Caridad Svich, Drama Editor, saw her play, The House of the Spirits, open February 5 in Costa Rica; the play will soon be performed in St. Louis, Missouri, and Columbis, Ohio. Her play, Twelve Ophelias, an interpretation of Shakespeare set in neo-Elizabethan Appalachia, is coming to the Illinois Wesleyan University Theater in Bloomington, Illinois. If you’re in these cities, go see the plays (and surreptitiously record them for the rest of us)!
For those of you in London: check out Visual Editor Simon Morley’s third exhibition at Art First. If stranded on a desert island, but with a Wi-Fi connection: see the exhibition catalog here. In his work, “[Morley] tackles the conundrum of Utopia […] As writer and artist Morley constantly explores and examines society and its mores. The book paintings and text works (collages, sculptures, etc.), for which he is best known, constitute meditative reflections on the signifiers on which we rely” (Art First).
Interviews Editor Matthew Jakubowski will have a collaborative art installation on display at the Impossible Books exhibit February 7-28 at the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym. The exhibit pairs writers with sculptors to explore concepts around the idea of an impossible book. Matthew was also featured in a recent Guardian article about the #readwomen2014 movement (for more of his thoughts on the movement, see his blog post).
Alex Cigale, Editor-at-Large for Central Asia, had his English-language poetry published in Anthem and About Place. His translations of Russian Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi’s poems appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, for which Cigale also recently amassed an extensive month-long tribute devoted to Aygi (see the Beloit Poetry Journal blog for all thirty days’ worth of information). Over the course of the tribute, Cigale conducted an interview with Aygi’s primary translator, Peter France, reprinted at New Directions.
We are thrilled to announce that Hidetoshi Yamada was selected as Guest Artist for Asymptote’s April 2014 issue. Yamada lives and works in Tokyo, and his work was affected by the earthquake and Fukushima nuclear crisis. He writes that since the crises, the direction of his art has been increasingly influenced by journalism, politics, and documentary approaches. His artwork is above and his personal website can be found here.