It’s here! The first issue of Asymptote’s second decade, featuring Hoda Barakat, Can Xue, Bruno Latour, and Lêdo Ivo, alongside new work from 35 countries, confirming “we all live in a beautifully round world.” More than any other issue in recent memory, “Age of Division,” our Summer 2021 edition, also speaks to the current divisiveness of our times.
In Ethiopian writer Mulugeta Alebachew’s short story, childhood memories are betrayed when the narrator returns home after a long time away only to find his friends “intently drawing family trees and working out ethnic background of people as if they worked for the cartography agency, and it was their task to draw boundaries.” Meanwhile, at a “time of infinite sadness,” diasporic Palestinian poet Olivia Elias speaks to us of “a life in the eye of the hurricane” and of “a country / engulfed in a fault of history.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see a country’s divides. This is the case in Lusine Kharatyan’s fiction comprising tweet-sized vignettes delivered in a brilliant deadpan, such as this zinger of an opening: “After 9/11 my American family decided to learn about other cultures. This is how I appeared in their home. I tell them about Armenia, they tell me about the Chinese guy they hosted before me.” It is also the case in Hwang Sok-yong’s memoir, in which he tells us of his return to North Korea “some forty-odd years after pretending to leave on a picnic”—but only after recounting at length his visit to a divided Berlin in 1985. In Aitor Romero Ortega’s “Bridges of Bosnia,” the post-war divisions of what used to be Yugoslavia provide a backdrop to the disconnect between a visiting Spanish couple.
We’re also very thrilled to host a very important conversation about diversity under the aegis of our “Brave New World Literature“ Feature, contributed by Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef and drawing on the experiences of many translators of color within the literary translation community. If you like what we do, please consider signing up as a sustaining member so that we can continue to bring you many more issues like this. Happy reading!