Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.
This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.
I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.
—Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.
—Matthew Redman, Digital Editor
Colin Leemarshall’s introduction to Lee Sumyeong’s “Just Like” is such a treat. I’m endlessly fascinated by the genre of the translator’s note/preface‚ something Asymptote tries to encode alongside the pieces we publish‚ and here we witness the density, the essayistic capaciousness, the theoretical sophistication of a translator’s mind given space to unravel, run its course. Leemarshall’s piece traverses and reopens, anew, the chasm between the like and the unlike, the ‘homeopoetic’ and the ‘allopoetic’, forging a vision of a poetics that might “flicker between uniqueness and equivalence, between form and nebulosity, between immanence and its evacuation”.
The interview with Diamela Eltit by Sebastián Sánchez (tr. Fionn Petch) overturns, with great deftness, the usual teleologies of composition and creation; instead it poses the question of what it might mean to search “for a literature that demanded writing”. From this impulse stems a resolute, principled commitment to politics, to the marginalised, to a literature that tentatively grasps for a public. Eltit teaches us that urgency need not exclude (or, in her words, “compromise with”) an exploratory posture of curiosity.
I think of the excerpt from Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Elisa Folly (tr. Wendeline A. Hardenberg) somehow in conjunction with the selections from Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç’s “prinzenbad” (tr.Özgecan Kesici) . Having just read Johannes Anyuru’s They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears‚ a devastating time-travel narrative deeply concerned with the precarity of Islam’s futures in Europe‚ I saw these two pieces in Asymptote‘s issue as connected, twinned, but dislocated from one another, as if over an aporia. The disoriented stream of sensation emanating from Aubry’s character captures the shock of spectating a terrorist attack through the medium of recorded video. Where she imagines the ecstasies and limits of rock music in a darkened concert hall thronging with bodies, Keskinkılıç sets the scene in a swimming pool patronised by precisely those people pre-emptively marked as violent and terrorising. Yet another public space, but subject to different forms of racialisation and exposure, and open to other kinds of reinvention. What measures time is prayer, sounding to the cadences of queer kinship, a language inhabited by playful neologisms and words from Turkish. Not trauma, or fear, here, but tenderness: “at the margins the tongue clicks louder”.
Like Keskinkılıç’s German, so Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s Italian in “Three Short Pieces”: in exile, between countries, scarred by war; grappling with the plight and joy of translation, carving “a frontier that contains something very precious: a secret, a detail, a root.” In these brief sketches, we follow Ali Farah slowly reassembling that most elemental of capacities: to listen, to tell stories.
—Alex Tan, Assistant Managing Editor
Not only is Khrystia Vengryniuk’s “Flood” (tr. Dmytro Kyyan and Kate Tsurkan) a page-turning gem in and of itself, but the contrast to the generally oppressive atmosphere in the other pieces in the Fiction section makes it shine even brighter.
I found Steven Monte’s translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso innovative and, actually, groundbreaking. Both scrupulously formal and courageous at the same time, it was also subtle and endlessly funny.
“Rewilding: Katie Holten and The Language of Trees” by Peter Streckfus was by far the best thing I have read and watched in a long while in terms of cross-artform ecopoetics.
In Rannvá Holm Mortensen’s Spring Milk (tr. Matthew Landrum and Rakul í Gerðinum), we encounter a visual artist’s compelling, obsessive verse that manages in apparently simple ways to be relevant on so many surprising levels.
—MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova
Michela Murgia’s short story ”Animated Cardboard” (tr. Taylor Yoonji Kang) was a poignant depiction of female loneliness, and I really liked its sympathetic portrayal of a fandom that is often depicted as “teenage girls screaming” and hence not seriously considered for what it does with regard to stereotypes surrounding gender and race; Murgia’s visibilisation of these dynamics and sensitive attention to them was genuinely refreshing.
I expected that linguistic and regional loyalty would lead to me picking Leeladhar Jagoori’s poetry (tr. Matt Reeck) as one of my top five, but I also loved his strong ecopoetic voice and themes of subtle resistance and anti-establishment politics. I find myself drawn to Hindi and vernacular literature from the 1970s and the Emergency as a way of understanding the democratic backsliding of modern-day India.
Katie Holten’s work, though it shares similar sensibilities, is far more praxis-oriented than ecopoetics alone, and I also loved the attention that the interview paid to the materiality and concreteness of the book—almost disconcerting when read on a screen in a digital-only publication like Asymptote.
Josep M. Miró Coromina’s drama (tr. Sharon G. Feldman) was the first piece I copy edited for the issue, and I was particularly struck by the form of the piece, and how much of a story could be told by simply remaining in a character’s head. At times, it almost reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
Finally, I’m always interested in learning about literary resistances, which is why I found the interview with Diamela Eltit especially fascinating.
—Matilde Ribeiro, Copy Editor
Last year I read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (in Brian Murdoch’s 1993 translation) for the first time. I think it’s a masterpiece, not just as a piece of writing but for the way the futility and horror of war come through Remarque’s focus on the ordinary concerns of his characters, which are fundamentally unchanged by being in such dramatic circumstances. Alfred Döblin’s “The Slaughter! Oh, the Slaughter!” (tr. Joachim Redner) reads as a precursor to Remarque’s novel. In its revenge theme, Döblin’s short story also connects to David Diop’s powerful but horrifying novel At Night All Blood is Black.
It’s interesting to read that Elena Ferrante admires Michela Murgia, because the character in Murgia’s short story is reminiscent of Ferrante characters: a woman unsatisfied by her given life who, rather than complaining or raging against her circumstances, expresses her defiance by building an internal escape in her quirky passion for a K-pop idol.
Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s Hill Station (tr. Matt Reeck) appealed to me partly because, having spent several weeks in India in recent years on two trips and failed (through bad organisation) to spend some time in a hill station myself, I was curious to read about hill stations. I was also drawn to Yousufi’s gentle, hyperbolic, and slightly old-fashioned humour, which revels in human foibles and weaknesses.
—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor
After reading the tender, humorous, and devastating novel Grey Bees, I was excited to read Sarah Gear’s in-depth interview with Andrey Kurkov. He discusses his own work and recommends other writers from or writing about Ukraine, reminding us: “We should not forget that this war is over 300 years old and to understand it better we need to read more.”
The whole Faroese feature is fascinating, and I especially enjoyed Guðrið Poulsen’s poetry (tr. Randi Ward) and photography, which were paired so beautifully, creating an intimate perspective on the shapes of the landscape. Other standout works from this feature include Beinir Bergsson’s erotic and vivid poems from The Night Garden (tr. Marita Thomsen).
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s essays (tr. Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen)—especially “To Leave in the Afternoon,” which focuses on the connections between language, translation, migration, memory, and the trauma of war—made me want to read more of this Somali Italian writer’s work.
Finally, I was struck by the elegance of the images and leaps in Chen Yuhong’s two poems in George O’Connell and Diana Shi’s translation, in which, fitting for the issue’s theme of “midnight garden,” “Stars proofread in braille.”
—Heather Green, Poetry Editor
The texture and language of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Elisa Folly (tr. Wendeline A. Hardenberg) themselves seem to textually describe the ‘massive K-hole,’ writing the void. Perhaps it’s Aubry’s use of punctuation and enjambment, dipping into prose poetry, or the relentless rhythm of Hardenberg’s translation. Both Aubry and Hardenberg deftly write into a poetics of terror here, reminiscent in both musical substance and Orwellian mood of Jen Calleja’s brilliant experimental novel, Vehicle (2023). Though the excerpt is specifically set against the 2015 terrorist shooting in Paris, France, Aubry bleakly and musically invokes this ‘poetics’ in a universal, riotously sensual experience of life versus death.
marwin vos’s wild death (tr. Frances Welling and Nguyễn Thị Mai) is equally riotous, a wilding of words, a naturalisation of rhythm. I love the boomerang effect of this that Nguyễn and Welling lean into in their translation, tossing the reader from the arch of pre-dawn into the droplet of “water vapour”; and from that particularity into ‘rocket exhaust’; and back into the heights of the “atmosphere.” The sheer play and scale of vos’s work is exhilerating.
Celine Nguyen’s review of Victor Heringer’s The Love of Singular Men, just as she says of Heringer’s novel, “holds the reader in a state of terror and anticipation.” It’s a remarkable feat to create tension and terror in unravelling the secret structures of The Love of Singular Men, linking the novel’s form to an intricate knowledge of the Brazilian literary scene and Heringer’s place and legacy within it, as well as to a brilliant framework of literary mimesis.
What stands out about Paolo Nori’s We Will Take Our Revenge tr. Tim Cummins is its structure, self-anticipating and self-echoing. Paragraphs are headed by a brief line or a few words of text from the paragraph itself, creating a striking call-and-answer effect that pulls the reader’s attention forwards. The consequent sense of foreboding reflects not only the murderous historical event that Nori recounts, but is echoed in a cyclical, interweaving narrative that braids itself downwards through the filament of words.
From the Special Feature on Faroese Literature, Beinir Bergsson’s poems from The Night Garden ( tr. Marita Thomsen) are little gems or vibrations in their own rights, small, purely faceted, trembling. The poetry is physical, transforming the poet’s and their lover’s bodies into earthworms or plants, stained like asphalt by “chewed gum”; their imagistic power is stunning.
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)
*****
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