In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.
Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.
In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.
With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.”
Translation is much the same. By nature, there is a barrier between what the translator has had impressed upon them and their ability to impress that upon others: not merely language, but experience, passion, and skill. How do you replicate what it feels to read a text? In the same vein, how do you tell a story, how do you share something of yourself when there is no way for anyone else to understand—and should you?
It is this question that Samuel reckons with in his essay, “Kafka, Yi Sang, Moon Bo Young: Poets of Mirror Hatred.” In his description, poetry that hates the mirror describes the poet who has felt an “expanse between themselves and society,” where “it would be death for the poet to explain exactly what is hurting her . . . it would be the death of language. It would show, again, that language cannot communicate—language, the last thing that she had faith in.” The poet and the translator face parallel struggles: that of language, and that of convincing others to understand something that cannot be put into perfect words. Samuel’s essay is an exploration of pain, and where we funnel it; how it finds its way into writing, and into the hearts of others.
This all comes together in the sense of form, apt for this issue dedicated to “New Forms.” In Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Augustín Fernández Mallo, art and literature is brought into conversation with the sciences, which, to Fernández Mallo are all themselves humanities, inventions of humanity:
. . . the sciences and the arts are the only human endeavors that are sufficiently self-critical, the only ones that start with the premise that tomorrow they can change . . .
When Breon Mitchell ponders what it is that calls for a new translation every generation, Fernández Mallo responds: “the works of these creators continue to tell us new things because their works are reinterpreted by each generation.” It is then the onus of the translator to represent the moment in time, perhaps possessed by some genius or fumbling in the inefficacy of it all—but it is the endeavor to express what cannot be said that creates something new.
In discussing good writing, Fernández Mallo declares that “to write well is to write complex things . . . that nonetheless make the reader believe that he is smarter than you.” In turn, perhaps to translate well is to convince the reader that they have read the original themself.
Perhaps. But in Asymptote’s fourteenth anniversary issue, each story, poem, and essay is a new venture: a new form of greatness, of expression, and of understanding. For the reader, there is the choice to assume predestined knowledge, to expect things to be as they have always been—or, to stand next to a writer in the mirror, and see what bounces back.
—Bella Creel
Damion Searls’s translations of Paul Klee paintings into poetry do not describe but inhabit. Searls fits forms and content to the paintings that inspired the poems—“Rainy Day” the most mystical, “The Emissary of Autumn” a blend of organic form and industrial waste, “ÄRA. ‘COOLING IN A GARDEN OF THE TORRID ZONE’” concerned with the forms of language and its violence. They read not so much as definitive statements of the painting’s meaning but rather as an incantatory interpretation. Virginia Woolf, after all, wrote often of the silence of paintings—Searls doesn’t speak for them, but for himself, each poem all his own. For instance, his Regentag, 1931 is, as “Rainy Day,” about a trip to New York for a funeral. The poems are rich with the profound observations that are, when we’re lucky, the product of spending a long while looking at paintings like Klee’s. “my favorite word is acacia, everything has a double in the astral world / where everything is just the way it is here only a little different,” he writes in “The Emissary of Autumn,” and “truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling,” he writes in “Rainy Day.” The poems are also marvelous works of critical insight, as every translation must be.
Meanwhile, Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” translated by Edward Gauvin, is an investigation into the nature of color, as sharp and carefully observed as any color field painting. Gribinski’s narrator seeks color everywhere, from paint tubes to the contents of her refrigerator, philosophizes about it, systematizes it. It is slightly surreal, by turns funny and profound. She watches red meat slowly rot into blue shot through with green, with gray. “I dreamed,” the narrator writes, “that meat was the color of time.” And, well, isn’t it?
In the process of pinning down color, she smashes her finger with a hammer and, watching her finger turn blue, observes, “There is no such thing as color without matter.” It reads—and, really, the piece as a whole reads—like a statement about painting.
—Meghan Racklin
The perennial intrigue of the First Lady has never strayed far from the public consciousness, but one’s curiosity is never more peaked when the madame is at the side of a brute. From Imelda Marcos to Lucía Hiriart to Melania Trump, the internal lives of these powerful yet subordinate women are the subject of endless conjecture, influenced variously by the understanding that there exists some specifically feminine variation of benevolence, vanity, greed, cruelty, egoism, or deference. It is this gendered bias that has shielded them somewhat from being implicated in the more purposeful and driven crimes of their husband-leaders: a reduction of guilt and thus responsibility. In the excerpt from Sedef Ecer’s hilarious and sardonic drama, First Lady, a politically disturbed nation in ancient Mesopotamia is in the full throes of a revolution. Translated with an admirable ear for comedy by Amelia Parenteau, the scene takes place as incensed citizens are storming their way to the castle, where the ruler is nowhere to be seen; there remains only the titular matriarch and a few of her staff, left to face the rage of the public and their bloodlust. As she struggles to comprehend the situation, the elegant façade of the First Lady quickly splinters to reveal a hysteria of desperation and ignorance. Trying to determine how she can save her life—which she cannot envision without Prada and the “Falcon 900” jet—she rallies with her stylist and various ministers in a furious volley of clueless demands, downing Valium and refusing to pack light: “But I’m an icon! They said I was the ‘rose of the desert!’ I represent . . . I represent . . . They wrote it a thousand times . . . I represent ‘the glamorous Eastern woman!’”
Though human history is positively fraught with the demonizations of women, the First Lady has often served as a softer counterpart to a reprehensible partner—perhaps because they are proof that even monsters can love, but in this leniency, one also suspects the false presumption that women simply don’t have the stomach to condone campaigns of atrocity. Despite evidence of their political ambition, criticisms against the tyrant’s wife often focus more on their frailty or their pursuit of glamor; Imelda is derided largely for her beauty-pageant origins and immense shoe collection, while Melania has been characterized as everything from perpetually drugged to a literal robot. But even if she was just in it for the jewels, even if she had no direct input in the atrocities, would that excuse her from the fury of a ruined country? In ruthless depiction, Ecer draws attention to how decadence in the presidential palace is as ugly as it is destructive, indicating that egoism and wilful blindness create the conditions for idiocy—which, when combined with power, is tantamount to abuse. As our increasing incapable political and neoliberalist systems continue to reward strongarming and exhibitions of force, as they continue to grow the distance between those who possess power and those at the behest of it, parody and laughter remain as some of our most capable tools to destroy, as Mikhail Bakhtin put it, “any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance.” In placing a subject within the scope of comedy, we measure its actuality, instead of its appearance, thereby eliminating the hegemonic mandate that demands our fear, our obeyance, and our futility. When there’s less than five minutes on the clock for her escape, Ecer’s First Lady is in a wreck over her zoo animals: “My baby tigers! My lion cubs!” It would be absurd if the world hadn’t already witnessed something similar; when the Marcos fled the Philippines for Hawaii, US custom agents sorted through twenty-four suitcases of gold bricks and diamonds.
Beyond the ruler’s gates, there are people dreaming of a better world. Lidija Dimkovska’s Personal Identification Number, excerpted in a vivid translation by Christina E. Kramer, sees an academic named Katerina surmising the existence of a “wasteland,” a place exacted as the opposite of holistic, communal living: “The wasteland is a society in which it is possible to live for oneself, as independent from others as possible, more alone, more antisocial, more taciturn. Or louder, but still alone with themselves. An intentional society of alienated individuals!” Writing in the slowly simmering tension of the Cypriot Question and the Macedonian Question—ongoing debates of territory and national identification—Dimkovska’s work emphasizes the innate contradictions of coexistence, examining how the individual ego can relate and feel connected to their surroundings and their fellow peoples. The question of true solidarity emerges when considering the fundamental qualities of selfhood: is it language, culture, religion, or any other external factor that unites us—or is it the urge to have a truly independent internal life? As much as the wasteland represents an undesirable, alienated, and solitary existence, it also draws attention to the exhaustion of belonging amidst international dispute and violent conflicts of landhood.
Things quickly escalate when Katerina communicates her idea to a friend, Helen. Though at first Helen is dubious of her claims, she soon gets on board with the revolutionary potential of a wilful “dystopia,” and quickly manifests the concept as a start-up. In past attempts at utopian society, ideas led into horrendous and grotesque aftermaths when applied, as there is nothing more indomitable than the human desire to pursue possibilities to their ends—which includes potentialities for corruption, cruelty, and control. As the wasteland begins to emerge as an actual entity (sponsored by funds from London and enacted in Katerina’s parents’ hometown), the actual consequences of its actualization begin to emerge. In the twenty-first century, we’ve now been privy to a great many human experiments, many of which began as hopes of progression, improvement, and enlightenment. Dimkovska’s work here slyly offers the opposite: the dream of isolation, retreat, and withdrawal. Reflecting on the increased diminishing of individuality amidst larger socio-cultural disputes, Personal Identification Number searches for a position that does not offer oneself as bargaining chip or statistic. “A man needs to find a wasteland!” It is a hopeless, miserable vision of separateness—but it is also a plea for some peace.
—Xiao Yue Shan
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025
Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.
In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.
Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.
In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.
With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.”
Translation is much the same. By nature, there is a barrier between what the translator has had impressed upon them and their ability to impress that upon others: not merely language, but experience, passion, and skill. How do you replicate what it feels to read a text? In the same vein, how do you tell a story, how do you share something of yourself when there is no way for anyone else to understand—and should you?
It is this question that Samuel reckons with in his essay, “Kafka, Yi Sang, Moon Bo Young: Poets of Mirror Hatred.” In his description, poetry that hates the mirror describes the poet who has felt an “expanse between themselves and society,” where “it would be death for the poet to explain exactly what is hurting her . . . it would be the death of language. It would show, again, that language cannot communicate—language, the last thing that she had faith in.” The poet and the translator face parallel struggles: that of language, and that of convincing others to understand something that cannot be put into perfect words. Samuel’s essay is an exploration of pain, and where we funnel it; how it finds its way into writing, and into the hearts of others.
This all comes together in the sense of form, apt for this issue dedicated to “New Forms.” In Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Augustín Fernández Mallo, art and literature is brought into conversation with the sciences, which, to Fernández Mallo are all themselves humanities, inventions of humanity:
When Breon Mitchell ponders what it is that calls for a new translation every generation, Fernández Mallo responds: “the works of these creators continue to tell us new things because their works are reinterpreted by each generation.” It is then the onus of the translator to represent the moment in time, perhaps possessed by some genius or fumbling in the inefficacy of it all—but it is the endeavor to express what cannot be said that creates something new.
In discussing good writing, Fernández Mallo declares that “to write well is to write complex things . . . that nonetheless make the reader believe that he is smarter than you.” In turn, perhaps to translate well is to convince the reader that they have read the original themself.
Perhaps. But in Asymptote’s fourteenth anniversary issue, each story, poem, and essay is a new venture: a new form of greatness, of expression, and of understanding. For the reader, there is the choice to assume predestined knowledge, to expect things to be as they have always been—or, to stand next to a writer in the mirror, and see what bounces back.
—Bella Creel
Damion Searls’s translations of Paul Klee paintings into poetry do not describe but inhabit. Searls fits forms and content to the paintings that inspired the poems—“Rainy Day” the most mystical, “The Emissary of Autumn” a blend of organic form and industrial waste, “ÄRA. ‘COOLING IN A GARDEN OF THE TORRID ZONE’” concerned with the forms of language and its violence. They read not so much as definitive statements of the painting’s meaning but rather as an incantatory interpretation. Virginia Woolf, after all, wrote often of the silence of paintings—Searls doesn’t speak for them, but for himself, each poem all his own. For instance, his Regentag, 1931 is, as “Rainy Day,” about a trip to New York for a funeral. The poems are rich with the profound observations that are, when we’re lucky, the product of spending a long while looking at paintings like Klee’s. “my favorite word is acacia, everything has a double in the astral world / where everything is just the way it is here only a little different,” he writes in “The Emissary of Autumn,” and “truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling,” he writes in “Rainy Day.” The poems are also marvelous works of critical insight, as every translation must be.
Meanwhile, Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” translated by Edward Gauvin, is an investigation into the nature of color, as sharp and carefully observed as any color field painting. Gribinski’s narrator seeks color everywhere, from paint tubes to the contents of her refrigerator, philosophizes about it, systematizes it. It is slightly surreal, by turns funny and profound. She watches red meat slowly rot into blue shot through with green, with gray. “I dreamed,” the narrator writes, “that meat was the color of time.” And, well, isn’t it?
In the process of pinning down color, she smashes her finger with a hammer and, watching her finger turn blue, observes, “There is no such thing as color without matter.” It reads—and, really, the piece as a whole reads—like a statement about painting.
—Meghan Racklin
The perennial intrigue of the First Lady has never strayed far from the public consciousness, but one’s curiosity is never more peaked when the madame is at the side of a brute. From Imelda Marcos to Lucía Hiriart to Melania Trump, the internal lives of these powerful yet subordinate women are the subject of endless conjecture, influenced variously by the understanding that there exists some specifically feminine variation of benevolence, vanity, greed, cruelty, egoism, or deference. It is this gendered bias that has shielded them somewhat from being implicated in the more purposeful and driven crimes of their husband-leaders: a reduction of guilt and thus responsibility. In the excerpt from Sedef Ecer’s hilarious and sardonic drama, First Lady, a politically disturbed nation in ancient Mesopotamia is in the full throes of a revolution. Translated with an admirable ear for comedy by Amelia Parenteau, the scene takes place as incensed citizens are storming their way to the castle, where the ruler is nowhere to be seen; there remains only the titular matriarch and a few of her staff, left to face the rage of the public and their bloodlust. As she struggles to comprehend the situation, the elegant façade of the First Lady quickly splinters to reveal a hysteria of desperation and ignorance. Trying to determine how she can save her life—which she cannot envision without Prada and the “Falcon 900” jet—she rallies with her stylist and various ministers in a furious volley of clueless demands, downing Valium and refusing to pack light: “But I’m an icon! They said I was the ‘rose of the desert!’ I represent . . . I represent . . . They wrote it a thousand times . . . I represent ‘the glamorous Eastern woman!’”
Though human history is positively fraught with the demonizations of women, the First Lady has often served as a softer counterpart to a reprehensible partner—perhaps because they are proof that even monsters can love, but in this leniency, one also suspects the false presumption that women simply don’t have the stomach to condone campaigns of atrocity. Despite evidence of their political ambition, criticisms against the tyrant’s wife often focus more on their frailty or their pursuit of glamor; Imelda is derided largely for her beauty-pageant origins and immense shoe collection, while Melania has been characterized as everything from perpetually drugged to a literal robot. But even if she was just in it for the jewels, even if she had no direct input in the atrocities, would that excuse her from the fury of a ruined country? In ruthless depiction, Ecer draws attention to how decadence in the presidential palace is as ugly as it is destructive, indicating that egoism and wilful blindness create the conditions for idiocy—which, when combined with power, is tantamount to abuse. As our increasing incapable political and neoliberalist systems continue to reward strongarming and exhibitions of force, as they continue to grow the distance between those who possess power and those at the behest of it, parody and laughter remain as some of our most capable tools to destroy, as Mikhail Bakhtin put it, “any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance.” In placing a subject within the scope of comedy, we measure its actuality, instead of its appearance, thereby eliminating the hegemonic mandate that demands our fear, our obeyance, and our futility. When there’s less than five minutes on the clock for her escape, Ecer’s First Lady is in a wreck over her zoo animals: “My baby tigers! My lion cubs!” It would be absurd if the world hadn’t already witnessed something similar; when the Marcos fled the Philippines for Hawaii, US custom agents sorted through twenty-four suitcases of gold bricks and diamonds.
Beyond the ruler’s gates, there are people dreaming of a better world. Lidija Dimkovska’s Personal Identification Number, excerpted in a vivid translation by Christina E. Kramer, sees an academic named Katerina surmising the existence of a “wasteland,” a place exacted as the opposite of holistic, communal living: “The wasteland is a society in which it is possible to live for oneself, as independent from others as possible, more alone, more antisocial, more taciturn. Or louder, but still alone with themselves. An intentional society of alienated individuals!” Writing in the slowly simmering tension of the Cypriot Question and the Macedonian Question—ongoing debates of territory and national identification—Dimkovska’s work emphasizes the innate contradictions of coexistence, examining how the individual ego can relate and feel connected to their surroundings and their fellow peoples. The question of true solidarity emerges when considering the fundamental qualities of selfhood: is it language, culture, religion, or any other external factor that unites us—or is it the urge to have a truly independent internal life? As much as the wasteland represents an undesirable, alienated, and solitary existence, it also draws attention to the exhaustion of belonging amidst international dispute and violent conflicts of landhood.
Things quickly escalate when Katerina communicates her idea to a friend, Helen. Though at first Helen is dubious of her claims, she soon gets on board with the revolutionary potential of a wilful “dystopia,” and quickly manifests the concept as a start-up. In past attempts at utopian society, ideas led into horrendous and grotesque aftermaths when applied, as there is nothing more indomitable than the human desire to pursue possibilities to their ends—which includes potentialities for corruption, cruelty, and control. As the wasteland begins to emerge as an actual entity (sponsored by funds from London and enacted in Katerina’s parents’ hometown), the actual consequences of its actualization begin to emerge. In the twenty-first century, we’ve now been privy to a great many human experiments, many of which began as hopes of progression, improvement, and enlightenment. Dimkovska’s work here slyly offers the opposite: the dream of isolation, retreat, and withdrawal. Reflecting on the increased diminishing of individuality amidst larger socio-cultural disputes, Personal Identification Number searches for a position that does not offer oneself as bargaining chip or statistic. “A man needs to find a wasteland!” It is a hopeless, miserable vision of separateness—but it is also a plea for some peace.
—Xiao Yue Shan
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Contributors:- Bella Creel
, - Meghan Racklin
, - Xiao Yue Shan
; Languages: - French
, - German
, - Italian
, - Macedonian
, - Spanish
; Places: - Chile
, - France
, - Italy
, - Macedonia
, - Switzerland
, - Taiwan
, - Turkey
; Writers: - Agustín Fernández Mallo
, - Damion Searls
, - Elsa Gribinski
, - Giorgio Fontana
, - Lidija Dimkovska
, - Sedef Ecer
; Tags: - dystopian thinking
, - identity
, - interpretation
, - nationality
, - painting
, - political commentary
, - revolution
, - the Cypriot Question
, - the Macedonian Question
, - translation
, - visual art
, - Winter 2025 issue
, - world literature