Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.
I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.
Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”
When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.
Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor
The poems from Enver Ali Akova’s A Park Wished For (tr. Zeynep Özer) knocked me out with their bracing poetic voice from quite a young poet rendered in a lucid musical English (“time lies intertwined with all its twists”). Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s essay “The House of Termites” (tr. Brandon Breen) perfectly stimulated my emotions and my thoughts at the same time; I particularly liked how she cited and weaved together her influences, not to flaunt her erudition but to build, it seemed, a cosmos of intellects (Baldwin, the blues singers, Said, Zambrano, etc.). I was amazed by the range of Samuel’s thinking in “Poets of Mirror Hatred”, delighted to have been directed to a new-to-me poet (Moon Bo Young), and pleased to see we share similar ideas about the role of silence in poetry. I admired both the multiply-authored drama “Macunaima” and Damion Searls’s “Paul Klee Translated into Verse” for making old works new.
—Daniel Yadin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
I was transfixed by Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Agustín Fernández Mallo. My favorite among the fiction pieces is Johanna Sebauer’s “Pickled,” translated by Lillian M. Banks and Aaron Sayne. I love the sassy, zinging language. The translation is alive. “At the Circus” by Jurj Salem, translated by Samuel Bollier, is particularly strong in the translation of dialogue. And the circus communicates in an odd and interesting way with the wasteland in Personal Identification Number by Lidija Dimkovska, translated by Christina Kramer. Miklós Vámos’s “The Last Straw” (tr. Ági Bori) grapples masterfully with the sentence and must have been both a joy and a torment to translate.
—Ellen Elias Bursac, Contributing Editor
Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue” (tr. Edward Gauvin) was my absolute favorite piece from this issue. A meditation on art, color, desire, and obsession that is as absurd as it is funny. The story’s format—a series of journal entries—gives the author’s descent into madness a sense of hilarity as we receive repeating dispatches from Friday, October 49.
Damion Searls’s “translations” of Paul Klee’s pantings into poems are ekphrasis at its best and a perfect take on the New Forms theme.
The ghazal has become a popular form in contemporary English poetry, and I was delighted to read Enver Ali Akova’s Turkish ghazal “No Fish at All” from A Park Wished For (tr. Zeynep Özer). As a whole, Ali’s poems explore a tension between the known and unknown with incredible lyric resonance.
I appreciate that Asymptote showcases deceased writers whose works have been newly translated. Despite being written nearly a century ago, the poems of Rose Ausländer (tr. Carlie Hoffman) could pass as contemporary: they possess a sparse style and eerily timely subject matter. I cannot think of a single poem that better describes the anxiety so many of us here in the United States have at the moment than “without a visa.” If only the “green faith” of spring that Ausländer insisted upon felt as certain today.
—Carissa Coane, Social Media Manager
My favorite piece from the Winter 2025 issue, Robin Munby’s experimental “parasite poem” stretches the limits of language both in form and meaning. I’m still reading it from time to time and coming across new phrases that delight me. I’ll get around “algebra photon orifice” someday but I find that good literature is not always about analysis, but pure joy.
As a pickle lover myself, Johanna Sebauer’s sharp and vinegary “Pickled” (tr. Lillian M. Banks and Aaron Sayne) made my weekend. I couldn’t read it in one go because I was getting into fits of laughter. How something that isn’t exactly a culinary hero becomes the subject of a razor-edged dissection is what I loved most about this story.
I was delighted to read the interview with Agustín Fernández Mallo conducted by Sebastián Sánchez. Mallo’s thinking of merging sciences with arts and humanities was very inspiring. I felt many similarities with his ethos as a former biochemist who is now trying to write and blend sciences with arts.
Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue” (tr. Edward Gauvin) is a lovely diaristic piece evoking images of Chaim Soutine, Pollock, and Emile Zola’s Belly of Paris for me all at once.
When I was a kid during the early 90s, the state-sponsored television channel aired a Hindi series based on King Vikramaditya and vetala (an evil spirit), and watching the late-night show sparked a lifelong fear in me of vetala. Tomoé Hill’s review of Douglas J. Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty shed new light on the ancient text. I had no idea about the origin of these stories. In fact, I used to have a children’s picture book of vetala stories with terrifying illustrations of the corpse hanging of King’s back. I would very much like to read this book now and compare my memories with my interpretation of the current translation.
—Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large (India)
The alternate reading of a wasteland in Lidija Dimkovska’s Personal Identification Number (tr. Christina E. Kramer) as a kind of utopia speaks to our current geopolitical situation, reminding us to reevaluate situations and reconsider the connotations of previously established concepts.
Ancho Kaloyanov’s “Stradivarius” (tr. Marina Stefanova) both reminds us of a forgotten time and is refreshingly current, as the author reminds us of a time of political upheaval and economic agricultural crisis, just as the fault lines of Europe are being rewritten and Russia once again has delusions of empire.
Johanna Sebauer’s “Pickled” (tr. Lillian M. Banks and Aaron Sayne) is a wonderful satire that reminds us of the way in which news is selectively reported and magnified, and how the trivial can become sensational.
Osip Mandelstam’s dissident poetry (tr. John High and Matvei Yankelevich) has in some ways never been more relevant, as his references to how, ‘in obdurate, unyielding Kremlin words / Defense is armed with ardent aegis” could be seen as a prescient foreshadowing of our current times.
Giorgio Fontana’s reevaluation of Kafka (tr. Howard Curtis) is contemporary in that it emphasises the impossibility of fully explaining Kafka. Kafka remains elusive yet ever-present in his analysis, as his manifold interpretations can only ever be half the story.
—Anna Rumsby, Educational Arm Assistant
I absolutely loved Martin Piñol’s “In Each, Every Direction” and chose to write a lesson plan based on it for this quarter’s educator’s guide, slated for release this Thursday. Piñol reflects on and enacts the dilemma of a writer faced with the intention of a specific project alongside the tendency of words to challenge and subvert these very intentions, to drift in their execution toward what we can’t help but write about. I’m especially drawn to Piñol’s exploration of translation, both in a literary sense as well as in terms of the interpretations we make in our lives and relationships. Piñol maps the images from Qi Kun’s poem onto life and experience, richly illustrating and expanding the material and emotional landscape of the piece.
The juxtaposition of surreal natural imagery and the imagined ressurection with clear, urgent requests and declarations in Miguel Hernández’s poems from The Unending Lightning (tr. Pedro Poitevin) lays bare the intensity and reality of the speaker’s grief. The writer’s skillful and surprising use of repetition is evident in both ‘Elegy’ and ‘Mud,’ but what I most admire about these pieces is how the surreal imagery is balanced by and grounded in the materiality of the landscapes described by the poet.
Natsume Sōseki’s five poems (tr. Ryan Choi) conjure evocative images in their focus and brevity, the first few landing on volta-like turns that reveal an emotional subtext to depictions of the landscape. What I find especially compelling is the ordering of these short poems. A reader is first situated in poems that face the external world, and then taken through a slow, inward turn with each poem. By the end, emotion and self-reflection (although with a bitter and ironic tone) are at the forefront, and natural imagery/the landscape becomes almost an afterthought. I also appreciated the translator’s note contextualising Sōseki’s writing and the literary tradition of kanshi.
I enjoyed how Ubah Cristian Ali Farah’s “The House of Termites” (tr. Brandon Breen) invoked various musical and literary traditions, as well as the works of writers and thinkers I admire deeply. In doing so, Farah enacts Fatema Mernissi’s instruction to engage in dialogue as a way to exercise power and to write against brutality. In tracing anecdotes from her life alongside intertextual reflection, Farah connects the imagination around exile to her own lived experience, and moreover, to the narratives she’s gathered in her broader work of writing for stateless people.
The two short but striking pieces from Alfonsina Storni’s We…and Our Flesh (tr. Anna Evelyn White and Alina Lazar) effectively satirizes the conventions and expectations of gentile society. The tone of these pieces at once channels hyperbole to emphasize the perceived stakes of transgressing these conventions, and the indifference and dismissal of someone who can discern how arbitrary these conventions are in the first place. I found “The Irreproachable Woman” especially amusing, with its list of “approximate movements” permissible to maintain such a status.
—Devi Sastry, Educational Arm Assistant
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