This New Year, pledge to read diversely by joining the only Book Club that partners with indie publishers on both sides of the Atlantic! To help you take the plunge, we’re taking 10% off all Book Club subscriptions from now till 2359hrs, January 5th. A steeper discount is available for group subscriptions—inquire via bookclub@asymptotejournal.com.
Posts by Lee Yew Leong
Are you game for our New Year reading challenge?
Discover the latest and greatest of world literature, curated by our award-winning team!
Dear reader,
Time flies. It’s almost the year-end. How was 2022 for you?
Amid new work from a staggering 75 countries across four quarterly issues, we were very proud to have shone a spotlight on Ukrainian voices this year, voices like Zenia Tompkins, Andrii Krasnyashchikh, Yaryna Chornohuz, Galina Itskovich and Sergey Katran (outraged by what we saw on the news, we also announced a #
But this year was also marked by great uncertainty. For one, inflation everywhere meant that some team members were no longer able to continue in their roles—this meant that many of us took on extra work to maintain our quality and output; we didn’t want to let our readers down.
We also had to brace ourselves for cancellations in Book Club membership when we announced our first increase in subscription fee after five years, no longer able to absorb the increases in costs (of postage, and of the titles) ourselves. And, on a more personal front—as contributors to the postponed Summer edition knew—I came down with COVID this July, with symptoms that have lingered till now. Though my health is in a better place today than, say, one month ago, nothing is assured about our future: We still don’t qualify for the generous funding that many like organizations from the US or the UK receive.
So, on #GivingTuesday, I have to ask on behalf of my entire team: If our work this past year has meant anything to you, will you take just three minutes and pledge five dollars a month to our mission?
Because we can do even more for world literature with your help. Even better, sign up as a patron or masthead member. To show our gratitude, I’ll even personally put together a care package for you.
Around the corner, our big 5-0 (in issues, not years!) looms. Help us stick around until then. Our 50th edition will be all the more magnificent for it.
Gratefully,
Lee Yew Leong, editor-in-chief
Announcing Our Black Friday Sale!
Calling all world lit lovers, here’s the #BlackFriday sale you’ve been waiting for!
For three days only, we’re taking 10% off Book Club subscriptions (including the one-year membership). Click here for our special coupon applied pricing and remember: A book club subscription also makes the perfect gift for the reader in your life. Offer expires after 2359 hrs, this Sunday, so hurry!
What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2022)
In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff have been busy with publications this past quarter!
Philippine Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s lyric collage is included in Our Stories To Tell (Texas: Folkways Press, 2022), an anthology of essays on mental health, out now.
Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, has recently contributed, jointly with Raluca Tanasescu, a chapter on “Literary Translation in Electronic Literature and Digital Humanities” to the Bloomsbury anthology Translation Beyond Translation Studies and an article on “#GraphPoem: Holisme analytique-créatif, le genre D(H) et la performance informatique subversive” to the special issue on transmediality and convergence in literature of the journal Recherches & Travaux.
An essay, “Humor in the Dark,” by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor, was published in the journal Translation Review. It explored some of the strategies Elias-Bursac used when translating Dubravka Ugresic’s counterpoint of humor and trauma in her book of essays The Age of Skin.
Incoming Visual Editor Heather Green moderated a panel on “Word + Image,” featuring translator Alta L. Price and artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Abdulrahman Naanseh at the Center for the Art of Translation’s Day of Translation conference. She also recently reviewed poetry titles by Iman Mersal (tr. Robyn Cresswell), Shuri Kido (tr. Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander), and frequent contributor Eugene Ostashevsky for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.
Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor, took part in a two-way interview with writer Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for Punctured Lines, a blog on Post-Soviet literature. The two writers discussed their respective novels, Two Big Differences and The Orchard.
In September, José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large for the Central American region, published his translation of Solito, a memoir by Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora, with Penguin En Español. READ MORE…
The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!
Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages
Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.
On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.
No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!
“To Hear Your Fellow Man But See No One”: Yao Yao on Her Latest Essay Collection
The universe can be infinitely large, yet at the same time infinitely small—it all depends on where you happen to stand.
From the writings of San Mao to Jia Pingwa, the sanwen or essay is easily one of the most beloved genres in Chinese literature. Monika Gaenssbauer’s survey essay in our Spring 2013 edition spotlighted just four of the most prominent practictioners of this art and explored why Chinese essays are only rarely translated into English. On the occasion of Yao Yao’s delightful essay “Colourful Fruit Trees” in Samuel Liangxing Luo’s translation appearing in this week’s Translation Tuesday showcase, our editor-in-chief sat down with the author to discuss her latest collection and the outsized influence of Fujian writers in this particular genre within contemporary Chinese letters.
Why did you go with As Mentioned, No Names Are Mentioned as the title?
Tang poet Wang Wei once wrote a poem, beloved through the ages, which contains the line: “Even in a deserted mountain, one yet hears the whispers of man.” To hear your fellow man but see no one—the implications behind this conceit are endless. I based this collection of essays on the stories of my Chinese art circle friends, ascribing anecdotes to made-up names like Yi yi or Yi er. Even without proper attribution, the stories are one-hundred percent taken from real life. Not only does the title befit my mode of storytelling, it also hints at the playfulness inherent in the anthology.
Creative nonfiction in the Western tradition typically centers the author, but in these essays, it’s your friends who take centerstage; you, on the other hand, mostly stay in the wings. What would you say to the readers who might have come to this essay collection hoping to read about you, only to be denied this familiarity?
This may be a book that takes as its subject the lives of my friends, but, as author, I am in fact everywhere. What I have expressed is entirely what I have chosen to express; what my readers encounter is what I have chosen for them to encounter. Though I may be offstage, I am like a director, staging tableau after tableau, mapping thought after thought, carrying the reader through space-time, perspective, and logic. Should the reader derive pleasure from the work, it will be my pleasure too. I’m at the scene with the reader.
Within your text, you intersperse other writings by authors and artists alike. In addition, after each essay—and this is a novel idea that I haven’t encountered elsewhere—you also add readers’ online comments that the articles attracted when they were first published on a website. How did you go about selecting these comments? And do you treat these comments as equal to the other texts?
Adding readers’ comments is a new thing for me as well. Inevitably, different readers will react differently to the same text. No matter what point of view is being expressed, if there is substance to their opinion, I’ll be happy to use it as a kind of annotation or a finishing touch, if you will. As for quoted text lifted wholesale from other writers or artists, these serve as elaboration or counterpoint; this way, there’s something for everybody. That’s also one of the aims of this essay collection. READ MORE…
Submit to our Winter 2023 Korean Literature Feature
Korean translators: submit fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and stand to be a part of our twelfth anniversary issue!
For our Winter 2023 issue—also our special twelfth anniversary edition—we have partnered with LTI Korea to host a showcase of the best Korean fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. For the prolific translators among you, we welcome multiple submissions across genres; due to limited resources, however, we will be waiving our submission fee for the first submission only. Translators whose work is published in this showcase will be paid USD90 per article. General guidelines (including word count) below apply. Send all work via Submittable. Deadline: Nov 15.
Not a Korean translator? We remain open to submissions in our regular categories throughout the year. We guarantee outcomes within a month. Feedback is available upon request at an additional cost.
Guidelines on how to submit can be found here.
Breaking Down the 2022 National Book Award Longlist
A selection to whet your appetite for translated literature!
Now in its fifth year, this rebooted annual award for translated literature deserves a serious look. How does its newly released longlist compare to the Booker International counterpart?
Unlike its Booker International counterpart, works from European languages dominated, continuing the trend from previous years. Previous winner (and frequent Asymptote contributor) Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth was one of the only two titles from Asia.
As with the 2020 selections, only one title appeared in both the Booker International and the National Book Award longlists, and it was an Olga Tokarczuk novel translated by Jennifer Croft. We hope it will be third-time lucky for this illustrious duo!
Order a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.
New Directions is the only publisher to have two titles on the longlist. Aside from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which our Criticism Editor Barbara Halla chose as her clear winner from last year’s Booker International longlist, is also nominated.
Incidentally, Aitken, who is the only longlisted translator to ever be nominated for his work on different authors, was interviewed in our pages last year. This year, we sat down with Mónica Ojeda, whom interviewer Rose Bialer calls “one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” Her Jawbone made the cut:
Order a copy of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.
We hope we’ve whetted your appetite with these selections. Take a look at the full longlist here! Oh, and by the way, we may receive a small commission for your purchase(s), which will go toward supporting our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Other ways to sustain our mission include signing up as a masthead member, or joining our Book Club!
The New “Destination Unknown” for Adventurous Readers
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."—Anais Nin
Who says you have to push pins into maps to plan your next travel destination?
The Asymptote Book Club delivers a monthly journey built around surprise and discovery. It’s the new “destination unknown,” where each month’s book is a surprise selection curated by Asymptote’s award-winning editorial team in partnership with leading independent publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Since 2017, more than 500 subscribers all around the world have toured 40 different countries in books, immersing themselves in exclusive features like Zoom Q&A interviews and discussion groups—all from as low a price as USD15 a month.
Whether you’re an immersive explorer, a casual reader, a solo traveler, a group traveler, or a pin pusher, you too can sign up for our next great journey.
In fact, if you subscribe by today, September 4th, you’ll receive your first title in your mailbox this very month! So, don’t wait! Read the world today with our Book Club!
Dubravka Ugrešić on Asymptote: The Visa to Enter is Good Writing
Check out our submission guidelines and send us your best work today!
“As a reader of Asymptote, I am overjoyed to see literary texts by friends I haven’t seen for a long time, to discover new writers and new names from all over the world. Asymptote has become a literary realm in cyber space built by enthusiasts: the visa to enter is good writing.”
—Dubravka Ugrešić, winner of the 2016 Neustadt Literature Prize
Did you know that Winter in Sokcho, last year’s US National Book Award winner for Translated Literature, made its English debut in our very pages way back in 2017, and it was on the basis of that publication that translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins was able to find a publisher for her manuscript?
Asymptote is proud to be a leading purveyor of world literature—with a truly global readership that includes luminaries such as Dubravka Ugrešić. In our twelve years, we have built one of the best archives of world literature by casting our nets as far and wide as possible—not only is our team spread out across six continents, we are also open for submissions—in all the usual genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, criticism, and interviews—throughout the year. And we now guarantee a one-month turnaround time for submission outcomes, and offer optional editorial feedback so that you can grow as a translator.
If you’d like to be a part of our next issue, we encourage you to send in your best work today! Worth a special mention is our “Brave New World Literature” category, under the aegis of which we invite critical or even celebratory essays from readers, critics, authors, publishers, and of course translators discussing and problematizing the ways in which non-English texts reach Anglophone readers, perhaps envisioning a “brave new world literature.” Highlights have included Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef’s essay that fleshes out the very real challenges faced by non-white literary translators, as well as Eugene Ostashevsky’s whipsmart poems, from the current issue, that capture the translator’s liminality.
If you would like to publish in the blog instead, we welcome pieces on topics ranging from global cinema to the ethics of review to the literature of revolution. Apart from essays, we run dispatches from international literary events, interviews, weekly new translations, book reviews, and more. Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that considers the role of translation in literature, the arts, and the fabric of everyday life. We welcome pitches for the blog via email.
READ OUR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Photograph of Dubravka Ugrešić by Shevuan Williams
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2022)
What has our literary powerhouse of a crew been up to this past quarter? Read on to find out!
Editor-at-Large for the Philippines Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s original cross-genre work (part poem, part essay) will come out in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Virginia, USA: Stillhouse Press), which is now available for pre-order. Their translation of Filipino transgender writer and past contributor Stefani J Alvarez’s short prose has also been published in the first issue of the Oxford Anthology of Translation and their book review of Shuntaro Tanikawaz’s anthology The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009 (tr. Takako U. Lento, Cornell University Press) appeared in the eleventh issue of Tokyo Poetry Journal.
Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently presented a #GraphPoem computational performance at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2022, #DHSI22, and contributed an article on the #GraphPoem poetics of “network walks, stigmergy, and accident in performance” to the latest issue of IDEAH.
Blog Editor Erica X Eisen has found an agent to represent her debut novel, I Come from a Cold Country. An excerpt will be published in Guernica in August 2022 under the title “To Kill a Horse.”
Incoming Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton’s novel Two Big Differences will be featured alongside The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry on Punctured Lines, the blog for post-Soviet literature.
Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a review of Kjell Askildsen’s “Everything Like Before” out in Full Stop and an appreciation of Aimee Bender’s short story “Off” in Fiction Writers Review.
Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis recently reviewed Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda (tr. Alison Watts), Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizu (tr. Louise Heal Kawai), and Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino (Giles Murray) for Asian Review of Books.
Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant, has translated a chapbook for Strangers Press as part of their +SVIZRA series focusing on Swiss literature. Her translation is an extract of In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic by Usama Al Shahmani, a memoir of his experiences as an Iraqi refugee newly arrived on Swiss soil.
Translation Tuesdays Editor Shawn Hoo‘s translation of Singapore Literature Prize-winning writer Wong Koi Tet’s “Turtle Fever” was recently published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Shawn’s debut chapbook, Of the Florids, has also recently been published by Diode Editions and is available to order here.
Interested in joining us behind the scenes? Good news: We’ve just released our final recruitment drive of the year—check out the newly available openings and submit an application today! READ MORE…
Sponsored Post: Register for the American Literary Translators Association’s Virtual Programming, ALTA45!
ALTA is hosting an exciting series of virtual programming exploring literary translation. View the full schedule of events and register today!
Dates: April – November 2022
For aspiring, to mid-career, to seasoned translators, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has something for you!
Now through November 2022, ALTA is hosting an exciting series of virtual programming exploring literary translation. View the full schedule of events and register today!
At ALTA45, you can:
- Learn from twice-monthly panels and roundtables on literary translation, such as:
- Overthrowing the Idea of the Mother Tongue
- Words that Get Off the Page: Translating for the Stage and the Page
- Translating Children’s Literature: Values, Norms, and Ethics
- …and many others!
- Listen to monthly Bilingual Readings, where translators present new and exciting work in translation
- See a staged reading of a play in translation held in Tucson, AZ in the fall
- …and much more!
How to register: Purchase an All-Access Registration which includes access to all 2022 events. All-Access Registration is $75 at the standard rate, and $150 at the Pay-it-Forward Rate, while single event tickets are $10 per event. Either purchase your All-Access Registration here, or browse all the events and purchase a single event ticket for each panel, roundtable, or reading.
ALTA is excited to welcome attendees from all over the world to take part in these events for ALTA45! What are you waiting for? Check out the full schedule and register today!
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) supports the work of literary translators, advances the art of literary translation, and serves translators, and the students, teachers, publishers, and readers of literature in translation. Find out how to become a member here.
All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!
Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature
You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”
The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.
Today Only: Take Part in our Book Club Giveaway Contest!
Our giveaway ends 7pm EST, today, so seize the day!
This month, we’ve teamed up with our friends at And Other Stories and are pleased to host a giveaway of our Book Club’s May 2022 title, Mister N. by Najwa Barakat, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren.
Mister N. takes place in modern-day Beirut, where Mister N. has checked himself into a hotel to get his writing–and his thoughts–in order.
To enter:
- Follow the Instagram Pages of Asymptote Book Club and And Other Stories
- Like this post
- Tag 2 bookish friends in the comments
- Share this post in your stories (don’t forget to tag us!)
- Competition closes at 7pm EST on 15th June 2022. Entrants must be based in the USA. Winners will be selected at random and announced the next day. Must be 18 years old or have parents’ permission to enter. The giveaway is not affiliated with Instagram.
Good luck to everyone who enters!