Posts by Sofija Popovska

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 15, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, José García Escobar, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from Central America, China, and North Macedonia!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on award-winning literature from Nicaragua and Guatemala; the blend of art and letters in recent events centering Chinese literature in translation; and a dedication to one of the most influential literary figures in Macedonia, the late Olivera Nikolova. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Central America

Last month, Mexico’s FIL (Guadalajara International Book Fair) announced that the Guatemalan editor Raúl Figueroa Sarti will receive the inaugural Federico García Lorca Prize. The Premio Federico García Lorca a la Libertad de Expresión y Publicación is awarded to people or organizations that have promoted and protected freedom of speech across Latin America and Spain. Raúl Figueroa Sarti is the founder and director of F&G Editores, one of Guatemala’s and Central America’s most renowned publishing houses, and in 2021, he also won APP’s Freedom to Publish Award.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 4, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Mexico, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

In this week’s round-up of literary news from around the world, our editors report on an exciting translation-centric colloquium in Mexico, a prestigious award going to a new translation of one of North Macedonia’s most canonical novels, and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s spotlighting of the Philippines in its 2025 edition—a choice that has met resistance from local publishers due to the fair’s Zionist sympathies.

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

They say that no matter what you do, there is always a saint from which you can ask for help. In the case of translators, that is Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the Council of Trent, his translation became the official Latin Bible in the western hemisphere.

With this in mind, the fourth Coloquio de Traducción Literaria San Jerónimo (Saint Jerome Literary Translation Colloquium) took place last week in Veracruz, Mexico. The event was dedicated to fully immersing participants in the art of translation and fostering discussions on what it truly means to translate. It was organized by the Culture Office of Veracruz and the independent publishing company Aquelarre Ediciones, which also sponsors a prize dedicated to literary translation.

Among the participants were notable figures such as Fabián Espejel, the recent winner of the Bellas Artes Margarita Michelena Literary Translation Award; Mario Murguía, who won the same prize last year; José Miguel Barajas, the translator of Mallarmé into Spanish; and José Luis Rivas, a poet who has translated works by Derek Walcott, John Donne, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 30, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia to the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from North Macedonia to New York with updates on literary festivals and fairs. From Jean-Pierre Siméon’s belief in the sustaining nature of poetry, to a celebration of the many languages spoken besides Spanish in Hispanic communities, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from North Macedonia

The conclusion of the 2024 Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE) brought conversations about the meaning of poetry nowadays to the foreground of the Macedonian literary scene. The festival’s main award, the Golden Wreath—whose recipients over the years include W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes—was awarded to French poet, writer, critic, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Siméon this year. In an illuminating conversation with the magazine Nezavisen (Independent), Siméon retraced the well-known, yet often forgotten, connection between poetry, longing, and change.

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What’s New in Translation: August 2024

August 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Matilde Ribeiro, and Sofija Popovska

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

In this month’s compilation of newly released titles, our editors take a close look at three works that cohere stylistic invention with unconstrained probings into reality. In a bold collection of psychogeography, Daniel Saldaña París vivifies the urban space as a transformative intersection of image and imagination. From Aimé Cesaire, one of the founders of négritude, an early dramatic work provides further insight into his potent discourse against colonial violence. And in the English-language debut of one of Latin America’s most vital political thinkers, a volume combining dialogue and essay introduces the essentiality of communal resistance in the thinking of Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar.

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Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, Catapult, 2024

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. . . It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them. . .” writes Michel de Certeau in his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life. I thought of these words immediately as I immersed myself in the shifting landscapes of Planes Flying Over a Monster, a collection of ten essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. In writing about (and moving through) Montreal, Havana, Mexico City, Madrid, and other places, Saldaña París engages in a transformative cartography, rearranging bits of metropolises in turn into a tangle of ruelles frequented by a secret writer; a map of zones where different types of drugs can be purchased; a junction between “three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza”; and a stretch of space-time existing only momentarily within a locked gaze between a shy, adolescent cult member and his adult self. Tracing the connections between places, people, and events, Saldaña París creates a sense of communion with the world that is at times uneasy, yet always shot through with radical tenderness and a rare species of honesty—the kind that doesn’t confuse itself with the truth. This self-awareness, rooted in the memoir aspect of the collection, intensifies the realism that the genre of nonfiction always purports to provide, yet only occasionally delivers.

The collection’s closing essay, “Assistants of the Sun,” is also the beginning of the story—chronologically speaking. In it, we meet a young Saldaña París, dragged into joining a cult by his father and uncle. The sect’s activities happen during nature retreats, and include rituals of varying extremity—anything from walking in a neat line to a live burial. Saldaña París is forced to confront these memories years later, watching footage of these events while sitting with his partner Catherine in a borrowed Brooklyn apartment—an arrangement he mentions multiple times throughout the essay, as though attempting to anchor himself amidst the flood of disturbing recollections. He faces the past with striking empathy—remembering his father as “softness personified, mildly alcoholic, holding down three jobs . . . and a radical advocate of tenderness,” despite his having roped his son into a scam. This compassionate clarity, spanning all ten essays, is consonant with the author’s mission—relayed to him by an extra-terrestrial during a cult activity—to “help the sun to illuminate the world.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 2, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the foremost developments from their respective regions. In North Macedonia, a new collection from a renowned poet and director finds solace and profundity in the complex nexus between human life and its context. In the Philippines and Bulgaria, readers bid farewell to two titans of writing and translation. 

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia, reporting from North Macedonia

Prostori (Spaces), the third poetry collection by renowned Macedonian film director and poet Antonio Mitrikjeski, was recently published by Dijalog Press. With a track record of two well-received collections and several films playing at festivals across the world, Mitrikjeski is equally ‘intellectually rich and emotionally lush’ in his visual language as he is in literature, per writer Dimitar Bashevski’s review of Prostori.

The collection is fittingly cinematic; weaving together a mystical sublime, oracular dreamscapes, and a loving mimesis of familiar places, Mitrikjeski’s robust poetic voice blends inner and outer worlds, delving deep into the human psyche as he wanders into distant regions—mountain peaks, the ocean’s floor, the night sky. Frequently apostrophic, he foregrounds the deep entanglement between his human subjects and their environments, their ideas, and the people around them. In ‘Saraj,’ a poem about his childhood home, Mitrikjeski celebrates the ‘fraternity of children’ and ‘the mystique and simplicity of all the silhouettes who confessed their feelings’ in the ‘house bearing the roots of beginnings,’ where he still discovers the ‘eternal. . . fraternity of those present.’ Opening the collection and dedicated to his parents, ‘Saraj’ is programmatic. Throughout Prostori, the speaker is preoccupied with finding connection amidst distance, and this search is mediated via both real and oneiric spaces, as well as the relationships they make possible: ‘The lake’s water connects us all. / The fog is lifted,’ writes Mitrikjeski in ‘The Word’. The word itself, the material of poetry—’invisible, written upon the ruins’—will remain eternally within the lake, that is, within the space of human connections, among ‘familiar names’. READ MORE…

Scratched knees, pickled vegetables, and (un)belonging: A Conversation with Elina Katrin

August 1, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

The most honest way translation has shaped my work as a poet is through incompleteness.

 Published by Newfound in October 2023, Elina Katrin’s debut poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice renders the (un)belonging of immigration, the fluidity of the cross-cultural self, and the sensory core of memories in a vulnerable, mesh-like voice woven from three languages, emojis, and blank spaces. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian mother and a Syrian father, and currently living in Southern California, Katrin is profoundly aware of how living between cultures and languages both enriches and destabilizes the subject: in her work, multilingualism multiplies meaning, yet makes the mother tongue something which can be gradually forgotten, mixed with other languages, or, suddenly, spoken with an accent—somehow less authentically than before. Katrin’s poems—previously featured in Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, and Nimrod, among others—move across Syria, Russia, and the United States, recounting wounds both old and new, the love and pain of familial bonds, and moments of exhilarating rebellion and excruciating self-scrutiny. In this interview, I spoke with Elina about her experiences with immigration, her poetic techniques, food (and, more broadly, the sensory) as a medium for memories, translation, and her “personal English.”  

Sofija Popovska (SP): Congratulations on your debut chapbook! It’s definitely one of those rare books that make reading them for the first time feel like a homecoming. Can you tell me a little about how it came to be?

Elina Katrin (EK): Thank you so much. The chapbook originally started as a full-length book, or rather, my MFA thesis. Though I technically graduated with a complete manuscript, I quickly realized that the full-length needed more work. However, many poems in my thesis felt done and interconnected, so I decided to put them together into a chapbook. When I started treating If My House Has a Voice as its own separate project, I included the title poem into the manuscript—the only one from the chapbook that I wrote before graduate school. As this project was coming together, I was thinking about the curiosities and complexities of language—its beauty, pliability, and failures. Language is what ultimately connects us, it’s the center of any relationship, no matter what shape or lack thereof that language takes. I wanted to explore that in If My House Has a Voice, so I’m delighted to hear this chapbook reads like a homecoming.

SP: One of the first things that struck me was how memory was mediated through the body in your poems: a scratched knee becomes the point where love and hurt, control and rebellion converge, and biting into pickled vegetables suggests bottled-up fears and frustrations. What inspired you to choose touch, smell, and taste as privileged modes of perception/ expression?

EK: It’s no secret that most of our memories are attached to sensory details. Songs remind us of certain people, and scents transport us back to different periods of our lives. When thinking of Syria or Russia, my life in those countries came back to me through scratched knees and pickled vegetables—little fragments of time and space that reminded me what it felt like to occupy the body of a girl or a teenager. I wanted to document, archive those memories on the page exactly as I experienced them. For this reason, many images rooted in touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound work on different levels—the literal one that describes the physical experience, and the emotional one that allows us to look into how the speaker was feeling or what she was thinking about during any sensory experience. This layering of perception hopefully gives readers the opportunity to fully be there with the speaker, experiencing moments in her life they might otherwise have no way of accessing. READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

July 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Hilary Ilkay, Julia Maria, Marguerite Alley, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sofija Popovska

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 5, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from Palestine, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news of a crucial conference using collective artistic expression for justice, drama surrounding a literary prize, and an innovative effort to honor a beloved author. From activist poets to an experimental anthology, read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

The International Coordinating Committee of the World Poetry Movement (WPM) has issued an urgent call to action concerning the escalating crisis in Palestine. In a recent statement, the committee emphasized, “The world and Palestine are in great danger. We must intervene, speak out, and act.” To address this, back in April, WPM issued an open letter by 1026 poets, artists, and intellectuals from hundred and forty countries to eighteen presidents and prime ministers of the world, on a an appeal to act for immediate ceasefire and humanitarian assistance in Gaza. More recently, WPM hosted a virtual World Conference for Palestine, which took place on the 15th and the 16th of June.

WPM, renowned for its steadfast support of Palestine through poetry and activism, seeks to leverage this conference to mobilize international solidarity and propose solutions. Reflecting the sentiment of poet Mahmoud Darwish, “Our poems have no melody, no color, no flavor, no voice if they do not hold the torch from home to home, from house to house,” the WPM aims to illuminate the path to justice through collective artistic expression.

The World Conference for Palestine, hosted virtually by Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, represented a critical effort to galvanize international support. The conference gathered poets, writers, artists, intellectuals, and political leaders to discuss protective measures for Palestinians. The two-day event featured expert analyses and discussions to push for an end to the war and the occupation. Prominent attendees included Miguel Diaz-Canel, Nicolas Maduro, Gustavo Petro, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, Mahmoud Abbas, Michael D. Higgins, Cyril Ramaphosa, Fortune Charumbira, and Juan David Correa. Recordings of live streaming of poetry readings can be watched here. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 7, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia and Japan!

This week, Asymptote‘s team brings us up to date on the most recent releases and awards around the literary world! From a meditative poetry chapbook on the broad concept of motherhood from North Macedonia, to a Japanese thriller shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger Awards, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from North Macedonia

Spring of 2024 marked an exciting new beginning in the Macedonian literary scene: in mid-April, Majkata na Svetot (Mother of the Universe), the debut poetry chapbook of Marija Svetozarevikj, was promoted in the bookshop cafe Bukva in Skopje. Concerned with themes both timely and timeless, the chapbook is centered around a “maternal approach to spirituality and life,” as Svetozarevikj explains, and celebrates the mother figure in a broader sense, which includes planet Earth. 

Svetozarevikj (b. 1998) is a graduate of the Fine Arts faculty at the University of Skopje. Her approach to writing is accordingly visual; Aleksandar Rusjakov, a fellow Macedonian poet, who admitted to having read Majkata na Svetot multiple times, describes its author as someone who “paints with words and sings in images”. This is one of the several dichotomies that Rusjakov believes are resolved within the chapbook: its pensive and loving lyricism reconciles “kindness and cruelty,” finds “peace amidst rebellion and rebellion within peace,” and remains “simple in its complexity”. Poems such as “Waterfalls (A Love Letter to Humanity)” affirm his exegesis. In a lyrical voice that is equally oracular and conciliatory, Svetozarevikj dives into the human tendency to inflict artificial boundaries upon existence as the ultimate cause for suffering. Trapped in a “dire cycle” of “denying facets of our selves”, and struggling to mold our lives into a linear “track” moving single-mindedly towards self-satisfaction, humans lose touch with being, where “there are no mistakes, but everything is part of a unity.” 

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The Double-Edged Possibility of Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Hanna Johansson

June 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

I think this kind of [queer] isolation can be generative for an author—it provides you with this ability to see while not being seen.

In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson unleashes a rapturous, sinuous tale of desire and its reckless vehicle. After falling for an older artist, a misguided journalist follows her and her teenage daughter onto a trip to the Greek islands in an almost-instinctive sense of codependence, and soon the gorgeous shores are turned into a stage of ruins, in which a self-deluding passion lays bear the tensions between the wanting and the wanted. Shifting between the incantatory posturing of someone captivated by the forbidden and the anxious distortions of unreciprocated intimacy, Johansson deftly grows an explosive triangulation in which closeness begets isolation, and isolation begets tragedy. In the following interview, Sofija Popovska speaks to Johansson about Antiquity’s queerness, ancient Greece as a specter, and how the novel considers power.

Sofija Popovska (SP): Firstly, congratulations on your gorgeous debut novel! Before we dive into the text itself, could you tell me a little about how Antiquity came into existence?

Hanna Johansson (HJ): I started writing it seriously in 2018, and I had at that point been trying for a while to write a story about a trio of some sort. I find that kind of social structure to be very interesting and enticing—not the kind of love triangle where two people desire the same person, but a triangle where two people might belong to each other in this obvious, indisputable way, like a couple, or, as in Antiquity, a mother and her daughter, with a third person sort of looking in, desiring their bond more than anything else. I had also had a little bit of a personal crisis in 2016 and went to Ermoupoli for three months and realized pretty quickly that I would like to write something set in that city. It’s so beautiful and glamorous and strange at the same time. So, all of that had been brewing for a couple of years, and then, in the fall of 2018, I moved from Stockholm to a smaller city with my partner, who’s also a writer, while she was getting her MFA. I’m not sure I could have written it without those circumstances—the fact that she was incredibly supportive, and that we were living in a way that left me plenty of time to write. 

SP: Described in its promotional materials as a “queer Lolita story” and as reminiscent of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, Antiquity is, from the outset, embedded in a specific literary tradition. Was this cultural situatedness a planned feature? Were you ‘in conversation’ with any of these works—or other texts—during the writing process, and, if so, what effect did you hope to achieve by recasting (and subverting?) their themes and elements in Antiquity?

HJ: Yes, the cultural situatedness was a planned feature, I would say. I was very preoccupied, while I was writing Antiquity, with these sorts of queer or gay tropes—the age gap love story, for instance, which is one, although maybe not very nuanced, way of describing the novels mentioned—but probably even more the story of the guest who overstays their welcome, like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I read The Line of Beauty in my late teens and it made a huge impression on me. Saltburn is another example of that trope, to mention something even more current. These are all stories of people who are obsessed with beauty, and who have a desire for luxury, but they also have this seemingly unquenchable thirst for belonging—and an equally intense conviction that they can’t belong anywhere unless they are deceptive and not themselves—and this very much informs the narrator of Antiquity.

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Poetic Justice: Will Firth on Translating Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly

May 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Oh, plans. I can't make plans. I'm a translator.

The apocalypse has always been a popular topic in literature, but Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly is no regular walk around the end of the world. From one of the Balkans’ most fearless voices, the last day of humanity sees a complete collapse of the timeline as everything that has ever happened begins to occur at once. All sins rise to the surface, the dead return to testify, and the Devil himself makes wry commentary on all the fluff and frivolity we use to conceal our deepest secrets. Incisive, indicting, but not without compassion, Anomaly brilliantly exhibits the vital and intrepid nature of Nikolaidis’ work, which, coupled with a poetically lucid style and explosive intelligence, provoke readers to consider our world’s most central and incendiary contradictions. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, we had the opportunity to talk to Will Firth, the translator of Anomaly, about his remarkable work in bringing Nikolaidis’ writing to English, and what it means to be both translator and advocate.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Sofija Popovska (SP): Anomaly isn’t the first novel by Andrej Nikolaidis that you’ve translated, could you tell me more about how you two met and began to collaborate?

Will Firth (WF): I was first drawn to Andrej’s polished prose, coupled with his intelligent black humor—or cynicism as some would call it, and the remarkable imagery that he uses in all of his books. It’s basically the dense, intense intellectual challenge of his writing that I really like.

I didn’t actually meet him until 2012; I had translated his first novel, The Coming, and we had a launch event in London, at the now defunct Europe House. It’s a typical situation, actually; I don’t always meet authors before I translate their books, but I’m in touch with them while I’m in the process of translating, and several have become friends, which is a nice spin-off.

SP: You mentioned in an email to me that Andrej’s written about the apocalypse a lot, and this isn’t the first apocalypse-themed book he’s written. Has he said anything about why he loves this theme so much? And is Anomaly sort of a step—or a conclusion—in his literary project?

WF: Well, I don’t actually know what his greater literary project is. I’m not sure what he has in mind for the next few years and decades, but he certainly is fascinated by this idea of the apocalypse. In a text that I’ve quoted in various places, he calls himself an apocalyptist. He really feels it as a part of his existence: that the world we live in is doomed, in a way, and that better things, greater things, different things can arise from that.

But he’s playing with this idea all the time in his different books, and approaching the topic of the apocalypse from different angles. I’m not really sure why he’s so fixed on it, but it probably has a bit to do with his intellectual interests and the writers he’s into—Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, the post-Marxist, fairly radical writers.

But his personal experience of having to flee from Sarajevo in 1992 as a youth was certainly scary, if not traumatic. Add to that the experience of war, of systemic change, of being uprooted, being a refugee—and all sorts of other things. I mean, think of the massive earthquakes that the whole Balkan region has experienced: Montenegro in 1979, and Macedonia in 1963. Those are things that create a sense of insecurity, a sense that this world is dangerous and has its limitations, and we could be dead tomorrow. Those feelings perhaps flow into his interest in the apocalypse. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 3, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large celebrate writers of children’s literature, experimental postmodern novels, and memoirs of oppression. From a celebration of a beloved poet in Mexico to a new novel by a novelist and comics scholar in North Macedonia, to a recently republished chronicle of Greece’s years under dictatorship, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

“Forgetting is a modern phenomenon that goes beyond the usual individual, medical frameworks,… because it is already an instrument for political and wide(r) scale manipulation, embedded in… almost the whole society”, writes literary critic Gligor Stojkovski in the preface to the latest novel by the author Tomislav Osmanli. Known for diving deep into the problems of history and modernity, Osmanli zeroes in on collective forgetting as a pathological social force in Zaborav (Forgetting), his fifth novel.

Osmanli (b.1956 in Bitola) is a media critic, poet, screenplay writer, dramatist, and author of multiple prose works. His first novel won the Best Macedonian Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Balkanica Literary Prize and his scholarly work, Comics: Scripture of the Human Image, was the first example of comics studies published in Yugoslavia. With a father of Macedonian and a mother of Greek descent, Osmanli grew up trilingual—speaking Macedonian and Greek, and having been taught Aromanian by his paternal uncle. His work as an independent editor and member of the editing board of his nation’s oldest daily newspaper, Nova Makedonija, from 1991 to 1998, as well as his theoretical studies in political cinema, are visible in the themes of his fiction. His scholarly interests blend with his mixed cultural heritage and find expression in Zaborav, a postmodern tapestry of lives and languages.

Told almost entirely in present tense to illustrate the loss of connection between past and present, Zaborav renders a bleak social landscape where values and freedoms previously achieved are being obscured by false spectacle and slipping into oblivion. The novel’s characters, increasingly egotistical and politically repressed, are unable to resist hypercapitalism. To capture both the fragmentation and diversity of modern society, Osmanli weaves his text from documentary citations, fictional scientific language, multilingual speech, dialects, web-addresses, footnotes, and QR codes leading to musical pieces which complete the atmosphere of the passages where they are found. The philosopher Ferid Muhić, speaking at the novel’s launch, notes that Osmanli’s “suggestive, …original…, and deeply humanistic” novel creates awareness which acts as an antidote against the “pandemic” of “collective forgetting.”

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Announcing our April Book Club Selection: Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis

April 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit. . .

In Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, no one is safe. Not only is the world ending, but everything is being unearthed up along with it—every confidence, every disgrace, every deception. With his signature blend of rapturous imagery and indomitable intellect, Nikolaidis forces humanity to face its horrors while still allowing us some potential for redemption, a characteristically penetrating move for an author who is also an outspoken activist against war and corruption. Just last month, Nikolaidis faced intimidation and public harassment for his bold political work in Montenegro, underlining the necessity and urgency of his dissent. We are proud to announce this exemplary title as our Book Club title for the month. It’s a hell of a ride, literally.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis, translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth, Peirene Press, 2024

I am an Apocalyptist. I believe that Good will win out in the end, and when it does, the world as we know it will be abolished—it will no longer exist. So, once that world is gone, Good will prevail. If the concept of the Apocalypse isn’t the ultimate irony, I don’t know what is.

—Andrej Nikolaidis

Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, published in Will Firth’s translation, begins with a verdict: “The human race owes its history, as well as its future, to the fact that we’ve always been able to turn our backsides to the graves of those we maltreated, and then seek absolution.” Though this has been the case for millennia, the novel insists that human censorship will not be able to preserve its euphemized retellings for much longer. After a freak incident involving “a machine that would give each of us . . . all of the possible scenarios and outcomes of our lives”, past and present begin to merge: a mammoth falls and crushes a man brooding on a quay in Chile; a cruise ship collides with three women contemplating shop windows on Ferhadija Street; a man haunted by an incestuous affair is killed by a cannonball fired in 1805 by Napoleon’s fleet, while praying in the Kotor Cathedral. The truth of never-ending human cruelty—“one drop” of which is “enough to destroy the world”—finally refuses the revisionism afforded to us by the present, and becomes unignorable by physically unfolding everywhere, all at once. Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit of the uncomfortable details we tend to suppress.

In 1992, Nikolaidis and his parents fled to Montenegro from his native Sarajevo to escape the mounting ethnic strife that would soon erupt into the Bosnian War; the author, then, is no stranger to the tumultuous experiences at the core of Anomaly. Decidedly anti-war and anti-nationalist, Nikolaidis is also fearless in voicing his views. When his 2006 novel, Sin, was awarded the 2011 European Union Prize of Literature, the announcement detailed how his public defense of “victims of police torture. . . resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance”. His insistence on “freedom of speech [as] the basis of freedom” is obvious in his literary and journalistic work—and the way he implements this freedom is equally noteworthy. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Charlie Ng, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from Macedonia, Hong Kong, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors-at-large report on prizes in Macedonia, literary festivals in Hong Kong, and unexpected literary losses in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The Slavko Janevski Foundation, a Macedonian foundation dedicated to the advancement and promotion of cultural values, recently selected Edinstven Matičen Broj (which translates to Unique Master Citizen Number) by Lidija Dimkovska as the novel of the year for 2023.

Lidija Dimkovska was born in1971 in Skopje. She is a poet, novelist, and translator, whose literary interests and expertise extend beyond national borders and include early Macedonian poetry, contemporary Slovenian poetry, and contemporary minority and migrant writing in Slovenia. Currently based in Slovenia, Dimkovska works as a freelance translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature. Her work has been translated into 15 languages, including English, German, French, Romanian, Slovenian, Croatian, Polish, Serbian, and Albanian. English translations of her work include the poetry collection Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers—translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, and published in 2006 by Ugly Duckling Presse—and What Is It Like?—selected poetry translated by Ljubica Arsovska, Patricia Marsh and Peggy Reid and published in 2021 by Wrecking Ball Press—which made World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022 list. Her poetry has been described as “honest and uncompromising” by the writer Goce Smilevski; Edinstven Matičen Broj is no different. Named after an identification number assigned to every citizen of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it offers an unflinching study of identity loss and dehumanization.

“The question that I ask in the novel and that each of us should ask is whether we really exist, even when we have a unique master citizen number, and that question everyone should answer separately, individually and, perhaps, only in silence of their heart,” said Dimkovska at a recent press conference. The jury at Slavko Janevski highlighted her “acute sensitivity to zeitgeist”, which has allowed Dimkovska to dramatize the abstraction of “rootlessness and displacement” in “concrete life scenarios”. Her prose devastates with its candor—she writes in a clipped and probing narrating voice, reminding readers of “[m]oments when you can no longer breathe in the cramped apartment, when you are so lonely and alienated from the people who should be close to you, that you simply have to go somewhere so as not to lose yourself.” READ MORE…