Interviews

“An End of the World with More Movement and Fewer Screens”: An Interview with Daniel Saldaña París

September 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

[I]f there is meaning and order, it’s not individually accessible—it can only be found in love and friendship.

Daniel Saldaña París’s novel, The Dance and the Fire, recently published in Christina MacSweeney’s translation, is a sophisticated tour-de-force centering the ungovernable forces that nourish, propel, and destroy us. In it, three estranged childhood friends are reunited as wildfires close in on the city of Cuernavaca. Besieged by inexorable change and irretrievable intimacies, the trio narrates a carnivalesque Armageddon woven from dance plagues, religious fanaticism, and natural disaster. París’s cerebral, compassionate prose encompasses a vast range of lived experiences, including the domestic, the uncanny, and the beautifully flawed. 

The Dance and the Fire is a journey through the past and the present, heading into the unspeakable core of being human. As a fan of both his earlier essay collection, Planes Flying Over a Monster (also translated by MacSweeney), and this most recent work, I was thrilled to be able to speak with Saldaña París about his writing, its major themes, and inspirations in this interview.

Sofija Popovska (SP): In Planes Flying Over a Monster, you weave personal memories together with an eclectic mix of historical anecdotes. Natalia, the first narrator in The Dance and the Fire, seems to share your archival bent, and so does the father of the third narrator, Conejo. It looks like they process how they feel about where they are at the moment by engaging with stories from the past. What does this “historian’s compulsion” mean to you?

Daniel Saldaña Paris (DSP): It’s the way I experience places. I’m in New York City right now, for example, and when I walk these streets, I always remember that the first non-native inhabitant of Manhattan was a Black man from Santo Domingo who spoke Spanish and arrived with Dutch merchants. That detail reminds me how deeply my language is interwoven with this city, and it changes how I see the place. Archives are not dead tools; they’re the original augmented reality glasses.

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A Marred and Martyred Language: An Interview with Ahmad Almallah on Writing from the Borderlands

August 27, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

For you to understand poetry, you must see the human action it reflects and the one that gave it form on the page.

Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s second collection, Border Wisdom, is a searing love song of longing, memory, and language. It is a heart-wrenching evocation of the poet’s mother, Nawal, and of the poet’s own identity, familial lineage, and their occupied homeland. Woven with epigraphs from Ahmad Shawqi and Emily Dickinson, the collection propels itself smoothly between English and Arabic with erasure poetry, Arabic khatt, shape-poems, and English prose that chart the poet’s topographies of Philadelphia, Beirut, Vermont, and Bethlehem, along with the reimagined terrain of his mother’s Amman and al-Khalil. 

Border Wisdom pulsates with the poet’s estrangements: from his home, from his father, from the contours of his own memory. And echoing through as though an aftershock is a disclosure from the book’s last few pages: “Dear reader, I’ve been pretending all along to have a second language. Actually/in reality/basically/essentially/ I don’t know anything in Arabic.” 

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Almallah about Border Wisdom, mistranslations, and his labyrinthine poetics of negotiation between Arabic and English.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. How did the poems in this collection come together over time? And what has the experience of sharing this work with the world been like for you?

Ahmad Almallah (AA): The poems began to come together before and after my mother’s disappearance from this world. The world of borders did not allow me to be by her side in her final hours. It was in 2021; I was trying to be there for her but the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) launched a large operation to quell protests over kicking people out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza ended up being hit the hardest as Israel was flexing its military power on innocent Palestinians as has been for seventy-seven years now.

At that point, I chose to leave the West Bank to be with my family in the US. A week after that I got news that my mother was no longer of the living. I was advised not to go back. I found myself flipping through the poems of Emily Dickinson and I happened on the line “there is a finished feeling at the grave.” It was then that I decided to go back to Palestine. The first thing that came to my mind when I walked into the room where my mother spent the final days of her life was that she was not dead. She had just disappeared. And the same thought stayed with me when I visited her grave. I wasn’t there to witness her body put in the ground. This is when I began to hold onto the idea of disappearance as an alternative to death. READ MORE…

The Poetics of Fatherhood: A Conversation with Robin Myers on Translating Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born

August 21, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

[P]reservation in translation is a conversation, opening the work to new and unexpected places.

Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born, translated with delicate precision by Robin Myers, is a quietly powerful meditation on fatherhood, language, and identity. This slender volume delicately weaves poetic vignettes and prose reflections, capturing the intimate transformation of becoming a parent, and Myers, having worked on the translation during her own pregnancy, brings an empathetic awareness to the text’s subtle rhythms and linguistic surprises. The dialogue also touches on linguistic shifts, cultural inheritance, and the vibrant literary ‎scenes of Buenos Aires and Mexico City—culminating in a tender exploration of voice, translation, and the evolving nature of home.

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. 

Maddy Robinson (MR): The book is such a quietly beautiful collection of aphorisms, blending poetry and prose to explore the experience of fatherhood. When you’re tasked with finding a narrative voice so closely aligned with the author’s own, how does that compare to translating fiction?

Robin Myers (RM): That’s a wonderful question. Having worked with both life writing and fiction, I honestly don’t feel there’s a huge difference. What matters most is paying close attention to what the language is doing on the page—trying to understand and honor the author’s choices.

For this particular book, it falls along a spectrum of Andrés’s styles. I’ve had the honor of translating his work before—both his early novel Bariloche, which he wrote at a very young age, and also a book of his poetry. What I find remarkable about A Father Is Born is how it combines his novelistic sensibility with the precision of poetry; there’s something about the spareness and distilled quality of this book that I also find in his fiction. The voice emerges from those deliberate decisions.

The text is elliptical, presenting quick vignette-like scenes, from the interior world of preparing for fatherhood to welcoming the child, and the intensity of early parenthood. It also beautifully captures the child’s formation and psyche. It was important for me to attend to the imagery and the surprising, somewhat unconventional sentence structures Andrés uses—which are rarely predictable. Translating this invited me to stay alert to that strangeness in his sentences.

The book is deeply earnest but also includes humor, sometimes self-deprecating. I also tried to retain those moments with their original oddness in English.

MR: As a reader, one of the remarkable things about books like this is how we experience them differently depending on where we are in life. I think the same is true of translation: a book arrives at a time in your life when you least expect it. I happen to know that this book found you at a very fitting moment in your life. Could you talk about that a bit? READ MORE…

Bringing Contemporary Turkish Poetry into English: A Conversation with Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher

August 14, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Even when poetry is read silently, we tend to subvocalize. Rhythm—and even a kind of melody shaped by stress patterns—still resonates.

Curated and translated by Buğra Giritlioğlu, with the collaboration of Daniel Scher, The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish: Poems from the New Millennium (Syracuse University Press, 2025) seeks to dismantle the “Orient of the anthologies,” as Laurent Mignon calls it in his incisive foreword, offering instead a mosaic of voices that refuses reduction to cliché or cultural shorthand. The volume spans 172 poems by 61 poets, weaving canonical figures alongside bold experimenters who push the boundaries of form and language. Familiar names, such as Lâle Müldür and Murathan Mungan, converse with emerging poets whose works might otherwise remain inaccessible to English-language readers. The effect is an anthology that is not merely representative but dialogic.

Turkish, with its null-subject syntax and layered ambiguities, resists a one-to-one mapping into English. Rather than smoothing these difficulties, the translators lean into them. “If any of the translations seem obscure,” Giritlioğlu writes, “the reader can rest assured the originals are equally so.” This refusal to domesticate feels radical in an era of over-sanitized translations. Scher’s role balances this fidelity with readability, bringing a native ear attuned to English idiom

In this interview, I speak with Buğra Giritlioğlu, whose background straddles materials science, ethnomusicology, and literary translation, and Daniel Scher, whose editorial eye and native English fluency helped shape the anthology’s final voice. We discuss the puzzles and pleasures of translating experimental Turkish poetry, the ethics of collaboration, and the aesthetic fault lines that define this vibrant literary moment. From negotiating null-subject ambiguities to preserving sonic textures across languages, their reflections offer a rare glimpse into the labor behind making a national literature audible in another tongue.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): Buğra, given your background in materials science and ethnomusicology, how do these fields inform your work as a translator of poetry?

Buğra Giritlioğlu (BG): Both materials science and ethnomusicology have shaped how I think, in ways that carry over into translation. All three require an inquisitive, analytical mindset. Translation often involves a kind of optimization, much like materials science: you’re constantly weighing trade-offs, making fine-tuned adjustments, and aiming for the best possible version under specific constraints.

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The Dust of Her Bones: An Interview with Inés Bellina, Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, and Anne Freeland on Gabriela Mistral’s Queerness

August 7, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

[Mistral's] overlooked queerness speaks to the question: Who has access to the archive and who has the power to shape it?

In 1945, Gabriela Mistral shattered the Euro-American stronghold of the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Latin American laureate and the second from the Global Majority world since Rabindranath Tagore’s landmark win in 1913. Her award marked a cultural shift, amplifying voices beyond the confines of the North Atlantic canon—yet today, Mistral’s legacy remains an unresolved enigma: Was she a modernist, as her French translator Mathilde Pomès suggested, standing shoulder to shoulder with Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío? Or was she a postmodernist like Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou of Uruguay? Politically, too: was she an anarchist, Christian socialist democrat, or antifascist?

One aspect of Mistral’s life that remains clear, however, is her queerness. She spent her later years in New York with her partner, Doris Dana, an American children’s book author who translated some of her works and, after Mistral’s death, supervised her literary estate. Her sexuality is also affirmed by her contemporaries such as Alejandra Pizarnik and Pablo Neruda, and she even sometimes self-identified as a man in her own poetry. These complexities are further illuminated by a new centennial bilingual edition of Mistral’s Desolación (Sundial House, 2024), featuring translations by Inés Bellina, Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, and Dr. Anne Freeland, along with thirty-seven poems translated by Langston Hughes, originally published in the 1957 collection, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. 

In this interview, I spoke with Bellina, Quintana, and Dr. Freeland about Desolación, and the enduring queer legacy of Latin America’s first Nobel laureate.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Congratulations to the three of you on the publication on Desolación! Could you share how this book came to be? Also, while working intimately with Mistral’s first poetry collection, how did the experience of translating her transform your appreciation of her as a poet, an educator, a thinker, and a woman of her time?

Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho (AQA): Thank you so much. It’s honestly still quite a surreal thing to process for me—the publication of this edition. Not just because of how incredible of an opportunity it is to have co-translated and become so acquainted with the work of the great poet that is Mistral, but also because of how much reading, editing, and sharing her words with others feels more like an ongoing process than the end result of our collaboration. This volume marks the first full English-language of her debut poetry collection Desolación in its 1922 edition, originally published at Columbia University’s Hispanic Institute and edited by its then-director Federico de Onís—but the rest of her full-length works (despite appearing excerpted in translations of select poems, such as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s and Randall Couch’s editions) remain unpublished in English. Translator and literary critic Anna Deeney Morales is at work on a translation of Tala (1938) and Anne Freeland is working on Mistral’s last book, Poema de Chile (published posthumously in 1967), but there is much work to be done in creating and sustaining new readerships for Mistral among Anglophone, Spanish-speaking, and bilingual audiences alike. In considering the potential for Mistral to be rigorously and lovingly (re)read a hundred years after Desolación’s publication, our editor Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson was the one who came up with the idea of collaborating with a group of translators on an English rendering of the book. READ MORE…

Today would only be back tomorrow: An Interview with Geovani Martins on Via Ápia

July 30, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

Via Ápia tells the stories of people who lived in the middle of this conflict, but who didn’t belong to either side.

Geovani Martins’s Via Ápia is a novel set in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela, and takes place from July 27, 2011 to October 26, 2013. During this time, the lives of the neighborhood’s residents were profoundly altered by a military occupation and “pacification” in anticipation of the upcoming World Cup; in exploring the fall out, Via Ápia describes what happens when the vitality of carpe diem meets the fate of broken young men—those who had “been born poor, [were] still poor, and would die poor.”

In this interview, I spoke with Martins about setting narrative expectations, telling the collective stories of residents in occupied Rocinha, and collaborating with his translator, Julia Sanches, in bringing this epic novel into English.

Tiffany Troy (TT): The first sentence of Via Ápia is: “They aren’t singing ‘Happy Birthday’ for another hour.” How does this set up the novel that follows?

Geovani Martins (GM): My intention with that opening was to prepare the reader in following the many expectations that the characters will face throughout the story. Early in the book, we learn that the police are planning to occupy Rocinha, and the entire first part is structured around this anticipation that surrounds the characters. Since it’s an official operation, there’s even a set date for the arrival of the police, which creates something like a countdown to this transformative event. So that reference to the clock right at the beginning helps, in an interesting way, to place the reader in this race against time.

TT: Can you speak about the overarching structure of this novel? How did you come to having three parts, and why repeat “RIO” in each of the chapter titles?

GM: When I was thinking about structure, the first major decision was to work with five characters. I initially considered a simpler structure, focused only on two brothers, but I soon realized that my intention with Via Ápia was to tell a collective story. I wanted to speak more broadly about a generation that was deeply affected by this moment of police repression. In trying to paint that wider picture, I defined each character around the main themes I wanted to explore in the book, so that each one would allow me to deepen a different perspective on the situation. I wasn’t interested in just one character’s view; what mattered to me was the intersection of their experiences. READ MORE…

To Bring the People with Us: An Interview with Paul Larkin on Translating Henrik Pontoppidan

July 23, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

The only safeguard against tyranny is democratic (and spiritual/intellectual) courage.

Throughout his life and literary career, Henrik Pontoppidan held an unflinching eye on the culture and time that surrounded him, pinning down what he saw as its most spectacular failures in characteristically incisive, comic, and penetrating fictions. This ability to portrait society earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917, and today, he continues to be hailed by some as ‘Denmark’s greatest realist’. A recently published compilation of his two novellas, gathered under the title The White Bear, was our Book Club selection for the month of June, and in it one finds Pontoppidan at his most reflective and honest, telling the stories of hypocritical morality and doomed love. In this following interview, we speak with translator Paul Larkin about his discovery of this under-celebrated author, Pontoppidan’s relevance in our current political climate, and what individualism means in these works.

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.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Despite being a Nobel laureate, Henrik Pontoppidan has a relatively low profile in the Anglosphere; could you tell us a bit about how you came to discover his work, and what drew you into translating it?

Paul Larkin (PL): It is actually a deeply interesting question. I first came across Pontoppidan’s works whilst still a young man, working as a deck-boy in the Danish merchant navy. This navy has a very well organised library service, which did not just furnish books to ships but also films and—if I recall properly—audio material, which was mainly in cassette format back then. And this material was by no means all of the ‘tabloid’ variety. Much of it was serious literature, serious celluloid stuff on a 16mm format. By about a year and a half into my service, I had enough Danish to comprehend good writers like Pontoppidan, and the first short story I read was ‘Den første Gendarm’ (The First Gendarme)—see illustration. This had me laughing out loud, as Pontoppidan sends up the timid villagers seeking to somehow get the better of the lone, armed gendarme during a tense period in modern Danish history when the state sought to impose draconian laws. Eventually a barking dog does the job for them. The villagers then concocted their own legends . . .

pontoppidan_1

By the time I got to University, I realised, of course, that there was a lot more to Pontoppidan’s bow than the short story format, social realist tales, and caustic fables. However, it was not until I read the magnificent A Fortunate Man that I resolved to translate Pontoppidan. I am still amazed at how little of his work has made its way into English.

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Beyond that Southern Sky: An Interview with Seo Jung Hak and Megan Sungyoon on the Korean Prose Poem

July 17, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Wouldn’t it be enough for poetry to remain as something that doesn’t really serve any function, something without a definite meaning?

Appearing first in its Korean original as 동네에서 제일 싼 프랑스(Seoul: Moonji Publishing) in 2017, The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry Books, 2023) is avant-garde poet Seo Jung Hak’s second collection, and his debut in the Anglosphere. To me, as a writer and reader of prose poetry and its permutations from the Arabic qaṣīdat al-nathr to the Japanese sanbunshi, Seo’s writings move with the silken grace of the Korean sanmunsi tradition. Forged by turn-of-the-century poets like Han Yong-un, Jeong Ji-yong, and Joo Yo-han, the sanmunsi found fertile ground when Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Threshold’ was rendered into the Korean as ‘Munŏgu’ by the poet and publisher Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, published in the October 1914 issue of the literary journal Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth). The sanmunsi later became, as The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry notes, a ‘notable . . . form, redolent of the aestheticism then intriguing Korean writers’.

Seo Jung Hak reimagines the sanmunsi through ‘paper box’ poems and absurdist tales, crafting language and aesthetics to uncover the poetic in the mundane and to confront globalisation’s homogenising agenda. His translator, Megan Sungyoon, frames his work as a recycling of ‘the rhetoric of outdated ideology and bureaucracy, late capitalism and unrelenting consumerism, and hyper-commercialized culture industry to make an ironic patchwork of languages of the past and present’. 

In this interview, I spoke with Seo and Sungyoon, both in Seoul, about the sanmunsi, The Cheapest France in Town, and the ways in which one can resist linguistic homogeneity.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Jung Hak, can you take us through the years between 1999—when the earliest poems in The Cheapest France in Town began taking shape—and 2017, when the collection was first published? What was your process while putting these poems together? 

Seo Jung Hak (SJH): I have been writing poems since 1991. It took me a few years to publish my first poetry collection, and eighteen more years would pass until I published my second. Personal things happened in the meantime; I got married, had a child, wrote poems on commission for literary magazines, earned some money, bought a car, lost someone, and played lots of video games. Indeed, these things are not very interesting to talk about. My personal history may mean something to me, but not to most of the people reading this interview. I’ve just lived along the currents of the world, with enough swinging and swaying. READ MORE…

An Interview with Mary Jo Bang on Translating Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

July 7, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I wanted my translation to honor Dante’s decision to write the poem in the vernacular instead of in literary Latin.

In her new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, translator Mary Jo Bang has brought to bear an eagle-eyed focus on the power of lyric poetry. This book is the last of the three that form Dante’s The Divine Comedy—the most widely read of the three being Inferno, where the punishment of the sinners in Hell mirrors the nature of the sins committed in their lifetimes. The same process is at work in Purgatorio, although there, punishment is structured instead as restorative penance, which, once completed, enables the souls to enter the blissful realm of the tenth heaven. In Paradiso, then, Dante travels through the nine spheres of the solar system until he arrives at the Empyrean, where he finds the saved basking in the Eternal Light of God’s mind. Speaking to those he meets along the way, Dante becomes aware that bliss isn’t the same for everyone; one’s ability to feel God’s love in the afterlife depends on the qualities of their time spent on earth.

By translating Dante’s language into modern American English and adopting a matter-of-fact authorial tone, Bang retains the elegance of the original diction. Throughout, she adopts a loose iambic structure and preserves the three-line stanza to echo Dante’s terza rima, an arrangement he devised to gesture to the Holy Trinity. All of these measures combine to honor the imagery and meaning of Dante’s original vernacular Italian, while also acknowledging the fundamental differences between the two languages.

Curious to learn more, I spoke with Bang about the act of “carrying” poetry across from one language to another, the nuts and bolts of her translation process, and how Heaven is different for each person lucky enough to have made it there.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time?

Mary Jo Bang (MJB): The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.

When I began translating the Comedy, I knew little to nothing about translation. I had taken two translation workshops when I was an MFA student at Columbia in the early nineties, working on translating a French novel, but after I finished my degree and moved to St. Louis to begin teaching, the novel stayed in the cardboard box it arrived in. I don’t know that I would have ever gone back to translation except that I read Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and marveled at the fact that in forty-seven translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno, no two were identical. This felt like a demonstration of the fact that there is no single “right” way to translate one language into another; that might be obvious to some but for me, it was a decisive revelation and one that has been at the forefront of my mind in all of the translations I’ve worked on since. READ MORE…

REFUGE and Immersive Theater: In Conversation with Vita Tzykun and David Adam Moore

July 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Ian Ross Singleton

[T]his immersive experience can offer a chance to understand—on a visceral level—the uncertainty and disorientation that refugees so often endure.

In the spring of 2022, Vita Tzykun and David Adam Moore began working on the immersive theater installation REFUGE, “ignited” by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Developed and first presented with the support of UC Davis’ Granada Artist Residency, REFUGE is an exploration of the refugee experience and the meaning of home. In a series of interactive, multilingual scenes, audiences are brought into the stories of refugees, navigating the unfolding of events guided only by the dynamic sets, the lights, the voices, and their own intuition. At the end of it, David remarked, “The thing that I want more than anything is for the audience to leave with a changed frame of reference.”

In the following interview, Ian Ross Singleton speaks with Vita and David on the urgency of this project, its development, and its role in uniting disparate refugee communities in a shared narrative.

Ian Ross Singleton (IRS): What was the inspiration when you began this project?

Vita Tzykun (VT): We were awarded a dual Granada Artist Residency at the University of California, Davis during the pandemic, but the closures of live performance spaces meant we couldn’t bring our vision to life. When the world began to reopen, the invitation returned—this time, just two weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Unhappy Ending: An Interview with Franziska Gänsler and Imogen Taylor

June 26, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

I wanted to connect my area with a more urgent threat of climate crisis.

A sweltering combination of domestic turmoil, existential ennui, and an increasingly threatening final disaster, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer presents the portrait of fractures both geographic and internal, translated with a natural erudition by Imogen Taylor. Set in a German spa town on the verge of being consumed by wildfire, the novel tells of a young woman who receives a pair of surprising visitors, and in this disruption of her melancholy routine, a spark of desire is awakened—something that could prove to be illuminating, or all-consuming. 

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.

Rachel Stanyon: Franziska, you’ve had a lot of success with this debut novel in Germany; translations and film rights have been sold, and it’s received some glowing reviews in the English-language press. And Imogen, you’ve got twenty translations under your belt. How did you each get where you are now?

Franziska Gänsler (FG): I always wrote. It was my main interest even as a child, but I never felt that it could be a profession—it’s so uncertain. I’m not from an artistic family, so I didn’t know how to get there. I ended up studying to become a teacher of art and English, and had stopped writing for a few years; I was painting and doing other things creatively, then somehow I took it up again. Then writing just took over all of my time. I was lucky because I was supposed to be painting, but my professor at university allowed me to write instead. She was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and couldn’t even read what I wrote, but she always signed off on everything. I started entering competitions, and from there my agent saw my work.

I actually wrote one book prior to this one, but nobody wanted to publish it. And then with Eternal Summer we came to Kein & Aber, which is my publishing house in German, and I’m still with them.

Imogen Taylor (IT): I think for me, it was a coincidence. I studied French and German, and then moved to Berlin after my BA in England. People started asking me to translate because they knew I could speak German and English, so I took odd jobs on for neighbours and friends. I was paid in bottles of wine for one of my first jobs. It wasn’t really very serious, and I carried on studying, with a master’s and a PhD. I was still doing some translation on the side, but not very much or seriously. And then I gradually realized that was what I really wanted to do, more than academic work. READ MORE…

A Word Misunderstood, A Siege: An Interview with Maria Borio on the Italian Lyric

June 18, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation is, rhythmically, a second twin birth.

Plunging into poet and literary historian Maria Borio’s Italian-language collection, Trasparenza (2019), one finds a riveting poetic study on the human gaze, dis/connections of touch, and visual intimacies of modernity. This collection was later brought to the Anglosphere as Transparencies (2022/2025) in Danielle Pieratti’s translation for World Poetry Books. In Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), the celebrated scholar Arnaldo Colasanti painted an intriguing portraiture of Trasparenza, describing a blend of the pure and the impure, like the digital screen, an evocation of the imagistic clarity of snow and glass, ether and windows. For Colasanti, Trasparenza reveals desire only for it to be erased and emptied. However, he cautions against reading Dr. Borio’s poetry merely as abstract and argues instead that her work presents a resistance against the concrete, existing in a space that is tactile yet fleeting, spiriting language away towards solitude, lyrical disunity, and oblivion.

In this conversation thoughtfully translated from the Italian into English by Danielle Pieratti, I spoke with Dr. Borio, currently in the central Italian city of Perugia, on her poetry collections, particularly Trasparenza (Transparencies), and the poets and critics that define the Italian lyric tradition.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut into the Anglosphere, Transparencies (trans. Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2022), saw a re-edition in May 2025. Could you tell us what your creative ethos was when writing the poems in Trasparenza (2019)?

Maria Borio (MB): The English translation of Trasparenza led to a book that is slightly different from the Italian original; in fact, we even reconsidered the order of the poems and their division into sections. I would say that it became a transcontinental collection or, if you could call it this, a form of transatlantic poetry. I believe that the book’s core—thinking about transparence in our time—resonated naturally in response to these changes. How can poetry represent certain issues pertaining to those who live in the Western part of the planet—a realm in the midst of redefinition? Transparence connotes our relationships, real and mediated, as well as our way of living, of constructing, of being in the world. Isn’t the language of algorithms also presented as transparent? And can’t we say the same about AI? With one provision: taking care to avoid reducing our relationships and actions to a surface-lacking substance, which has only instrumental ends. From Italian to English, therefore, the book’s interrogation of these problems intensified: how do we avoid making transparence a double game? How do we prevent ourselves from getting caught up in common sense, or slipping into hypocrisy (even when we need it to survive…), or forgetting what responsibility means—and not just responsibility to ourselves.

AMMD: Looking back at your first poetry collection, L’altro limite (2017), and then to Trasparenza, what would you say are the most notable shifts in your poetic vision and approach to writing? READ MORE…

Death Will Come in a Single Reckoning: An Interview with Oisín Breen on the Irish Avant-Garde

June 4, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

People do, in fact, want to read and hear work that is pursuing art, first and foremost. . .

Irish poet and performer Oisín Breen’s second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was released in 2023 by Downingfield Press and has been highly praised by World Literature Today, The Scotsman, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. The collection draws on the sagas of the goddess Étaín from Irish mythology, weaving together a brocade where the mythic past meets an experimentalist future. Breen describes his work as employing ‘a smattering of other languages’ alongside English, most notably his Irish native-tongue.

Born in Dublin, Breen has established himself as a prominent voice in the Irish avant-garde, with his work featured in more than a hundred literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across over two dozen countries. He is a poet at home in the so-called ‘world republic of letters’, connecting the local with the universal. His next book, The Kerygma, is due in September through Salmon Poetry.

 In this interview, I spoke with Breen, currently in Edinburgh, about Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, his creative process, his use of language, and the intersection of myth and modernity in his work.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was re-released last year by the Melbourne-based Downingfield Press. Could you tell me about how you wrote the title poem?

Oisín Breen (OB): The title poem, ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín’, owes its genesis to the moment the curtain fell at the committal of my oldest and dearest friend’s mother.

My friend was so strong throughout the day, and in the run-up, joking, sharing, helping, always there for all those who loved his mother—including many who knew the iterations of her long before my friend was a glint in her eye. She was wise, kind, deeply loving, spiritual, playful, cheeky, mischievous, and passionate. Yet when the curtain fell, well, I saw my friend shatter, briefly, into so many pieces; but it was the way he shattered that was astoundingly beautiful. The word that came immediately to mind was ‘Godstruck’.

I knew then that I had to write this physical reality, this metaphysical reality. It had the awe of a medieval painting. It was inspiring in the truest sense of the word. So, write it I did, in my own way, weaving together myth, narrative, and a long meditation on the way in which iterations of ourselves through time form a communal being that perennially negotiates its own status as an identity creature/function/process. And then juxtaposing that with the total awegrief at a funeral, at a death, when one is present to a whole human for the first time, as they cohere slowly into a single vanished point that then branches out again into so many new forms. The fact that she who had passed was not only a mother, or a friend, she was a lover, she was sexual, she was playful, she probably carried a million doubts, and a million seeds of friendships, some of which bloomed, and some that didn’t—it is all this that I worked to try and capture, to hew and to weave, and I do hope that, in some small measure, I did. READ MORE…

Translating Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist: An Interview with Avery Fischer Udagawa

May 26, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Bella Creel

Beyond the editorial trappings and packaging, however, the best stories ignore borders. . .

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist is a moving and fantastical story of a young girl’s burgeoning independence, taking place in a strange village nicknamed Absurd Avenue. Kashiwaba is a prolific author of children’s literature in Japanese, with her oeuvre ranging from the grounded and slightly magical to the utmost heights of imagination—but embedded alike with a deep emotional resonance. Widely read by both children and adults, The Village Beyond the Mist in particular has had a global effect as the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and Avery Fischer Udagawa’s English translation now renews this magical book for US readers.

Udagawa’s repertoire of translations contains a number of Kashiwaba’s works, including Temple Alley Summer (2021) and The House of the Lost on the Cape (2023), both from Restless Books. In the following conversation, we discussed Kashiwaba’s influential body of children’s literature and Udagawa’s thought process while working on The Village Beyond the Mist.

Bella Creel (BC): You’ve translated a number of works by Sachiko Kashiwaba, from short stories to three full-length novels. From what I’ve read in your translations, it seems that her works, while often fantastical, remain grounded in real-life challenges—coming of age, the loss of a loved one, or the relationship between parent and child. How would you describe Kashiwaba as an author—what seems to drive her writing?

Avery Fischer Udagawa (AU): Sachiko Kashiwaba’s work seems to well up from both a deep love of Japanese storytelling and a vast knowledge of European and North American children’s literature, gained through a voracious reading of translations that began in childhood. Her works refer in form or content to a wide range of sources, from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to L. M. Montgomery to the Tōno monogatari, the collected folklore of the Tōno region in her native prefecture of Iwate. The afterword to her debut novel mentions The Chronicles of Narnia and Mary Poppins—before going on to thank the father of Japanese fantasy, Satoru Satō.

She has said that she hopes above all for readers to enjoy reading her books, finishing them and saying, “ah, that was fun.” But I have only to flip through her long-running Monster Hotel series—featuring a vampire and witches alongside a partially shifted kitsune (fox) girl and a rokurokubi (long-necked spirit)—to see how she relishes braiding the traditions she grew up with.

Her concern for real children and families is also palpable, perhaps especially in work that she produced shortly after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, which affected Iwate. Her novel The House of the Lost on the Cape was first serialized in the city newspaper of Morioka, where she lives, for young readers who would have experienced grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt just like the characters in House. In the story, she marshals kappa river spirits, stone lion-dogs from a Kesennuma shrine, and a giant Jizō statue from near her own house to facilitate communal healing.

Virtually all of Kashiwaba’s stories feature insights about families, such as how a growing daughter and her father may suddenly find themselves talking less; in The Village Beyond the Mist, a shared knowledge of a place promises to be the key to reopening communication.

BC: Alongside your role as a teacher, you have also built a prolific career in the translation of children’s literature—how did you find this niche? READ MORE…