Interviews

Ordered Chaos: Katy Derbyshire on Translating Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish

March 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Matthew Redman

[M]ountains implicitly divide . . . the way we speak, so that people on different sides of the mountain will have a different words for ‘brother’.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a folding of dreamscape into landscape—a study of some of earth’s most majestic topographies through the discursive, vivid wanderings of a mind led by its own fascinations. Made up of just over five hundred notes, this compilation of observations, narratives, fantasies, and contemplations track a journey through the Alps in colours, in flanks and peaks, hearsay and memories, macabre moments of comedy, and a continual rumination on the crafting of writing and composing. These deft workings of language have been rendered into a fluid and chimeric English by Katy Derbyshire, and she speaks here of Mountainish’s scepticism of mountains, the beauty and comedic tone of the prose, and ‘little narrative islands’.  

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.    

Matthew Redman (MR): One of my favourite aspects of Mountainish is when the narrator talks about the mountains and her fear of them; there is a kind of a mistrust of the mountains poking through a lot of the time, expressing itself in a lack of awe, a lack of overwhelm. When she’s faced with these mountains, it’s more like she’s peering at them, or stealing glances.

Katy Derbyshire (KD): Well, the narrator gives us that in the very first of her notes, when she starts off with this drive through the Alps and is terrified that they’re going to collapse onto her—and I think that continues all the way through. It really endeared me to the book, her scepticism. We, the two of us, between ourselves, we called ourselves ‘mountain sceptics,’ because Zsuzsanna doesn’t just accept this Swiss myth of the mountains’ magnificence. She sees the beauty, very much so, but she also sees the insularism—which she calls racism sometimes—and she sees the expectations and the narrow-mindedness that comes along with the landscape. READ MORE…

I wake to face the candle’s red bloom: A Conversation with Wendy Chen about Translating The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao

March 12, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

Translating taught me to interrogate my positionality to the languages I know and write in.

The Magpie at Night takes its title from one of Li Qingzhao’s surviving poetic fragments: “The feelings I make into poems / are like the magpie at night, / circling three times, unable to settle.” A woman poet from the Song dynasty, Li (1084-1151 CE) was recognized for her mastery of the classic ci form, and is described in this newly published, wide-ranging collection as an “indomitable voice . . . [that] still sings to us across the centuries” by translator Wendy Chen. In this complete series of poems commonly accepted to be written by Li, Chen brings about this singing in Li’s wondrous sense of listlessness, in recurring motifs of dreams, and in the clarity of awareness: “I wake to face / the candle’s red bloom.”

Here, I speak with Chen about her translation of The Magpie at Night, a process involving familial recitations, happenstance, and wounds towards encounters with true selves.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Wendy Chen (WC): It is inventive, playful, and an homage to the writer and the original work. The process of translation itself is like figuring out how to unlock a puzzle of language, while exploring its possibilities.

TT: For readers unfamiliar with the work of Li Qingzhao, can you describe what it was like to hear her work recited for the first time?

WC: In my family, recitations of classical Chinese poems were a part of the everyday fabric of conversation. The older generations would recite these poems as commentary on contemporary issues or events in our daily lives. In this way, I was raised to see these poems in dialogue with whatever might be happening, and Li’s work was no different. Hearing her recited in this way allowed me to see the continued relevance of her work, and how it could speak to a modern audience of readers who might also be grappling with desire, grief, longing, homesickness, resentment, and love. READ MORE…

Translating Macedonian Literature and Lidija Dimkovska’s Personal Identification Number: An Interview with Christina Kramer

March 5, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Gear

No matter how much I read, no matter how well I know the language, that language is constantly changing, and authors are creative.

Christina Kramer is a writer and translator known for her prolific work introducing Macedonian literature to the Anglosphere. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Christina about her role as a translator and linguist, the interplay between these two professions, and the excerpt of Lidija Dimkovska’s Personal Identification Number, which recently appeared in Christina’s translation in Asymptote. Throughout the conversation, we touched on Christina’s fascinating translation process, her love of Balkan music, her collaborative poetry translation, and the increasing number of translations coming from Macedonia.

Sarah Gear (SG): I very much enjoyed your translation in the current edition of Asymptote, an excerpt from Lidija Dimkovska’s 2023 novel Personal Identification Number. As an overworked parent of three, I can absolutely see the appeal of the ‘wasteland’ the narrator describes! Can you tell me how you came to translate the excerpt, and what challenges were specific to the text?

Christina Kramer (CK): I first learned about the novel from Lidija in 2022, then received a copy from her when we were both in Skopje in 2023. I was somewhat reluctant to translate the book because I saw many difficulties in moving between the narrative sections about Katerina and her family and the sections describing the wasteland. I knew virtually nothing about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Then, last summer I ended up working intensively on a full translation so it could be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I will be editing that draft, of course, but I was forced to push through, to make quick decisions, and with that intensive, compressed timeframe, I was immersed in the story, and what had seemed difficult became more natural.

READ MORE…

Return to the Prodigal Country: Gilbert Ahnee and Ariel Saramandi on the Mauritian Novel

February 26, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

As a writer, translator and most of all reader, I appreciate it tremendously when I see characters speaking in a way that feels true to themselves.

In 1989, Gilbert Ahnee, a then-rising figure of Mauritian journalism, ventured into the world of fiction with the release of Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel to date. Published by Éditions du Centre de Recherches Indianocéanique, Exils is an intimate inquiry into self-banishment and belonging, described by Charles Bonn and Xavier Garnier in Littérature francophone: Le roman (Éditions Hatier, 1997) as a largely autobiographical novel that was written upon Ahnee’s return to Mauritius after a period of study in France, illustrating the sense of exile that is felt even by those living in the very heart of the homeland—the novel being an explicit cri d’amour, or cry for love, for the French language.  

Thirty-five years later, in 2024, Exils was introduced to the Anglosphere when The White Review, a London literary magazine, included a translated excerpt in an anthology celebrating fiction and nonfiction prose from across the world. The translator, Ariel Saramandi, is a British-Mauritian essayist whose book Portrait of an Island on Fire (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June 2025) was described as ‘a searing account of Mauritius’. Her translation offers a delicate rendering of Ahnee’s prose, sustaining its emotional nuances while opening it up to a new audience. 

In this interview, I spoke with Ahnee and Saramandi, both in Mauritius, on the resonances of Exils in today’s world and the evolving legacy of exile in Francophone Mauritian novels.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The excerpt of Exils (Exiles) published in The White Review’s ‘Writing in Translation’ anthology (in Ariel Saramandi’s translation) bespeaks alienation—cultural, geolinguistic, spiritual—mixed up with indifference, boredom, and frustration. I love that we have the character Jean Louise, in his quarter-life crisis, who embodies how exile gnawingly takes on different shapes:  

But I felt that true apathy of not being able to share in their pleasures. I was indifferent to the sea. The sea and its transient vehemence, always the same.

Gilbert, could you take us back to the years leading up to the novel’s publication in 1989? Could you share insights into your creative process?

Gilbert Ahnee (GA): When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, I was 16. I felt, deeply, that my generation would make an unprecedented, but as yet undefined, contribution to our country’s evolution. As a matter of fact, the most groundbreaking changes of the time—political, societal, cultural—were brought about by those who came back from university.  My high school classmates were preparing to go abroad, but my family couldn’t afford to sponsor my university education and so I landed a secondary teaching job as an undergraduate physics teacher. In class I taught physics to young boys and adolescents, but in the staff room I benefited from senior colleagues’ advice as regards to literature. I first started by reading nineteenth-century authors: a few English writers, but many more French and Russian novelists such as Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. That was my first real exposure to the novel. Over the years, I kept on consolidating that interest for novels from around the world, from Truman Capote to William Boyd, Mark Behr to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mario Vargas Llosa to Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk to Pierre Lemaitre. My curiosity for novels is unquenchable. I’m happy that readers noticed, in Exils, allusions to the world of Camus and Proust.

AMMD: Ariel, what inspired you to translate Exils, a French novel published nearly four decades ago, into English? What significance does the novel hold for you as a British-Mauritian writer who grew up in Mauritius?

Ariel Saramandi (AS): This is such a wonderful, intricate question! So perhaps, to start: I’ve used ‘British-Mauritian’ a lot in describing myself abroad, not so much out of a sense of dual nationality—though I am indeed both British and Mauritian—but because all the essays I produced until November 2024 were written under an autocratic government regime. Saying I was ‘British’, even if I never really felt British, was a way for me to signal—hopefully!—that I couldn’t be charged with defamation or imprisoned without the British embassy knowing about it. Asserting my dual nationality in that way felt like a ‘word of warning’ to Mauritian authorities, a ‘technique’ that felt ridiculous—I’ve never been to the British embassy in my life or know anyone who works there. But I’ve also never been troubled, politically, for my work. READ MORE…

Play as Criticism, Curiosity, and Sense-Making: An Interview with Ena Selimović and Maša Kolanović

February 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

The world of grown-ups is so violent and boring, with nothing but news and politics, and [the children are] resisting this absurdist language. . .

In the wartime world of Underground Barbie, our January Book Club selection, Croatian writer Maša Kolanović vivifies another realm that is both an escape and a radical interpretation of daily horrors: the playtime conjurings of children. With its many inventions playing out in the basements of houses and the corners of rooms, the scenarios of childhood imagination both mirror and refract the way conflict and nationalism intercept daily life, articulating a more intuitive, unfettered interpretation of ongoing events. The novel is translated with a deft attention to the prose’s texture and humor by Ena Selimović, and in this interview, both author and translator speak to us on working with this text and its singular voice, the transformation of pop objects across cultural divides, and how the language of play can speaks to its context.

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.   

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to start us off by asking you, Ena, about your history with Underground Barbie. How did you come across the book, and what drew you to translate it?

Ena Selimović (ES): The book and I share a ten-year history. Back when I was finishing my dissertation in comparative literature, a lot of the books that I was working from were not translated into English, so I found myself having to translate all these passages that were in my chapters. Underground Barbie, for me, was such a no-brainer because my dissertation was on the relationship between American and Balkan racialization—in other words, putting the perception of race in both places in dialogue with one another. In the Balkans people tend to think there is no such thing as race, but there very much is, and Underground Barbie really shows how race functions in times of war, because it depicts how children are remapping what it means to be pure Croatian.

Everything started there, and in 2019, Maša came to a conference in San Francisco, where I was then living. At that time I had written a plea for other translators to translate the book, but not thinking of myself as a potential translator at all. I didn’t think that was a career or something that I could pursue, because I’m not a native speaker of English. I also had the experience going back to Bosnia as a child and a teenager, and everyone would make fun of me for my American accent in Bosnian. It just felt like I couldn’t win. READ MORE…

Ten Thousand Burdens: Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ on the Hanmun

February 13, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the language is not working in a literal sense; it’s trying to evoke an imaginary landscape, and do so aesthetically.

Translators Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ have forged a remarkable partnership in bringing the timeless beauty of classical Korean poetry to English readers. Their work spans centuries, breathing new life into poetic masterpieces originally composed in hanmun, or ‘literary Sinitic’, the written language of Korea’s past. Together, they have delivered evocative English renditions of Borderland Roads (2009) by Hŏ Kyun and Magnolia and Lotus (2013) by Hyesim—both of which were catalogued in The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (2022). Their more recent projects include Ch’oŭi’s meditative An Homage to Green Tea (2024) and the eagerly anticipated Spring Mountain (forthcoming June 2025) by the poet Nansŏrhŏn, all from White Pine Press, a New York-based publisher.

Through their Korean Voices series, White Pine Press has long been a bridge between Korean literary tradition and global readership, featuring works by writers Park Bum-shin, Ra Heeduk, Park Wan-suh, Shim Bo-seon, Eun Heekyung, and translators Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee, Suh Ji-Moon, Kyoung-Lee Park, and Amber Kim, further cementing its role as a vital conduit for transcultural dialogue.

In this interview, I spoke with both Ian, based in Ramstein, Germany, and T’aeyong, in Pusan, Korea, on translating poetry originally written in hanmun, as well as the historical and contemporary divides between what’s revered as cosmopolitan and what’s relegated as vernacular—in language and broader cultural contexts.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): For readers who can read Korean literature only through translation, could you briefly explain what hanmun is? Why did Korean poets, before the invention of the Korean script (kungmun or chosŏnmun) in the mid-fifteenth century, write in this orthography? Additionally, how distinct are classical and contemporary language, ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ language, and written and spoken language in the modern Korean literary landscape?

Ian Haight (IH): Hanmun is the Korean use of classical Chinese to write literature. Kungmun is an older term for what we now call hangul in South Korea, which is the contemporary written language of South Korea. Chosŏnmun is pretty much the same thing as hangul, but it is for North Korea. There are some regional dialectical differences between chosŏnmun and hangul, and owing to the political ideologies of North and South Korea, there are also some differences in the words and how some words are written.

READ MORE…

“lyreless poet oh unlyred one”: A Roundtable with Translators Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone on Translating Haroldo de Campos’s galáxias

January 29, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

To say that galáxias is a tour de force is an understatement.

galáxias, a book-length poem by the Brazilian avant-gardist Haroldo de Campos, is composed of fifty intertextual constellations that traverse multilingualism, incorporating slippages of word play in melody-harmony, explicitly in tune with the Poundian concept of “make it new” and Campos’s own “transcreation.” In August of 2024, Ugly Duckling Presse published his groundbreaking text. With the work of five translators, responsible in varying degrees for different portions of the text, the volume brings Campos’s “planetary music for mortal ears” to an English-speaking audience. Here, Asymptote is excited to present a roundtable featuring three of the co-translators: Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone (Christopher Middleton and Norman Maurice Potter have passed). Below, we speak about their individual encounters with Campos, their translation of the constellations as a collaborative and iterative process, and what they discovered in their translations.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to each of you? 

Odile Cisneros (OC): For me, literary translation stems from curiosity and the desire to share a literary work with others. At least, that’s how it started for me. In the early 90s, I lived in Prague, where I learned Czech, a language that hardly anyone outside the Czech Republic speaks. When I left to go to graduate school in New York, a friend gifted me a beautiful facsimile edition of a modernist poetry book: Na vlnách TSF, by the Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert. I fell in love with Seifert’s whimsical, surprising poems and wanted to share them with my friends, but alas, they didn’t speak Czech, so I figured I’d try my hand at translating some. A Czech friend helped out.

For me, then, translation emerged from friendship—friendship with a text, friendship with a language, friendship with others. My forays into other languages and texts, primarily Portuguese and Brazilian poetry, had similar origins, which we can talk about more.

As to what the act of literary translation is, there have been countless discussions. I always think of translation as a kind of puzzle that needs to be figured out by first taking the text apart in the source language and then putting it back together in the target language. There are many ways to do this, but some are better than others. The process is both challenging and rewarding. READ MORE…

Voiding the Ego: Charlotte Mandell on Translating Paul Valéry

January 22, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Mia Ruf

It doesn't interest me, what [authors] did as people—it's the texts that really matter.

The body of work comprising Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste manuscripts represents some of his most illuminating and challenging ideas, condensed into an alter ego who could articulate an evolving analysis of poetry’s intellectual mechanisms, multivalent origins, and immovable rationality. In reflecting on the character’s origins, Valéry had pointed to sudden, surging, “strange excesses of self-awareness,” a rousing that stirred newfound doubts and investigations into his chosen craft, and thus a renewed inquisition into the very acts of thinking, imagining, and inventing. Monsieur Teste became then a companion that would walk alongside Valéry for the remainder of the poet’s life, leaving impressions and musings in the stray forms of philosophical texts, brief aphorisms, and fictional letters. An encompassing collection of these works are now available in a luminous translation by Charlotte Mandell, which we were proud to present as our December Book Club selection. In this interview, Mandell speaks to us about the challenge of working with Valéry’s occasionally-lyrical, occasionally-bareboned style, and what it means to meet translation as its own form of creation.

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.    

Mia Ruf (MR): I want to first talk about Valéry’s own notes in the preface to Monsieur Teste, where he discusses the difficulty of translating this text—in part because of the language he talks about devising. He refers to it as “forced and vigorously abstract” and “with a few traces of that vulgarity or triviality we allow ourselves.” Did you feel that way in translating it? And did you find those aspects to indeed be difficult?

Charlotte Mandell (CM): Yeah, because a lot of the aphorisms are so short. There’s not a lot of context to base the translation on, so you sort of have to guess what Valéry is trying to say. Also, when he talks about abstract words, you have to resist an urge to just be easy and translate whatever you think it is; you have to try to put yourself in his mindset, which is really hard—to see what he meant instead of what I thought he meant. It helped a lot to have the Jackson Mathews translation [Princeton, 1989], so I consulted that, but you made a good point in your review, which is that I tend to make the sentences a little bit longer than Mathews did. He often attempted to make the text a little bit “easier,” and shortened some of the sentences, but I tried to just stay as true as possible to the original—both in terms of the sentence length, and also the way by which the thought unfolds.

READ MORE…

A Paradoxical Man of Letters: In Conversation with Kiriti Sengupta

January 20, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

I . . . aimed to break free from being overly symbolic . . . perhaps I sought to reach out to readers who wished to interpret my poems quickly. 

When I first met Kiriti Sengupta in 2015, I was unaware of his literary efforts. He contacted me on social media as a publisher in the United States, after which I had the honor of naming a few of his books while he inspired two of my most notable poetry collections, including Salt and Sorrow. Our friendship led me to learn more about the history, culture, and literary traditions of India, a country for which I have a special fondness.

Sengupta’s literary corpus include writing, editing, translating, and publishing writers across the globe to bridge the communities. He was awarded the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the inaugural Nilim Kumar National Honour (2024). I have since read all of his books and published him twice with Reflections on Salvation (2016) and Oneness (2024) under the imprint Transcendent Zero Press. He is a paradoxical man of letters, and his efforts sustain a bridge between the United States and India through literature. His poetry is fresh and cryptic, sometimes leaving the reader frustrated for meaning, but it is also ripe with cultural references and idioms that astound me. Finding his work intriguing, I sat down for a thoughtful conversation to better understand this literary figure.

Dustin Pickering (DP): Kiriti, you have authored numerous poetry collections and are established as a translator. Your translation of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous has received exceptional praise worldwide. You are also a publisher with Hawakal in India (New Delhi and Kolkata). Surely, these roles must clash at times! I am curious about why you believed you should translate Chowdhury in particular.

Kiriti Sengupta (KS): My roles clash all the time, Dustin. And they create a clamor when they jostle with each other. (Laugh) So, when I write, I indite my own thoughts. When I translate, I slip into another’s shoes. When I work as a publisher, I think of the readers who would buy the product and whether it would be worth their funds. Money is precious. All these roles influence my psyche in multiple ways, and the Kiriti Sengupta you are talking with will invariably lead to all these attributes rolled into one. So, when someone calls me multi-faceted, I flash a broad smile, thinking I have no choice but to surrender helplessly to my creative instincts to sport several hats.

READ MORE…

Spacetime/Timespace: On Translating the Poems of Yau Ching

January 16, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Chenxin Jiang, Steve Bradbury, and Xiao Yue Shan

Ideally, of course, the reader gets to do their own decoding, their own word puzzling, via this and any other translation.

In regards to each translator’s unique and inimitable performance of their craft, Chenxin Jiang and Steve Bradbury here take their own stab at translating the poems of Yau Ching, followed by a translation and interview in which they discuss their methodology, the particular challenges of the Chinese language, and the purpose of having multiple translations of a single work.

The work of Hong Kong writer and filmmaker Yau Ching ranges across mediums of cinema, criticism, and poetry to address themes of gender, sexuality, and colonialism, building a corpus that is as philosophically engaging as it is intimate and emotionally prismatic. In the five poems published as part of our Fall 2015 issue, Yau displays her capacity for creating surprising images with powerful social and personal resonances, bringing in prevalent crises of contemporary consciousness and political instability while suffusing the lines with a confessional edge: “I am my mom’s / exemplar of a beautiful life / this fills me with suspicion of myself        and the world / that represents me.” A full bilingual collection of Yau’s poems, For now I am sitting here growing transparent, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press in the US and Balestier in the UK, translated with a particular instinct for playfulness and musicality by Chenxin Jiang. Here, Jiang and fellow translator Steve Bradbury—whom Jiang credits for introducing her to Yau’s writing—take their own distinct approaches at translating the poem “時空,” and in the interview that follows, they discuss the craft of working with poetry, as well as their differences and admirations for one another’s work. It’s curious to see the variance in the resulting translations, as well as the meanings that can be derived from their interstices and collisions, giving new insight to the hermeneutics of reading and the technicalities of language.

時空

時間如影在路
英文的思念叫長
我長—長——的想妳
垂下兩隻袖兩隻褲腳伸長手指腳指伸長
每一條頭髮與眉毛
拖在地上如根
一隻黑鳥飛過
細細的影子在樹
葉子散落一地

中文的寂寞叫空
一張白白的稿紙
「喂，再來情詩三首！」
半透明沒一個影子
世界很大而我短短的
坐在這裏　愈坐愈透明
沒有文字可填滿
我四面八方的空
與前前後後的長

Timespace

Translated by Steve Bradbury

Time is like a shadow along a road
The English word longing is called long
To long, I long, for you
My sleeves, pantlegs, fingers and toes lengthen
Each hair on my head and brow
Trails along the ground like mangrove roots
A black bird flits by
Thin shadows across the trees
Leaves littering the ground

Loneliness in Chinese can be called kong
Empty, hollow, void, a blank
Sheet of very white writing paper
“Three more poems and make it snappy!”
A translucency that casts no shadow
The world is so large yet I am so short and brief
The more I sit here the more translucent I become
Without a word to fill the plenitude
Of kong all the compass round
Stretching before and after

Spacetime

Translated by Chenxin Jiang

Time is like a shadow cast on the road
The English word longing has length in it
I long—long——for you
My sleeves pant legs lengthen fingers and toes lengthen
every single hair on my head and brow
stretches downwards trailing on the ground like banyan roots
a black bird flies by
casting its slender shadow on the tree
Leaves scatter

Loneliness in Chinese is empty
An empty sheet of lined paper
“Hey you, three more love poems!”
translucent it has no shadow
the world is big and for now I am
sitting here     growing transparent
No words can fill up
how empty I am on all sides
and, in front and behind, how long

READ MORE…

Gestures of the Light, Shadow of Things: Kayvan Tahmasebian on Persian Poetry and Activist Translation

January 9, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Why should we accept the universal validity of the categories that the West creates for self-description?

Born and raised in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, Dr. Kayvan Tahmasebian is a writer and scholar whose work examines Persian literature’s place in the constellations of what is labeled as ‘world literatures’, and a poet and translator working on Persian, English, and French. Dr. Tahmasebian’s co-translation of House Arrest (with Rebecca Ruth Gould, Arc Publications, 2022) by Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh was recently shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, and he has translated and studied Persian-language texts from ancient Persian astrology and dream writing to contemporary Iranian modernist poetry.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Tahmasebian on his translations from the Persianate literary world, both modern and from antiquity, as well as the potential expansion of activism through translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): First of all, congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation for co-translating Hasan Alizadeh’s avant-garde House Arrest (Arc Publications, 2022). You also worked with Rebecca Ruth Gould on your translation of High Tide of the Eyes (2019) by Bijan Elahi, one of the figureheads of Iranian modernist literature. Could you tell us the experience of translating both Alizadeh and Elahi?

Kayvan Tahmasebian (KT): Bijan Elahi is a highly experimental poet and translator in modern Persian poetry. He moves through different language registers—formal, colloquial, archaic, even obsolete ones. He’s also a difficult poet. His poetry is intricate and can be quite challenging in its images and structures. For me, translating Elahi was an exercise in trying to grasp his poetic fluidity. And by ‘grasp,’ I mean something similar to what a photographer does when capturing a fleeting moment—seizing something that’s just passing by. The tough part was that his language is so volatile, and the perspectives he offers on his subjects can be so intuitive, that they sometimes clash with English poetry, which tends to be more discursive and analytical.

Hasan Alizadeh is almost the opposite of Elahi in many ways. It is the simple, the everyday, that speaks through his poetry. But that simplicity is deceptive. It’s a mask that hides the real delicacy of his poems. What I really admire about Alizadeh is how he uncovers the subtleties of spoken Persian, the little hidden dramas that play out in the unnoticed corners of everyday conversations. Translating his poems was about getting in touch with that extraordinary intimacy in his language. I actually had the chance to meet Mr. Alizadeh in Tehran in 2023, and it was fascinating. The way he recited his own poems, the way he seemed almost surprised by the stories his poems tell—about chance encounters, moments of forgetfulness, or the magical appeal of everyday objects—was fantastic.  READ MORE…

‘My writer friends used to say: you’re writing Trainspotting in Comala’: An Interview with Mateo García Elizondo

January 8, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Elisabeth Goemans

When you're reading, you're always in that painful or uncomfortable present.

I first came across Mateo García Elizondo in the 2021 Granta issue featuring the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists; the compilation included his short story ‘Capsule’, about a man subjected to life-long, unbearable suffering in an absurd, dystopian penitentiary system. Struggling to find their way in unwelcoming environments, from outer space to the famously liminal city of Tijuana, García Elizondo’s characters are often those who are marginalised, those we don’t even bother taking pity in, those who quietly tell their story while the world refuses to listen. With empathy but without sentimentality, García Elizondo grants the reader a privileged insight in the mind of his protagonists.

How to escape the eternal, unbearable present is one of the questions guiding the protagonist in García Elizondo’s 2019 debut novel, evocatively titled Una cita con la Lady, which follows a drug addict who is ready to leave the world of the living behind. Tired of losing and hoping never to return, he travels to his final destination, the small village of El Zapotal, accompanied by the last of his opium and heroin stash. The novel explores the blurred and unidentifiable boundaries between life and death, and as the protagonist wanders through the village, unresolved heartbreak from the past imposes itself, complicating the execution of his ultimate project. Awarded the City of Barcelona Award and previously translated into Greek, Arabic, Italian, French and Portuguese, Una cita con la Lady was published in June 2024 as Last Date in El Zapotal, in the translation of Robin Myers and from the Edinburgh-based Charco Press.

It was a pleasure to talk to Mateo García Elizondo, who is a big fan of Asymptote himself. Our conversation ranged across literature, screenwriting, meditation, the richness of the Spanish language, influences, and the privilege to work on non-commissioned projects.

Elisabeth Goemans (EG): Congratulations on the English translation of your novel, Last Date in El Zapotal. It’s not the first time you have been translated.

Mateo Garcia Elizondo (MGE): Thank you. Yes, the novel has been translated into various languages now, but the only ones I have been able to read are the French, English, and Italian—as well as the Portuguese version that came out not long ago.

EG: How is your relationship with Robin Myers, your English translator?

MGE: Well, with the French and the English translation I could meddle a little bit more with the translation, and it was a great pleasure to do that with Robin. I mean, Robin does all the heavy lifting, but I always tell her what I like. Sometimes she accepts my suggestions, other times she does not. And I always trust the translator. READ MORE…

A Long and Winding Way to Go: Luka Lei Zhang on Working-Class Writings from Asia

January 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to use the framework of ‘working-class literature’ to explore the transformations and tensions in literary texts.

Through the lens of comparative literature, the ancestry of working-class writings and the literature of labour trails from Russian novelist Maxim Gorky’s Maть (Mother, 1906) to South Africa’s Black migrant theatre, from the oeuvre of Argentine poet Elías Castelnuovo to the biographies of working-class Irish writers, and includes the many proletarian writers collectives springing up in response to the social moment: France’s Socialisme ou Barbarie, Japan’s Puroretaria bunka undō and Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei, Sri Lanka’s Dabindu, and United Kingdom’s ‘The Fed’ or the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.

As Macau-based Chinese scholar-translator Dr. Luka Lei Zhang writes in The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (2024), the literary production of contemporary Asian workers ‘are often subjected to intricate social forces and power dynamics’, and it ‘would be a mistake to reduce these contradictions to simple good/bad, political/apolitical, and individual/collective oppositions’. It is this simplistic dichotomy that is contested by Asian Workers Stories, an anthology of fiction and nonfiction prose produced outside the fortresses of the canon, the middle-class literati, and the academe. Dr. Zhang, the anthology’s editor, brings her expertise as a scholar (and at-times translator) of working-class writers Chong Han, Tan Kok Seng, and Md Sharif Uddin of Singapore, as well as Mengyu, Wan Huashan, and Shengzi of China. In a 2023 interview, she confessed: ‘Personally and politically, working-class literature holds a special place in my heart’, going on to name Gorky, Annie Ernaux, Xu Lizhi, Takiji Kobayashi, and Filipino migrant worker-poet Rolinda Onates Española as her favourites.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Zhang on migrant workers writing from East Asia, Southeast and South Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the expansion of working-class writings within the larger body of the Asian literary canon.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Cheers to the anthology Asian Workers Stories! Apart from wanting to contribute a new dimension to Asian working-class literature (considering most existing books are either scholarly or poetry collections originally written in English), what are other motivations that impelled the creation of this anthology? 

Luka Lei Zhang (LLZ): I’ve worked on workers’ writings for several years and have encountered many great storytellers. Although several anthologies of workers’ poetry exist, short stories are translated and collected on a lesser basis. My main goal was to organise the writers in this region and, in this way, show that their work is valued and that they do not write alone. I am fortunate to know many Asian worker writers personally, which had allowed me to approach them and discuss the project, and their interest and encouragement motivated me to pursue the work further. I met Hard Ball Press’s publisher, Tim Sheard, at the Working-Class Studies Conference in 2019. He invited me to publish working-class writings with him—and that’s how it happened. READ MORE…

The It Girl in Her Own Words: Helen O’Horan on Translating Izumi Suzuki

December 19, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Bella Creel

I wanted the translation to feel more emotionally driven, and that’s what I prioritized.

In her first novel to be published in English, the counterculture icon Izumi Suzuki draws from her real-life experiences to craft a musical, vulnerable portrait of nonconformism during a tumultuous era in Japan. From passion to nihilism, dreaminess to self-destruction, Set My Heart on Fire is unafraid of contradiction in its approach to the self, inscribing mind and body in all of its varying desire and directions. As our final Book Club selection for November, Suzuki proves to be a particularly resonant writer for contemporary readers in her audacious pursuit of pleasure and mutability in identity, all told in a vivid voice conjured by translator Helen O’Horan. In this interview, O’Horan speaks to us about how Suzuki channels a sense of disconnection, her knack for performativity, and the centrism of human relationships in her literary work.

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.   

Bella Creel (BC): How did you initially discover Izumi Suzuki’s work, and what drew you to her writing?

Helen O’Horan (HOH): I first worked on a short story for Suzuki’s collection, Terminal Boredom, just before the pandemic. I joined the project relatively late; by then, the reports had been written and the research done, so I want to credit the other translators and the publisher. That’s how I first learned about her work.

After that story, I really got into her writing—the timing was significant too. During the pandemic, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from my mind and body. My work as a translator wasn’t disrupted much since most of my clients are outside the United Kingdom, and it’s all online, but I started feeling like my mind and body were splitting apart.

That sense of disconnect reminded me of Suzuki’s writing—she often describes her body as something separate from her mind. Her work resonated with me at that moment, though of course, that’s just my interpretation. READ MORE…