Language: Chinese

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Charlie Ng

Literary festivals and publications from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the world report on literary celebrations in Bulgaria and historical archives of Chinese literature in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Plovdiv, one of Bulgaria’s oldest cities and the European Capital of Culture for 2019, recently hosted the twentieth anniversary edition of its renowned literary festival: Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”). For twenty years, the month of June has seen both established and up-and-coming authors sit side by side, trying to unravel the mysteries of the written word. Among the most notable participants this year were Zdravka Evtimova, winner of the Chudomir National Award; the writer and translator Chavdar Tsvenov; the literary historian Cleo Protohristova; the critic Boris Minkov, known for his masterful editorial skills; the publisher Svetlozar Zhelev, who takes pleasure in mediating literary friendships; and the experimental writer Rene Karabash.

Over the course of approximately two weeks, the various hosts and their audiences reviewed some of the best that contemporary Bulgarian fiction has to offer. However, the festivities weren’t restricted to the local literary stars, but also included prominent international guests such as the Ukrainian novelist Haska Shyyan—who commented on her new book in light of the dreadful developments in Ukraine that have shaken the world over the past few months. Another event of note was the special talk devoted to the twentieth-century Bulgarian poet and translator Atanas Dalchev, and the relatively unfamiliar circumstances surrounding his life in Thessaloniki and Istanbul.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 17, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Eva Wissting, and Jacqueline Leung

New books, events, and publishing houses from the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the world report on new acclaimed translations from the Philippines, Hong Kong writers discussing art-marking during political restrictions on their freedom of expression, and a new publishing house in Sweden focused on investigative journalism and books translated from Swedish. Read on to find out more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Literary translation in the Philippines is more alive than ever. Asymptote contributor Bernard Capinpin won the 2022 PEN America’s Heim Grant for his translation of the late Edel Garcellano’s sci-fi novel Maikling Imbestigasyon ng Isang Mahabang Pangungulila (Kalikasan Press, 1990) [A Brief Investigation to a Long Melancholia]. Also, obstetrician and travel writer Alice Sun Cua’s landmark project with Sto. Niño de Cebu Publishing House “ferried” post-Spanish Civil War novelist Carmen Laforet’s Nada into Hiligaynon language.

Aimed at enhancing the Filipino “diasporic cultural footprint around the world,” the country’s National Book Development Board offers translation grants to authors and publishers of children’s literature, classical and contemporary prose, graphic literature, as well as historico-cultural works written in Philippine languages (Ilocano, Cebuano, Waray, Hiligaynon, Meranaw, Tausug, and Kinaray-a) and foreign languages (German, Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese). This year, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts also conferred the Rolando S. Tinio Translator’s Prize to SEAWrite awardee Roberto T. Añonuevo for his translation of the late National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista’s phenomenological study Words and Battlefields: A Theoria on the Poem (De La Salle University Publishing House, 1998) [Mga Salita at Larangan: Isang Pagninilay sa Tula] from English.

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One for Another: A Conversation on Translation from the Chinese

June 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan and Zuo Fei

It seems to me that the world is a better place to live in simply because we translators are eternally making contributions to the Tower of Babel.

In Antena’s “Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” it is stated: “The politics of translation make us ultraskeptical and ultracommitted.” As such, the discourse and dialectics surrounding this artform are in an ever-evolving state of being challenged, argued, and explained. In the following conversation, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses her work in editing Chinese language translations with fellow translator Zuo Fei, touching on their separate values, priorities, and approaches.

Xiao Yue Shan: Translation is an intensely personal experience—perhaps the most transparent reflection of what occurs when idea is transmuted through the individual mind’s various channels. This is why we, as translators, are continually struck by our work’s mutating forms, its evolving methods, and continue to conversate with such intensity about our own logic; when one speaks of translation, one speaks of a way of seeing the world. When we were editing translations together, you wrote me a letter in response to some edits I sent on a final draft of some poems; in it, you stated that you believe in literal translation, in seeming opposition to my approach of preserving the ineffable by creating anew.

It’s interesting because we are both poets, and I’ve always assumed—presumptuously—that poets are all apart of the same passionate investigation, in which consciousness touches something and brings it to life, shaped in a precise and resolved concentration of words. In translation, there is no transposition of this consciousness, which is a singular encounter between the poet, their knowledge, and all that it reaches and contacts. So, the translator must take the place of the poet, and—with intelligence but without egoism—give the original poem something it can live with.

Essentially, there is a distinction between a poem’s components and its poetics. It seems to be a corrupt exchange should a text be translated word-for-word, when one acknowledges the multiple roles that words play in literature; they do not simply transmit meaning, but also voice, history, and music. Could you tell me why you work from a more literal approach?

Zuo Fei: I prefer literal translation to free translation simply because, in the time of science and technology, people believe translators should strictly follow the original text. By literal translation, I don’t mean word-for-word, which does not work for poetry in many cases; my intention is that we should adhere to the original work as much as we can, and put it into a target language according to our desires. That is to say, if translation is an impossible job, we try to increase the odds of it being possible. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2022

June 13, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New work from China, Tibet, and Slovenia!

In this month of highlights from the world of translated literature, we’re spotlighting three singular, wide-ranging, and immersive texts. From the Chinese, Shawn Hoo discusses the philosophical and journeying collection from celebrated poet Xi Chuan. From the Tibetan, Suhasini Patni reviews a dark, compassionate novel of womanhood and urbanity from Tsering Yangkyi. And from the Slovenian master Drago Jančar, Eva Wissting gives a look into his latest novel, on how personhood and identity survive the ravages of war.

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Bloom and Other Poems by Xi Chuan, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein, New Directions, 2022

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

In the title and opening poem of Xi Chuan’s (西川) Bloom and Other Poems, a simple verb like “bloom” begins lyrically and unsuspectingly enough—

if you’re going to bloom then bloom to my rhythm
close your eyes for one second breathe for two be silent for three then bloom

—but in the course of its exuberant and exacting repetitions across six pages, the action soon blossoms into a sophisticated geometry. At times, the verb seems to indicate an instructive concern for those new to the world (“bloom a pear blossom in case the nape of your neck is cold”). Other times, we hear the speaker issuing something of an injunction or a dare: “bloom / unleash a deep underground spring with your rhizome.” In a poem structured around insistence (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s understanding of how repetition works), Lucas Klein—who also curated and translated Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito—constructs a resonant architecture, allowing the echoes to bounce off the pages’ acoustics, often to rhapsodic effect: “bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms / bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical” and later: “bloom three thousand boundless universes / and string up and beat any beast that refuses to bloom.”

In English, though not in Mandarin, bloom sits uncomfortably close to blood; in this titular poem, this simple word—across both languages—operates with an undertone of violence, belying its vivacious exhortations until the end, ending up as a verb that has swelled beyond its initial premise. The poems that come after “Bloom” all seem to share this restless inflation of the poetic image and line, each taking the verse to its various geometric limits, upon where it strains to meet other worlds. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 3, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Charlie Ng, and MARGENTO

Book fairs, award shows, and passings from Hong Kong, Spain, and Iraq.

This week, our editors from around the globe report on recent literary awards in Hong Kong, examine the links between the literary scenes in Spain and Romania, and reflect on the passing of a revolutionary Iraqi poet. Read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong

The awards ceremony of the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards was conducted online on 22 May. Renowned Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheng Yin) was honored with the Life Achievement Award for her tremendous contribution to Hong Kong literature. Moreover, essayist Tung Chiao won the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts, and fiction writer Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung was awarded Artist of the Year for the literary arts category. While two works by Tse, Snow and Shadow and The Door, are available in the English language, Tung Chiao’s works have yet to be translated, despite the fact that he is already a highly acclaimed author in Chinese literary circles.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 20, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Josefina Massot

Bringing news from Argentina, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

Book fairs, festivals, competitions, new publications—the literary world this week is filled with a flurry of events and announcements. From the ongoing debate between culture and commerce in Bueno Aires, to new releases from Hong Kong icons Dung Kai-Cheung and Xi Xi, to a celebration of poetry debuts in Haskovo, to a renewal of a beloved book festival in Karlskrona, the world of letters has no shortage of things to offer.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Buenos Aires

In his opening speech at the 46th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, author Guillermo Saccomanno issued a complaint: “When we talk about a fair,” he declared, “we’re talking about commerce. This is a trade fair rather than a cultural one, even if it claims to be the latter. At any rate, it represents an understanding of culture as commerce.” What’s more, he added, the country’s dire economic situation does not bode well for the Spanish-speaking world’s largest industry event.

Saccomanno was both right and wrong: right that the Fair’s pursuits are largely commercial, wrong that they’d be somewhat of a bust this time around. Perhaps to make up for two years of pandemic torpor, over 1.3 million visitors crowded La Rural’s sprawling halls in just under three weeks, from April 28 to May 16—a 30% increase relative to pre-pandemic figures. Sales, too, went up by about 10-20%.

In addition to bestselling genre sensations (American John Katsenbach among them), the Fair featured critically acclaimed writers from over forty countries. Stand-outs included Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Chileans Diamela Eltit and Paulina Flores, Spaniard Jorge Carrión, and locals Mariana Enriquez, Selva Almada, and Guillermo Martínez. There were over 1,500 book stands on display, helmed by everything from multimedia conglomerates to artisanal press co-ops, as well as over 1,000 programmed events that spanned readings, conferences, panels, book signings, and courses for every taste and age group.

It would be impossible, given this near embarrassment of riches, to mention just one or two based on quality alone. I’ll appeal to our journal’s métier, then, and focus on a few events related to the art (and, yes, the commerce) of translation. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 6, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Asa Chen Zhang, Peera Songkünnatham, and Suhasini Patni

Prizes, poetry contests, and new works from India, Thailand, and China!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on publishing trends in India, the memorialization of the author Wat Wanlayangkoon in Thailand, and an exciting new development in Chinese to English interpretive translation, led by the Accent Society. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Temperatures are soaring and the country is experiencing grueling heatwaves. Indians have taken to social media to critique the Modi government’s negligent response to the climate crisis. Many are also sharing their memories of the devastating and nightmarish second wave of the coronavirus that led to numerous deaths in the country this time last year.

The pro-Hindutva, right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party is known to instigate violence, especially against Muslims, in the name of the Hindu religion. In the latest reform to eradicate voices of dissent, verses by Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been dropped from the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) class 10 textbook. Faiz, one of the most celebrated Urdu poets and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, addressed the issues of military dictatorships and tyranny in Pakistan. According to Scroll.in, “the verses were part of the ‘Religion, Communalism and Politics—Communalism, Secular State’ segment of the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s textbook called “Democratic Politics II.” The two poems are “Let Us Walk in the Market in Shackles” and “Upon Returning from Dhaka.”

In 2021, the New India Foundation (NIF) announced its inaugural grant for writing books relating to India’s history. The three winners of the NIF Translation Fellowship were chosen from ten Indian languages and each awarded a stipend of INR 6 lakhs for a period of six months with mentorship opportunities as well as publishing and editorial support. The three winners are Venkateswar Ramaswamy (literary translator) and Amlan Biswas (statistician) who will translate Nirmal Bose’s Diaries 1946-47 from Bangla; NS Gundur (academician and literary historian) who will translate DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from Kannada; and Rahul Sarwate (academician and historian) who will translate Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad from Marathi. More can be read about the winners here.

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Spring News: A new educational guide, two paid Special Features, and a final call to join our team!

May 5, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Whether you are an educator, a translator, or a potential volunteer, check out the following opportunities to be a part of our mission!

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Calling all teachers: the Spring 2022 Educator’s Guide is now available for download here! Whether your purview is high school or university students, we invite you to visit the Asymptote for Educators web page to discover new ways to bring translation into your classroom. With writing prompts and reading suggestions galore, this free resource based on articles from the Spring 2022 issue will be sure to spice up any literary discussion. Share the wealth with all your educator friends and be sure to fill out this survey to give us feedback. In this age of division, we can all play a part, however small, to foster empathy across cultures. Grab a copy of the new Educator’s Guide now.

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Considering a career in world literature? Then you should know that Asymptote provides the perfect training ground! (Former team members have gone on to take up positions at Penguin Books, Dalkey Archive, and Words Without Borders.) And now is the perfect time to apply! We’ve just entered Phase II of our mid-year recruitment drive—concentrating on editorial and marketing roles this time. Among the newly available openings are Visual Editor, Nonfiction Editor, Social Media Manager, and Assistant Director of Outreach. If you’d like to join us behind the scenes, check out the newly available positions and apply today. READ MORE…

It Is Wonderful to Survive: On the Literature of China’s One-Child Policy

April 27, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

The literature of witness is not the act, but that journey upon the very long landscape of a single because.

The population control policies of China have been a long, treacherous trial of the invasion of nationhood into the most private corners of personhood. In the following essay, Xiao Yue Shan discusses the literature written under this continual interrogation, the performance of autobiography, and how the intensely personal can come to elucidate the immense.

Halfway through Nanfu Wang’s documentary, One Child Nation, the scale of China’s family planning policies begins to hint towards their true proportions—violence that moves past the triangulation of parent, child, and state, towards a vast chaos of capital and globalism. Following a series of tender but unequivocal interviews—in which the director confronts her own family’s trauma of child abandonment and death—Wang addresses the sensational story of a family who had made a living out of selling found children to orphanages, before being convicted and imprisoned for human trafficking. In an interview with the household’s late matriarch, she speaks without hesitation; the amount received for the first child she handed over was 700 RMB—about 115 USD. The camera, both attentive to and suspicious of her watery gaze, makes few observations of guilt or sorrow. She has that same discrepant, hard youth of many rural Chinese women, an aura of won stoicism and fearlessness, even as she relays the brutal details: “I was inconsolable . . . and the orphanage director [said]: ‘You found her? Her own family abandoned her. Why the fuck are you crying?’”

More Than One Child, a memoir by Shen Yang of “China’s Invisible Generation,” opens with an assertation of presence: “I have to say . . . how we lived. Otherwise, our entire generation really will be buried in the abyss of history.” This mythos of selfhood, in which one rises amongst many to speak as if chosen, is defined by the threat of absence. For a country that has perfected its weaponization of silence, even the sheer presence of an individual voice can be radical. Such is how the book makes its statement, a cover unignorably red in the hands, marking itself as necessary by underlining our fear of silence.

Born second to parents that would eventually go on to have four daughters in total, Shen Yang’s invisibility was a chronological certainty. Neither preciously firstborn nor the only excess child of her family, she recalls being first shuffled to the guardianship of doting grandparents, before the arrival of younger and younger sisters inevitably pushed her to the margins. In the tempestuous years of childhood, she moved through the households of extended family and through the dejections of neglect, ostracization, and loneliness. These trials, described in detail, are what compose the majority of her memoirs—episodes threaded with rage, resentment, and yearning scattered against the artless landscape of rural Henan.

It’s difficult to address Shen Yang’s memoir as a simple work of literature. The writing follows the natural misalignments of raw emotion, wavering with indignance and brashness; it feels much like looking at the mirror-image of oneself as a teenager, enraged by worldly injustices as refracted through the prism of selfhood. The aggrieved consciousness of a recklessly emerging identity pervades each recounting of hand-me-down clothing, schoolyard bullying, and corporal punishment. Explosive tantrums—on the part of both children and adults—populate the accounts, balanced out only by equally acrimonious memories of seething, silent hatred. All the players in this vicious game of attachments are intricated in the tenuous balance-game of reluctant, mutual reliances: heartless, cruel, and ugly. Even Shen Yang herself, fragile and explosive, is cast in a dejected shadow. Yet—how can it be otherwise? The text never proclaimed anything other than testimony. I have to say how we lived. The directive of truth-saying, of the voice as a passageway by which history travels, was there from its very beginning. The witness needs not be graceful—only believable. The truth is not the work of poets alone. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Josefina Massot, and Kristina Tatarian

News this week from Argentina, Armenia, and Hong Kong!

As the scope of literature continues to take in the shifting realms of experiences and global relations, our editors from around the world report the latest updates, from festivals, activisms, and the spotlighting of vital voices both new and familiar. Read on to find out more!

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last week, we mourned the loss of the great Sergio Chejfec, whose work spanned grammars, genres, and geographies. Chejfec spent his time between his native Buenos Aires and New York City, where he lived and taught at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. During a 2018 interview with Télam, he spoke about the impact of migration on his work: “In my experience, moving from one country to another accentuates the passage of time: the gap isn’t merely geographic. Exiles are far away from their countries, but also from the network of simultaneities they were accustomed to while living there; notable among these is language.” Fortunately, gaps and absences can be bridged through translation. Chejfec’s works are available in French, German, Portuguese, and English, and US readers can delight in them via Open Letter.

Meanwhile, Other Press is on the verge of releasing Kit Maude’s rendition of Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (incidentally, Sosa Villada’s latest has just come out in Spanish). Equal parts gritty and tender, Bad Girls narrates a trans woman’s exploits at the margins of society; a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2020, it’s bound to take America by storm. The award’s previous winner, Maria Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, just out from Catapult, was also widely celebrated upon its reception. The novel, translated by Thomas Bunstead, follows an auction house employee on the trail of an elusive forger; like Gainza’s The Optic Nerve, it draws from art and literature to great effect. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, Kristina Tatarian, and Matilde Ribeiro

Dispatches from Ukraine, India, and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the globe are bringing news concerning the pressing issues of our time, from literature and its manifold intersections. From Ukraine, writers are publishing pertinent and vivid texts within the throes of war. In India, the Jaipur Literary Festival boasts an impressive line-up, including most recent Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. In Hong Kong, the prestigious Liang Shih-chiu Literature Prize announces its winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Ukraine

Nominated by the Polish Institute of Sciences, one of the most promising young writers in Ukraine, Serhiy Zhadan, is in this year’s runner-up list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his most notable works is The Orphanage, a novel about the war in Ukraine translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.

Reinforced by the international community, many Ukrainian writers have been extremely prolific, having emotive, cool-headed reads published in the international press; certain autofictional pieces provide the public with crucial information while relegating to the outside world the feelings of our own. Among them is the war diary of Yuliya Iliukha from Kharkiv—authentic, full of bitterness, hatred, and a sense of impotence; the Kyiv chronicle by Oleksandr Mykhed, translated by Marina Gibson, starts with a tentative description of his unfinished first play, interrupted by the start of the war; a letter from Kyiv by Luyba Yakimchuk, translated by Jennifer Croft, tells us about the power of language to turn into a gunshot.

TAULT, with Zenia Tompkins as its head, has encouraged the war efforts of Ukrainian writers who have laid down their pens and joined the fight for freedom. In the words of TAULT’s associate director Kate Tsurkan, literary translators and writers around the world must join the global translating efforts to “elevate Ukrainian voices right now.” This urgency is felt in the recent publications of Ukrainian literature. Stanislaw Aseyev’s In Isolation—for which he was imprisoned and tortured—speaks about the influence of propaganda in eastern Ukraine, as well as how the place and its people have transformed after the invasion. Another notable work is Larysa Denysenko’s new children’s novel Maya and Her Friends, published in the UK. It is a philanthropic and literary statement about how war ends or cripples our future—an urgent appeal with the “weapon of words” to the international community. In the darkest times like these, it is these kinds of stories we tell our children that have the power to discredit the malignant justifications of evil—for good. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2022

March 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Eva Wissting, Ka Man Chung, and Laurel Taylor

New works this week from China, Sweden, Italy, and Argentina!

March feels like a month of renewal, and our selections of translated literatures this week presents a wondrous and wide-ranging array of original thinking, ideations, philosophies, and poetics. From a revelatory collection of Chinese science fiction, to art critic María Gainza’s novel of forgery and authenticity, to Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays on writing, and a debut collection of poetry from Iranian-Swedish poet Iman Mohammed—there is no shortage of discovery amidst these texts. Read on to find out more!

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The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, Tordotcom Publishing, 2022

 Review by Ah-reum Han

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a trailblazing new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, created by and featuring the works of an all-female and nonbinary team of writers, editors, and translators. As a lifelong fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre but new to contemporary Chinese literary scene, I found this collection a true gift—warm and generous to the novice like myself, for whom Chinese literature has only ever been accessible through translation. Under the meticulous curatorial vision of Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, the stories and essays within celebrate decorated and emerging voices alike, indicating at an exciting future of sci-fi and fantasy for digital natives in our culturally porous world.

As you enter the collection, leave everything at the door and hold on tight. This book will whisk you away from one uncanny valley to the next—from a world where children raise baby stars as pets, to a near future where parenting is turned into a computer game, to a fisherman’s village where they practice the art of dragonslaying, to a woman on the road mysteriously burdened with a corpse, and much more. The title story, “The Way Spring Arrives” by Wang Nuonuo (trans. Rebecca F. Kuang), situates itself amidst the babbling creeks where giant fish carry the rhythm of the seasons on its back, delivering spring from year to year. In “A Brief History of Beinakan Disaster as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu (trans. Ru-Ping Chen), we are caught in a post-apocalyptic world, where people live under the threat of devastating heat currents and history pervades as literal memory capsules passed down by a select few. Despite the imaginative heights these stories reach, each creates enough space in its strangeness for us to reexamine our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Often, folklore and fantasy crosses into sci-fi and allegory, and readers are left feeling unsettled in even the most familiar landscapes.

Between these stories, you’ll find essays on genre, gender, and translation that enrich the surrounding fictions; these intelligent texts help orient readers in socio-political, historical, and global contexts, while looking to the future of this young genre. In “Net Novels and the She Era,” Xueting Christine Ni discusses the role the internet has played in disrupting gender norms within publishing—particularly in the case of the popular online sci-fi serials. In Jing Tsu’s essay on the collection at hand, she points out: “This volume shows that there is also a difference between science fiction about women and other marginalized genders and the ones written by them.” We also hear from translators, such as Rebecca F. Kuang, who writes about the symbiotic relationship between writer, translator, and reader—the choices implicit in the things left unsaid. “What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia is a playful de-reconstruction of the famous English pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—as both story and essay, illuminating the act of translation in a modern world of search engines, artificial intelligence, translation software, and media. As the author notes: “intersexuality is the dominant mode to create as well as to read most of the works in our time: quotation, collage, tribute, deconstruction, parody.” This collection pioneers its own conversation around its stories. We are paused at intervals to consider: who are we really, and where do we go from here? READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

February 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Chen Xianfa

January 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Romaine Scott

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems by the Lu Xun Literary Prize-winning writer Chen Xianfa. Chen’s meditative poems often begin from the plain contemplation of a minute object—a butterfly, the rain, an earthworm—only to draw them into a larger field of philosophical ideas where language and nature’s presumed certainties are interrogated. Reflecting on her translation of these poems, Romaine Scott emphasises “the process of dissolving linguistic and cultural borders to arrive at The Third Shore,” invoking Yang Lian’s notion of translation as forging a new element. So too does Chen write: “There is no such thing as an expression set in stone,” observing a word’s numerous metamorphoses. Immerse yourself in the sparse beauty of Chen’s poems where even a speck of the world can be made anew. 

Lanruo Temple

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’
There is no such thing as an expression set in stone
Nor can I speak unequivocally of a gust of wind
and though the temple may be built upon a speck
of dust, it will, nonetheless, collapse from within
There are moments when a butterfly is motionless
‘To live’ requires fewer strokes of the pen than ‘to take wing’

Taking Shelter From the Rain

It’s raining. In the square many people are running about blindly
a piece of clothing held over their heads
Of course, they are not actually blind
their eyes are simply fixed on taking shelter from the rain

Before the square was built, this was a shantytown
beneath whose poor-quality
bitumen roofs
the smell of poverty, excitement and rebellion rubbed shoulders
with the tavern’s moon. Heaven knows how many nights we
toasted each other READ MORE…