Language: English

To The Beginning of Everything: Elton Uliana on Brazilian Lusophone Prose and Untranslatability

November 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Elton Uliana

We often encounter undecipherable difficulties in translation, but it is also true that we never entirely fail to translate.

My first encounter with Prêmio-Jabuti-winning Brazilian writer and dramaturg Carla Bessa was through Elton Uliana’s translation of her “After the Attack, the Woman,” published in the first volume of The Oxford Anthology of Translation, for which I was also a contributor. In Elton’s translation, Carla’s genre-bending prose—part crime noir, part narrative poetry, part journalistic account—stretches its numbing hands towards the Anglosphere, cutting across the enclosures of language and making us rethink the ever-evolving questions of genre. Active in the Lusophone translation scene, Elton is also part of the Brazilian Translation Club (BTC) at University College London (UCL) and the Portuguese-English Literary Translators Association. In the HarperCollins anthology Daughters of Latin America, he has translated the prose of Carla Bessa, Alê Motta, Carolina María de Jesús, and Conceição Evaristo. His translation of Evaristo into English is also included in the Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction (out last September from UCL Press).

In this interview, I spoke with Elton, currently in London, about his translations from and into the Brazilian Portuguese language, the landscape of contemporary Brazilian Lusophone prose, and the necessary confrontations among translators regarding ‘untranslatability’ and ‘equivalence’.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): There is multiplicity to the Brazilian Lusophone writers and texts you translate—actress and theatre director Carla Bessa, novelist and scholar Jacques Fux, short story writer Alê Motta, journalist Sérgio Tavares, children’s book author Ana Maria Machado, among others. I’m curious about your translation process: Are there parallelisms and variances, process-wise, in translating across the differing genres, aesthetics, and movements from which these writers write?

Elton Uliana (EU): I absolutely love working with the diversity of writers that are currently emerging from Brazil, like Carla Bessa, a writer that I have been working with a lot recently who has become a leading force in contemporary Lusophone fiction. (Bessa won the 2020 Prêmio Jabuti, the most prestigious literary prize in Brazil, and is currently being published globally).

I am also delighted to be working with Alê Motta, a master in concise social critique with a unique style of micro-fiction, and Conceição Evaristo, whose stories irresistibly incorporate the accents and oral tradition of Afro-Brazilian culture. All of them were recently published in Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzman and published by Amistad and HarperCollins.

It has also been wonderful to work with the incredibly talented Jacques Fux and his worldly-wise autofiction that, with touching lyricism and humor, takes us into a detailed and complex world of Jewish culture. Other favourites of mine that I have recently translated include Mário Araújo, Sérgio Tavares, and Ana Maria Machado, all prize-winning authors in their own right.

I am always interested in looking at authors who are doing something completely different with form. A common feature of my translation method, regardless of author, has to do with the musicality of the piece, the fine-tuning procedure of finding and developing appropriate aural features such as voice, rhythm, and tone in such a way that the translation becomes seductive and attractive to the reader.

For me there is a huge difference between translating, for example, a dramatic text, where words become physical and affect the body immediately, and a children’s story, which, even if it is meant to be read out loud, does not necessarily involve a performance. I guess it’s the same with poetry or a dialogue in a novel. I’m always aware of the context from which the piece I’m translating emerges and also the genre or kinds of genre it incorporates. Indeed the form develops and grows in the translation because of the context and the literary conventions and devices the author is exploring, experimenting with, or setting aside.

Another important translation focus for me is the dialogue. Patterns of speech in Portuguese are completely different to those in English. I find a useful technique is to read the speech out loud to myself—indeed, it is even more enriching and useful when I have other people or fellow translators to read the words out loud for me. Reflecting on how the rhythm can be configured and how the words sound and even feel in the mouth is something I am constantly considering as I progress with any translation, regardless of genre, sub-genre, or writer’s style.

AMMD: You are also a translator of legendary Afro-Brazilian storyteller Conceição Evaristo. Could you tell us about the experience of translating her work? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

November 13, 2024  |  in News  |  by Georgina Fooks, Joseph McAlhany, Julie Shi, Mary Hillis, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Sauvryn Linn, and Thuy Dinh

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

September 6, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest literary news from Mexico and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large share reflections on prose from Mexico and an event on women in translation in New York. From the wise words of a beloved centenarian writer to a reading celebrating ‘minority’ languages, read on to find out more!

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

“Prose is everything,” said Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale with cheeky irony. “I have a so-so relationship with poetry, but prose… it presents more challenges to me. Poetry is a matter of rhythm, of good or bad taste. But prose… prose is everything.”

Last year, Vitale reached the modest age of 100, and last week, with unparalleled lucidity, she inaugurated the Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y los Universitarios (Filuni), a book fair organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for students, academics, publishers, and writers. READ MORE…

The Teacher’s Task: Translation in a High School English Classroom

September 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Kena Chavva

They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?

Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own? 

It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.

For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:

In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.

Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 1, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

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

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

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

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Our Summer 2024 Edition Has Landed!

July 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Georgi Gospodinov, Patrick Autréaux, Ali Wajeeh, and Brigitte Giraud in a Special Feature themed on collectives

What stops a cancer from killing its host? What might have prevented a grandmother from dying in a refugee camp? What allows a Deliveroo rider to keep his dignity through itinerant gig-work? Perhaps it’s care: “the connections we have with others and the everyday actions we engage in for each other” (Micaela Brinsley). Care is a vital #lifesupport—a necessity up there with shelter and air. The problem is that it’s scarce, as attested to by our brand-new Summer edition spanning 35 countries and featuring an exclusive interview with 2023 Booker International Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s debut in English, as well as new translations of Paul Éluard and Hamid Ismailov. In settings that take us from hospital to hospital and even one assisted suicide facility, few find it, while others seek it with increasing desperation. Patrick Autréaux’s exquisite memoir of chemotherapy, for example, describes cancer as a “cold octopus . . . groping at me as though I were some bizarre object . . . embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.” In Inga Iwasiów’s startling novel, on the other hand, the dead moon jellyfish forming a “gelatinous strip between the water and the land” becomes a buffer between the cancer-stricken narrator and intentional death (which in Pooya Monshizadeh’s devastating Red Meadow is canceled without even a refund). Against absolute loss, Honora Spicer, in this issue’s poignant Brave New World Literature entry, opened the very text that she had requested to translate one week after her grandmother died—to the wide field of “se fue.”


The hospital is also the setting for fifty percent of this issue’s Criticism section. While Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom paints a portrait of intimate life at a psychiatric hospital, Vanessa Springora’s Consent begins with a teenager being hospitalized for rheumatism, only to receive not one but two additional diagnoses during her stay. Though it’s the second of these (by a predatory gynecologist) that sets off a nationwide scandal with legal consequences, the first diagnosis very much deserves pause as well: according to the psychologist who sees her, our protagonist is “disengaged from her peers . . . isolated and vulnerable”; she struggles to “join” with others in society. This malaise is directly echoed in the trio of pieces (from Switzerland, Denmark, and South Korea) heading off the entire issue. All three are heart-wrenching portraits of alienation that speak to the current epidemic of loneliness.

If this edition or in fact any issue of this magazine has alleviated your loneliness, I hope you’ll take just three minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member. Subscribing to our Book Club is a great way to take your support for world literature to the next level. If you’re interested in joining our team, good news: In addition to social media managers and marketing managers to join us on the frontlines of a more inclusive world literature, we’re inviting talented illustrators to come onboard as our guest artists—send us a link to your portfolio if you might be interested!

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From the Tale of Crafting a God: Afrizal Malna on the Afrizalian in Indonesian Poetry and Drama

July 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

In writing poetry, I experience this body-that-writes as a mutant in language; I feel a different person is present in myself.

In contemporary Indonesian literature, the writer Afrizal Malna has earned his own movement. Coined by Universitas Gadjah Mada professor Faruk HT, the Afrizalian has come to mean “seemingly disjointed images and ideas wrapped inside deceivingly simple phrases,” according to University of Auckland’s Zita Reyninta Sari, who goes on to elaborate the ways that it puts “everyday objects, especially those which in a glance are the most mundane … in the spotlight.” In his foreword to Afrizal’s Anxiety Myths, translator Andy Fuller also contributes to the definition: “An Afrizalian aesthetic is an engagement with the physicality of the city. How the body collides and rubs up against the textures of the city; of the varying intense urban spaces of everyday life.”

A SEA Write award-winning writer and artist sketched as “one of Indonesia’s best contemporary poets,” Afrizal’s works have been translated from their original Indonesian into languages such as Dutch, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and English, and have received accolades from literary award-giving bodies in Indonesia and beyond. To name one, Daniel Owen’s translation of Afrizal’s poems was the winner of Asymptote’s 2019 Close Approximations Prize.

 In this interview, I spoke with Afrizal—currently in Sidoarjo in East Java—with the help of Owen’s translation. Our discussion covers the Afrizalian literary movement within contemporary Indonesian poetry and drama; the terrains of linguistic hierarchies and reader reception; and his latest poetry collection Document Shredding Museum, originally published as Museum Penghancur Dokumen in 2013.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your latest collection, Document Shredding Museum, is now out from World Poetry Books. Could you tell us about the collection’s journey?

Afrizal Malna (AM): This edition of Document Shredding Museum is actually a revised, second edition of the book; the first edition was published by the Australia-based publisher Reading Sideways Press in 2019. In Indonesia, it was published a decade ago. The answer I’m giving you to this question now is probably quite different from how I would have responded back then.

This book was written between 2009 and 2013, over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime and the 1998 Reformasi. This regime ruled from 1966 to 1998 as a result of the 1965 tragedy—the massacre of members of the Indonesia Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) and those accused of being Communists, alongside the overthrow of the prior president Soekarno—which is still full of question marks even now. 2009 to 2013 was a time when the Indonesian people began questioning: what resulted from the 1998 Reformasi? Has there really been a fundamental change? We wondered if the powerful in Indonesia will always be prone to nepotism and its corollary effects—such as legal, ethical, and human rights violations, as well as corruption.

It was also during this time that I lived in Yogyakarta, in a Javanese cultural environment, occupying the boundary between village and city as a blurred space in Nitiprayan, Bantul (still a part of Yogyakarta). This became the moment for me to start from zero, and to allow my activities to mimic the wind, moving to find empty spaces and lowlands. This blank slate could shift the past—which was filled with hope for political change, as well as hope for literature and art to respond the 1998 Reformasi.

Global society at that time was facing social upheaval and natural disasters. When the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra happened, I was living in a house that I had rented from a family of farmers—an old, fragile Javanese house (rumah limasan) made of wood. The earthquake made the house convulse, and it was as if the house were dancing along to the earthquake’s rhythm in order to avoid collapse. When the earthquake stopped, not a single part was damaged, but many of the houses made of stone or cement had cracked or collapsed. It felt as if the wind had vanished. Leaves were stiff like in a painting, and the feeling of solitude, of quiet, was stifling.

That natural disaster, among many others, reflected the awareness that our bodies and our technology were paralyzed, powerless. Our ancestors, who had a long history of facing disasters, may have known how to read the portents of an upcoming disaster as an ancient form of mitigation, but this knowledge was not passed down to us. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 28, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, Miranda Mazariegos, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest from Canada, Mexico, and Latin America!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on fascinating digital archives, literary time capsules, and a prestigious award. From e-lit cult works, to ruminations on the future, to a podcast on Mexican literature, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Canada

“Why this huge line,” I wondered, “rolling out of the University of Victoria (UVic) McPherson Library?” The bright British Columbia sunlight, the sweet breeze across the greens, not even the irresistible campus café patios could prevent people from crowding in for one of the coolest events of the year. 

The “Hypertext & Art” exhibit, hosted by the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) from June 10 to June 14, was living up to the reputation and coverage it had already garnered thanks to its exhibition in Rome at Max Planck Institute for Art History in fall 2023 and the indefatigable work done in the field by its well-known and widely awarded curator, author Dene Grigar. The tagline of the exhibit was “A Retrospective of Forms,” and that is exactly what Grigar has been doing for quite a number of years now at the Electronic Literature Lab she leads at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV), where she archived over three hundred works of electronic literature and other media alongside dozens of vintage computers, software, and peripherals. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 14, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Mexico, the Philippines, and

This week, our editors-at-large take us many places, from one book fair by the sea and one in the neighborhood that was once home to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Read on for news about new bookstore openings, sonic poetry readings, and upcoming chapbook publications!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The International Book Fair of Coyoacán (FILCO) is taking place from June 7 to 16 in the historic Mexico City neighborhood internationally famous for having been the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The event features stands from more than one hundred and fifty Mexican and international publishers, as well as two hundred events ranging from concerts and dance performances to book launches and roundtables. Among this year’s panelists are cultural luminaries such as the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, the descendants of Mexican historical figures like Emiliano Zapata, and the writer and Asymptote contributor Elena Poniatowska.

I visited the book fair on Saturday, June 9 for a presentation of the most recent book by Rocío Cerón, globally acclaimed experimental Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor. Simultáneo sucesivo is a collection that explores the sonic power of language. During her talk, Cerón emphasized how we live surrounded by sound but rarely reflect on its affective qualities. She demonstrated these qualities by reading from her book with her characteristic performance style: repeating words, modulating her volume, pitch and tone, and varying her speed. This performance style has the power to minimize language’s semantic qualities and foreground its sonic properties. She also played tracks of sound art that accompany the collection. These feature Cerón’s voice, but also include drone, ambient, and electronic sounds that induce a trance on listeners. Cerón’s performance, abstract poetry, and sound art liberate both language and sound from their utilitarian and practical everyday purposes, inviting listeners and readers to experience the texture, timbre, and materiality of language beyond its meaning.

Simultáneo sucesivo is the third installment of Cerón’s trilogy challenging the way in which we relate to language. The other two books in the series are Spectio (2019) and Divisible corpóreo (2022), which Cerón has presented in events around the world. READ MORE…

A Metaphysical Mistake: On Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death

June 13, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sebastián Sánchez

Death, to Cannetti, is not one part of what we might call a life-cycle, but rather a metaphysical mistake.

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated from the German by Peter Filkins, Fitzcarraldo/New Directions, 2024

The fact that the twentieth century saw the greatest number of conflict-related deaths in human history might be considered fundamental in explaining the over two-thousand pages Elias Canetti wrote in preparation for his book against death. However, reading the abridged version—published by Fitzcarraldo (UK) and New Directions (US)—one will find that Canetti would object strenuously to this causal explanation. This relation between factuality and literature, Canetti would say, concedes far too much to death in two ways. Firstly, it allows death quantity: by remarking on the sheer numbers, we suggest that the tragedy of death is quantifiable; that the more death there is, the greater the tragedy. Secondly, it allows death quality: by remarking on the specific kind of death—those caused by conflict—we suggest that its calamity is measured in part by the nature of the dying. To Canetti, a lone Don Quixote who ceaselessly struggled for life in a century of death, all death is singular and its tragedy is infinite. In order to better understand this, we must turn to one death: his mother’s.

June 15, 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. . . I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 17, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Bella Creel

The latest in world literature from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us around the world for updates on literary workshops, readings, and conferences! From a workshop dedicated to Kapampangan literature in the Philippines, to the thriving Mahala Bookstore in Bulgaria, to ALTA’s online Write the World panels, read on to learn more!

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

Tomorrow, May 18, marks the deadline of the call for workshop participants for Pamiyabe, the regional creative writing workshop for young writers who hail from the northern Philippine region of Central Luzon. Across Central Luzon and Metro Manila, the Kapampangan language (also alternatively named Pampangan, Pampango, and Pampagueno) is the native tongue to over 3.2 million Filipinos. 

Now in its 21st year, the Pamiyabe writing workshop is aimed at contributing towards the flourishing of Kapampangan literature and organised by The Angelite, the official student publication of Holy Angel University in Angeles City, Pampanga. This year’s theme is “Pamaglugug queng regalu ning milabasan, pamagkaul queng progreso ning kasalungsungan” (Nurturing the gift of the past, embracing the progress of the present).

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