Language: English

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 8, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Carol Khoury

The latest from Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and the US!

In this round-up of literary news, our editors report to us on resilience, adaptation, and performance. In Palestine, a remarkable poet is honoured with a prestigious award; in the Philippines, literary works take to the cinema and the stage; and in Mexico City, an annual multidisciplinary book fair brings together literature, music, film, and more. 

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

In the heart of a world often forgotten, where borders and conflict has created an intricate tapestry of endurance, there lives a poet named Mosab Abu Toha. He is a man of extraordinary eloquence, a lyrical visionary born amidst the chaos of Gaza. Each morning, as the sun timidly broke through the horizon, Mosab’s words flowed like a river, weaving tales of resilience and hope from the depths of despair. He perches on his metaphorical throne, the Edward Said Library, a sanctuary of knowledge he had founded in the heart of Gaza.

Mosab’s poetry is a testament to his life—marked by the relentless siege that encircled his homeland. From childhood innocence to the responsibilities of fatherhood, he had witnessed four brutal military onslaughts, yet his verses breathe with a profound humanity that refuses to wither. As Mosab’s words echoed through the world, many took notice of his poetry debut Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, (City Lights Books, 2022). He was amongst the winners of the Forty-Fourth Annual American Book Awards, announced last week. The book was also a winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Award.

Read an interview with him at PEN America’s weekly series, and a reading and discussion (video and transcript) can also be found at The Jerusalem Fund.

And far from the headlines and the spotlight, in the same enclave, three Gazan women also added their voices to the chorus of survival. Their books, A White Lie by Madeeha Hafez Albatta; Light the Road of Freedom by Sahbaa Al-Barbari; and Come My Children by Hekmat Al-Taweel, bear witness to the strength and courage of the women of Gaza, further enriching the archive of resilience. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

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Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About

August 24, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Life isn’t one-dimensional; it’s a blend of emotions, absurdity, and different tones. . .

Jente Posthuma’s striking, moving novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, delves into the aftermath of an unthinkable loss: the death of a twin. In tracing the patchworked life of a narrator who has long thought of herself as one-half, Posthuma explores the complexities of our most intimate relationships with evocative reflection and unexpected humor. This distinct work and our July Book Club selection has been translated beautifully by Sarah Timmer Harvey, resulting in razor-sharp prose that navigates the most intricate aspects of our selfhoods—how we are with one another. In this following interview, Harvey speaks about her discovery of this novel and her translation process, as well as the intricate journey of following this book’s many thought-paths and references. 

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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): I’m curious about your background and your journey into translation. I read that you’re Australian-born but ended up living in the Netherlands, where you began reading and occasionally translating Dutch fiction and poetry. Was there a particular work that played a significant role in sparking this interest?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course. Back then, while learning Dutch, I relocated to the Netherlands at nineteen with the intention of staying for a year. That single year evolved into a fourteen-year stay. During this time, I was working at a university, which eventually led me to translation as a second career. It happened somewhat unexpectedly. I strove to read while learning Dutch, focusing on more accessible books such as Hermann Koch’s The Dinner and even Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven—which, while not mainstream, deeply resonated with me.

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Translation as Disorder in Carlos Fonseca’s Austral

August 23, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . . disorder plagues the opening pages of the book, always in tight connection to translation.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“What is the social impact of translation?” is a question that often buzzes in my ear like a hungry mosquito, especially when I read translated books, and even more commonly when I try to teach colloquial expressions in Spanish to my non-Hispanic friends—more precisely, Spanish from Mexico City, my hometown. Immediately, attempts at clear definitions become convoluted, uncertain, ambiguous—in a word, atropellados (literally “ran over,” an adjective that refers to stumbling over words). I sound more or less like this: 

“Take ‘chido/chida/chide’ [CHEE-duh/-da/-de] (adj.). It can technically mean ‘cool,’ but also ‘good,’ ‘agreeable,’  or ‘comfortable’ (for things and places and preceded by the auxiliary verb ‘estar’); it also means ‘nice-kind-laidback-easygoing-friendly’ (for someone who meets all and every one of these attributes and with the verb ‘ser’); or ‘ok, no problem,’  and ‘thank you’ (in informal social interactions with a close friend but not necessarily an intimate one and, crucially, with an upbeat intonation)…but if you want to make things easier for you, just remember that in any colloquial situation where you would say ‘cool’ in English or the closest equivalent in your mother tongue, you can say ‘chido.’ Don’t forget to adjust the last letter for the grammatical gender of the noun, or the preferred gender of the person you are referring to. Recently, non-binary gender is expressed with an ‘e,’ but some people prefer ‘ex,’ or the feminine (a), or do not have any strong preference. When in doubt, ask.”

Similarly involved and protracted explanations often result in simpering faces and jocose efforts by my bravest friends to try out the words I share. More common, and more fun, is when friends also share their favorite colloquial untranslatables in their mother tongues, eliciting everyone’s excited perplexity and marvel at the abundance of meaning and the frustrating difficulties of carrying that meaning across languages and cultures. When we try to explain these terms, it is as though their translation abruptly hits the brakes on our language, pushing us into linguistic confusion with the inertia from the sudden interruption. In other words, translation begets disorder, upsetting the comfortable and normally thoughtless flow of everyday language. This sensation—which emerged in me after my recurrent attempts at translating colloquialisms—appears more subtly and robustly in the 2023 novel Austral by Carlos Fonseca and its translation by Megan McDowell. Disorder, Austral suggests, lies at the heart of translation’s social potential, as it makes translation (its exercise and its experience) essential for radical change.

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What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2023)

August 17, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our staff members have been up to when we’re not editing your favorite literary journal!

Editor-at-Large for Palestine Carol Khoury will be the guest editor of a special issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly, titled “Write-Minded: Jerusalem in Literature”; check out her call for submissions here or email her for further details.

Newsletter Editor Cody Siler published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about  the impact of the American suspense writer Patricia Highsmith’s diaries on her critical reputation.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, chaired in June the 5th edition of #GraphPoem at Digital Humanities Summer Institute, a “data commoning” hyper-platform performance involving hundreds of participants and watched by thousands of viewers online.

Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton translated four poems by Marina Eskina for Barzakh.

M.L. Martin has a new translation of the pre-10 c. Anglo-Saxon queer, feminist poet in the latest issue of Cordite.

Assistant Editor Megan Sungyoon‘s translation of The Cheapest France in Town by Korean poet Seo Jung Hak is scheduled to be published by World Poetry Books in October 2023.

Blog Editor Meghan Racklin’s essay on sore throats as illness and as metaphor was published in Full Stop and her review of The Light Room by Kate Zambreno was featured in The Brooklyn Rail.

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Michelle Chan Schmidt published a review of Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia Sofija Popovska‘s Macedonian translation of the novella Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz by Maxim Biller was published in July by Makedonika Litera Press; additionally, “Thaumatropes”, a poetry collection she co-authored with Jonah Howell also appeared in July, published by Newcomer Press.

Copy Editor Urooj recently had two poems published in Gulmohur Quarterly‘s Issue 10, released in June 2023. They were also invited to share their poems at the Bangalore Poetry Festival, in Bangalore, India as one of four young, emerging poets in a panel called “Poems in Progress.”

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Interested in joining us behind the scenes? We’re still finalizing our mid-year recruitment drive—hurry and apply if you’d like to help power the world’s literature! 

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 11, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Carol Khoury, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and the Philippines!

This week, our Editors-at-Large offer a fond remembrance of a recently-departed literary icon, and report on book fairs and BTS. From books on boats and boy bands to the changing texture of Ramallah mornings, read on to find out more.

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

Early mornings in Ramallah are varied, except for one scene: an older man, back almost fully straight, all-white head lowered, walking slowly towards one specific coffee house in the old city. A serene smile below a deep gaze, the man would sit in his friends’ company, not for long—just enough to empty his coffee cup, and his head from the thoughts that weighed him down on his way.

Since last week, the beloved older man has not appeared in the streets. Zakaria Mohammed, a celebrated poet and a Palestinian literary icon, now resides in his admirers’ hearts. At the age of seventy-three, Zakaria’s body was lowered to rest, but his soul will continue to visit Ramallah, reminding everyone that:

There is no death
There is only a tiny cloud that passes and covers your eyes
Like a friend who comes from behind and blindfolds you with his hands
There is no death
There is a black goat and a tattooed hand milking an udder
White milk fills your mouth and flows in your eyes
Again, there is no death
There is a Raspberry tree
It holds your shoulder and hurts you
because it wants to open the way for turtles
There is no death
There isn’t
at all

Read more of Zakaria’s poems, translated here by Sinan Anton.

Zakaria Mohammed - Apr 2023 - photo by Ahmad Odeh READ MORE…

The Dance of Śiva

August 9, 2023  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Śiva moves in dance, in sculpture, in painting, in poetry, in ritual, in physics . . . And still he is not done. What are we to do?

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Kanya Kanchana follows the whirling story of Śiva through dance, science, and myth.

“A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.” 

– Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

There was sound and the sound was colossal. From within the pulsing sound, from the heart of the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, a single beat could be heard—ḍam. Incantatory, the beat started to repeat—ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam. The beat was coming from the ḍamaru, a small handheld drum. There was a god and he was dancing. He was Śiva and he shook all the worlds. 

His matted locks flew wild. Gaṅgā, the holiest of rivers who was nestled in them, swelled in spate, tried in vain to keep him cool. The lambent crescent moon that adorned them, intoxicating soma, now glinted crazily. Vāsukī, the great serpent coiled around his blue, kālakūṭa-holding throat, reeled. Śiva’s locks were a forest (jaṭa, matted locks; aṭavī, forest, as the asura king Rāvaṇa sings).

Once upon a time, another forest: a forest of cedars (devadāru, wood of the gods, Cedrus deodara), into which Bhikṣāṭana Śiva, the mendicant, wanders naked, deep in despair for the sin of having killed Brahmā, his outheld palm an escutcheon, Brahmā’s skull still stuck to it somewhat like an alms bowl. The illustrious sages in the forest are not pleased to see this beautiful beggar who drives their women mad with desire. They send a tiger to shred him to bits; he flays the tiger and wears its bloody skin around his waist. They throw venomous serpents at him; he wraps them around himself as sinuous ornaments. They send a demon dwarf, the malign Muyalaka. Śiva steps on him and breaks his back. And then he dances. He dances until it dawns on them that he is none other than Śiva. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 4, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Charlie Ng, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Hong Kong, Central America, and India!

In this week of dispatches from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on literary awards, the establishment of a literature museum, and book fairs! From controversy surrounding the new museum in Hong Kong to the most recent Indian texts in translation, read on to learn more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Public voices demanding for a museum of literature have been around for years in Hong Kong. On July 22, during the Hong Kong Book Fair 2023, Poon Yiu-ming, the Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Writers, announced that the Museum of Hong Kong Literature would be inaugurated in April next year in Wan Chai with support from Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Poon petitioned Lee last year on the establishment of a literary museum. However, the announcement has attracted controversy in the literary arena. 

The concept of a museum for Hong Kong literature was proposed by a group of local writers and scholars, including Dung Kai-cheung, Tang Siu-wa, Yip Fai, Liu Waitong, and Chan Chi-tak, among others, who formed the “Hong Kong Literature Museum Advocacy Group,” in 2009. A signed petition that successfully solicited signatures from hundreds of local and international Chinese writers and scholars was published in Ming Pao, which proposed to establish a literary museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Since the suggestion was not adopted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority then, the Advocacy Group proceeded to establish the House of Hong Kong Literature as a non-governmental organization for promoting and preserving Hong Kong literature.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 14, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and MARGENTO

The latest in letters from Ireland and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large bring us the latest in arts festivals, awards, and innovative adaptations across the literary landscape! From new spins on James Joyce’s Ulysses for its hundredth anniversary to a thriving theatre festival in the Philippines, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland 

It is festival time across Europe, and Galway, Ireland’s West Coast pearl, is gearing up for its International Arts Festival (GIAF), to kick off in 3 days and go on through July 30. The “balmy, bohemian” city (as ireland.com poetically describes it) is already buzzing with the vibe as events ranging from special-effect-rich theatrical, musical, and circus performances to public conversations with awarded war-covering journalists and writers are boisterously advertised on seafront billboards, dedicated websites, local TV and radio stations, and even on announcement screens on greyhounds across the country. 

On the literary front, James Joyce’s spirit looms as large as ever—and particularly so on the hundredth anniversary of Ireland’s most notorious book ever, Ulysses—only now in more playful and cross-artform shades. Ulysses 2.2, a collaborative project between ANU, Landmark Productions, and Museum of Literature Ireland, will be featured with two independent acts. The first one will be You’ll See, an obvious word-play on, and homophone of, Joyce’s title, produced by Branar, one of Ireland’s leading theatre companies for children. You’ll See has been announced as a mix of “live performance, intricate paper design, an original score, and Joyce’s odyssey” that will enchant prior fans as well as all those who haven’t read the book yet.

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What’s New in Translation: July 2023

July 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu and Heloisa Selles

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 23, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

The latest from Spain and Central America!

In this week of literary news, we hear from our Editors-at-Large on Spanish-speaking countries around the world! From Spanish-Romanian literary intermingling in Spain, to recent award winners across Central America, to medium-bending poetry across sound and space in Mexico, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Spain

As the summer season is kicking in and tourists are about to take over Spain—as is the usual for this time of the year—certain portions of the literary world are seeming to gain fresh momentum. That goes particularly for the transnational and translational endeavors. 

The latest issue of the Madrid-based literary journal Ágora – Papeles de Arte Gramático offers a rich overview of contemporary Spanish poetry while including a generous Catalan special feature. A substantive section on Romanian literature is also featured, with reviews of Encarnación García León’s recent anthology of Romanian fiction in Spanish translation and articles on Spanish translations of the legendary writer and internationally revered religion phenomenologist Mircea Eliade and the symbolist Ion Minulescu. 

Moreover, the issue opens with poems by past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau in Elisabeta Boțan’s Spanish translation and some of Fernando Pessoa’s celebrated poems in Dinu Flămând’s Romanian rendering. The journal has had a long-standing interest in Romanian-Spanish literary cross-pollinations, as a previous issue featured a sizeable section dedicated to the Romanian inter-war writer Max Blecher, who passed away at the age of 28 after spending a decade ill, confined to his bed, and writing literature that would later be widely translated. Blecher’s collected poems in Spanish translation, edited by Joaquín Garrigós, was a highlight of the issue. Ágora’s Editor-in-Chief Fulgencio Martínez warmly recommends to his readers the summer issue of another Madrid-based journal, Littera Nova, profuse with Romanian writing. 

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A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

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.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

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The Vertigo of Blue: On Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine

June 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Annilee Newton

With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds. . .

Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, Héloïse Press, 2023

“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors.”

From the very first words of her short, poetic novel Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro restructures our expectations. We are entering another place where the rules of existence have changed. By challenging one of the most ingrained dichotomies of perception that we have—a person is alive or a person is dead—she begins to weave the shroud of mystery that is cast over the entirety of Ultramarine. The introduction of the sailor sketches out a third liminal space between our assumptions, destabilizing us and setting a tone of wonder and dread that will carry throughout the text. What could it possibly mean to be a sailor?

Our main character is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, her life fractured into two pieces. In one part, she lives on solid land, waiting uneasily for the moment when she will be reunited with crew and ship. The second part of her life is spent traversing the water, navigating the places between chunks of earth. Strict adherence to protocol has brought her success in a male-dominated career. She now manages a crew of twenty men and the portable world of her metal ship. 

Then, one day, she briefly abandons her own protocol. The crew asks her to stop the ship for a few moments in the middle of the crossing so that they can swim naked in the deepest blue of the ocean. She doesn’t know why she agrees, but she agrees, and this one strange acquiescence sets off a chain of inexplicable events. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 2, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary news from Palestine, Bulgaria, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and the Philippines! From a major award win to exciting literary festivals, read on to find out more!

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

On Wednesday, May 24, most Bulgarians woke up later than usual. After all, the country was commemorating its Alphabet, Enlightenment, and Culture Day, and the festivities would not begin before noon. The night owls, however, had already started celebrating much earlier as media outlets from all over the globe notified them that, at a ceremony in Central London, writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel had been awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022) whose primary focus is the “weaponization of nostalgia.” The duo, whom Asymptote has previously highlighted, gave a heartfelt speech about the stories that keep us alive and resist evil.

Later the same day, Gospodinov posted on his official Facebook page: “Blessed holiday! Blessed miracle of language! I was lucky enough to say these words in Bulgarian last night at the Booker Prize ceremony in the heart of London! On the eve of the most beautiful holiday! I wrote this book with the thirty letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I am grateful to everyone who believed in it! To my readers with whom we have been together for years. It was and still is a long road. To the writers before me from whom I have learned! To the Bulgarian writers for all they have suffered and written. I am grateful for the joy I saw in Bulgaria after the announcement of the award last night. Joy because of a book is pure joy. Thank you! It is possible! May it open the door to Bulgarian culture and give us courage.”

Courage, if I may add, to remain sensitive to life’s delicate intricacies. Courage to be mindful of the past in our eternal battle for the future. Courage to translate even the “unspoken speeches for all unreceived awards.”

And the rest is history. READ MORE…