Language: German

Elementalia: Chapter I Fire

February 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Fire blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.

/

*

Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”

The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१

agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01

– The Ṛgveda

/

*

Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.

Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.

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Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

February 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Carissa Coane, Daniel Yadin, Devi Sastry, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sayani Sarkar

Dive into our new issue with these choice recommendations from our amazing intercontinental team!

Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.

I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.

Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”

When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.

Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”

—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.

In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.

Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.

In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.

With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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What’s New in Translation: January 2025

January 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Christopher Higgs, Henry Gifford, Jordan Silversmith, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite” by H.W. Burg

December 17, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by M.M. Pinky

Over and over, I would anxiously ask myself: where did you get this queer desire to dress and act so femininely?

Just in time for the holiday season, we bring you a different kind of Christmas story for this week’s Translation Tuesday. “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite,” written by H.W. Burg and translated from the German by M.M. Pinky, was originally been published 100 years ago, but remains startling in its immediacy. Through a series of Yuletide reflections, the author, assigned male at birth, relates their lifelong journey of coming to terms with their innate femininity. The quest for authentic gender expression expands into a tender exploration of self-discovery, longing, and the profound human need for pure acceptance. In a political climate where transgender rights seem to be an increasingly easy target, this short memoir reminds us why fearmongering rhetoric obscures the simple truth of people who, like anyone else, are searching for connection and love.

It is Christmas Eve again. Alone, I stand at the window of my quiet bachelor’s room and look into the cold winter night. Hoarfrost covers the trees. Hedges and bushes glisten in the light of the streetlamps as if the sky descended to Earth with thousands of little falling stars on this holy night. How beautiful it is when nature unfolds its wonders and no human hand disturbs its mysterious play.

The sound of “Silent Night, Holy Night” floats by my ears from the neighboring house. Through the thin window curtains, I see the dark outline of a Christmas tree and the bright glow of its lights. I close my eyes and imagine how those gathered around the tree join hands in love, how the quiet happiness of peace transfigures their eyes. I know the people. Quiet, simple, content people, who help each other carry the heavy things in life. How beautiful it is when two hearts find each other and love lifts them up from the vices of everyday life.

On my table there too is a Christmas tree. It is small; I bought it today, ready-made with decorations and candles already on it. As I’m about to strike a match, a deep sadness creeps over me. I am suddenly gripped by a desolate loneliness with a force I haven’t felt for some time. Lighting the candles is impossible. My eyes fill with tears and I have to sit down with my head against the table. My deep misery grips me with terrible strength, and I begin crying, crying bitter tears, today—on Christmas Eve—while everyone rejoices and celebrates the season of joy. 

Once my tears dried, I sat dreaming, pondering before my Christmas tree, from which no light fell into my saddened soul. Memories from days long ago unfurled within me, memories of celebrations of Christmases past. In my mind they all lay before me, and of the long list, four stayed in my mind with particular clarity. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

December 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Len Sander, Liliana Torpey, and Regan Mies

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

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What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, NYRB, 2024 READ MORE…

Life is Like a Box of Golgappas: On Transcultural Translations

November 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Bowden

“Universality,” for interpretations of US products around the world, may also mean “unavoidable.”

Translators tend to like puzzles. Problem solving between languages is the definition of the trade, but what of the deeper, more invisible quandaries of culture and context? In this essay, Sam Bowden takes a look at two works that seem inextricable from the cultures of their origin—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton and Rober Zemeckis’s 1994 dramedy, Forrest Gump—as well as their respective international adaptations into German and Hindi, to investigate the various methodologies and techniques utilized in fitting these quintessentially US productions for new audiences.

One of the translator’s greatest challenges lies at a level deeper than language: instead, it is rooted in the countless cultural and historical contexts which consciously and unconsciously inform a given work. Since language is inextricable from the culture and history within which it is made, translational processes often prove more complex than simply replacing words, rhymes, characters, and themes. Source-cultural conditions and consciousnesses can shape a text in structurally embedded ways that go far beyond its linguistic surface.

Speaking from the United States, I am well aware of the extent to which my country’s culture and history—one could even call it mythology—have deeply shaped the literary narratives it produces and exports on a massive scale. When American stories circulate through the world-system, the result can be curious to study: these are narratives visibly shaped by a suddenly-invisible context. How do translators maneuver around this? 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

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2024

October 28, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

Exploring the breadth and depth of our latest issue!

Dive into our latest issue through the eyes of our blog editors, who take a close reading of the pieces that most moved them. In confronting shame and invisibilization, tracking the recurrent tides of grief, rending the mysterious forces of music and literature into poetry, and reimagining the painful, final moments of a migrant’s journey—these translations offer us avenues into wonderment, connection, and understanding.

When I was young, I developed a compulsion to count my fingers, pinky to thumb and back again, to fifteen, whenever I found myself in a situation I didn’t understand, or when I felt ashamed or guilty. The repetitive, reliable action was my way of putting a cork in my anxiety, to stem the building pressure that threatened to well up, and reorient myself in the world around me. No one else I knew had the same need—at least, not that I could see—and realizing this put a box around the world, shut by lock and key, depriving me of any access. In Ornela Vorpsi’s Offworld, in translation from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri, the main character Tamar feels similarly severed from the rest of the world. Where I experienced it like a dam ready to burst, Tamar feels a “fissure,” as if from an earthquake, splitting her brain and setting her apart from other people; where I had a box, Tamar views the world through a window, from which she observes the comings and goings of her neighbors and their visitors. Tamar’s fissure is fueled by an inexplicable wanting, a sense of shame and lust that she cannot put into words: “I could not tell my mother nor anyone else what was happening because I did not know either. I was brutally suspended in fear, under its control.”

From her window, Tamar watches the many sons of her neighbor Maria, entranced by their indulgence and languid masculinity, their bodies cast in light and smoke reminiscent of a Caravaggio. A Virgin Mary watches over the boys’ room, holding a baby Jesus—a reminder that God is always watching, and a source of the religious paranoia that haunts Tamar throughout her life. The religious undertones to her shame are in part what prevent her from recognizing what it is that she wants, even though she knows she lusts for something:

I too, Tamar, felt that I desired something uncatchable, even if I could not give it a name. It took many shapes, my desire, I only sensed that it was sly, that it deceived me, slipping like an eel from between my fingers, from between my thighs.

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Our Fall 2024 Edition Is Here!

October 24, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Jon Fosse, Mikhail Shishkin, Natascha Wodin, Bothayna Al-Essa, and Nebojša Lujanović in our Special Feature themed on outsiders

You and I, self and the other—it is the oldest, simplest difference we know. At a time of flooding across the world, from India to the US, the writers of our Fall 2024 issue call attention to physical and social separation, to the rushing waters that pull us apart, rendering us #Outsiders to one another. In exploration of this theme, we proudly bring you new work from 32 countries, including drama from Norwegian Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, an interview with exiled Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, a review of French icon Simone de Beauvoir’s latest English publication, nonfiction by Omani writer Hamoud Saud, a spotlight on Brazilian artist André Griffo, and, for our final Brave New World Literature entry, a moving essay by the recently announced US National Book Award nominee the Kuwaiti author Bothayna Al-Essa. One year on from October 7th, Al-Essa confronts the limits of literary activism as she reflects on her video calls with a Gazan colleague: “Did I expect a person besieged in an open prison since 2006 to rejoice at the sight of a shelf of books?” In another highlight, German-Ukrainian writer Natascha Wodin’s narrator resuscitates her drowned mother, trying to fathom her across the gulf of time even as she pictures the Regnitz river washing her away. Meanwhile, Swiss poet Prisca Agustoni and Moroccan author Khalid Lyamlahy confront another kind of drowning—that of modern day migrants in search of a better life—in particular, the 269 lives lost to the sea around Lampedusa in a shipwreck, the news of which lights up Agustoni’s phone, and the death of a Gambian Lyamlahy never got to know: “I dream of a book that would contain all the words refused you, all the silences imposed on you. A book where the word ‘help’ is constantly repeated, in which the author would fade from each line, each fragment, to give you back the space denied you in life.”

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Lyamlahy’s feat of empathetic imagination leads off this edition’s wildcard Special Feature, first announced on August 15th. By the time submissions closed one month later, anti-migrant rhetoric in the US had hit a new low with Trump repeating baseless claims of Haitians “eating cats and dogs” in his presidential debate. So, although we received more than one hundred manuscripts spotlighting every stripe of outsider, we decided to carve out space for the racial/national “other” so often denigrated in politics. From Cuban author Odette Casamayor-Cisnero drawing courage from her great-great-grandmother and taking a fiery stand against racism (“I’m done with running away”) to Croatian writer Nebojša Lujanović’s nuanced portrayal of a migrant who cannot bring himself to enunciate his full name for fear of outing himself to other members of his newly chosen community, the myriad voices showcased in this Feature are resounding proof of the struggle and humanity of those we as a society are so eager to condemn to the margins. All of this is illustrated by Spain-based guest artist Anastassia Tretiakova’s haunting photography.

As a magazine that does not receive ongoing institutional support because of our own outsider status—as elaborated in the Fall 2022 issue’s Editor’s Note—Asymptote counts on readers to sustain its mission more than most. If you think this “global literary miracle” (according to Dubravka Ugrešić) deserves to continue, please take a few minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member today. (Interested in joining us behind the scenes instead? Our final recruitment drive of the year closes in four days!) Thank you for your readership and support. We can’t wait to see what 2025 brings!

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What’s New in Translation: October 2024

October 14, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Christopher Higgs, Jonathon Atkinson, and Matilda Nevin

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

WaitingfortheFear

Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

Guilty But Not Intentional: Carla Bessa on Traversing Germanophone and Lusophone Literary Worlds

October 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

We [translators] have to . . . make the text breathe (like an actor on stage) in the language, time, and culture of the target audience.

Carla Bessa wears many hats: theater actress, director, poet, short story writer, novelist, and translator. Born in Rio de Janeiro and now based in Berlin, she has translated Germanophone writers—Max Frisch (Switzerland), Ingeborg Bachmann (Austria), Thomas Macho (Austria), Christa Wolf (Germany), and more—into Brazilian Portuguese for São Paulo-based publishers WMF Martins Fontes and Editora Estação Liberdade, as well as Editora Trinta Zero Nove in Mozambique. As a translator, she works on fiction and nonfiction as well as young adult and children’s literature. As a writer, she writes what may be termed as “cross-genre” or “hybrid works,” questioning the boundaries demarcating limitless possibilities; this would eventually earn her Brazil’s most important literary award, the Prêmio Jabuti, given to her short story collection Urubus (The Vultures, Confraria do vento, 2019).

In this interview, I spoke with Carla on her award-winning works that cross the conventional genres of poetry, play, and prose; linguistic politics in the Lusophone world; and the intricacies of translating German-language writers into the Brazilian Portuguese.

Author photo by Hubert Börsig.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Urubus and Todas uma, two of your short story collections, were translated by Lea Hübner into the German for Transit Verlag. Your 2017 book, Aí eu fiquei sem esse filho, on other hand, was rendered into the Greek by Nikos Pratsinis for Skarifima Editions. In the Anglosphere, you have been translated by Fábio Mariano and Elton Uliana. To anyone working on your works from their Brazilian Portuguese originals, what demands do you think these translators would face—in particular those translating you into German and English?

Carla Bessa (CB): The other day, I read an interview with my colleague Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel—the German translator of Nobel laureate Jon Fosse—in which he said: “Every literary text is an aesthetic project in its own terms. The translation is good if it realizes this aesthetic project in a style that is appropriate and consistent without breaks.”

I agree with that, despite the particularities of syntactic and verbal structures between Brazilian Portuguese and German. (As for English: I haven’t mastered this language in depth, but I dare say that the differences are minor.) I believe that the greatest difficulty in translating my texts is not of a textual or grammatical nature, but a cultural one. In my writing, I work very closely with spoken language, sometimes even using a kind of verbatim technique. So the translator of my work needs to have an in-depth knowledge not only of the environment where the stories take place—specifically the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro—but also, and above all, of the musicality of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in these layers of society that I portray. I was very pleased that the translators who have translated me into English so far—Elton Uliana and Fabio Mariano—are Brazilian. Normally, we tend to think that a literary translator should have the target language as their mother tongue, but I don’t think that applies to all types of texts. In my case, the main challenge lies precisely in transferring this specific social environment with its many overlapping layers of cultural influences into the language and reality of German- and English-speaking countries, because this environment and its characters are the basis of my aesthetic project: to return here to the idea presented by Schmidt-Henkel.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 4, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

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

In this week’s round-up of literary news from around the world, our editors report on an exciting translation-centric colloquium in Mexico, a prestigious award going to a new translation of one of North Macedonia’s most canonical novels, and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s spotlighting of the Philippines in its 2025 edition—a choice that has met resistance from local publishers due to the fair’s Zionist sympathies.

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

They say that no matter what you do, there is always a saint from which you can ask for help. In the case of translators, that is Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the Council of Trent, his translation became the official Latin Bible in the western hemisphere.

With this in mind, the fourth Coloquio de Traducción Literaria San Jerónimo (Saint Jerome Literary Translation Colloquium) took place last week in Veracruz, Mexico. The event was dedicated to fully immersing participants in the art of translation and fostering discussions on what it truly means to translate. It was organized by the Culture Office of Veracruz and the independent publishing company Aquelarre Ediciones, which also sponsors a prize dedicated to literary translation.

Among the participants were notable figures such as Fabián Espejel, the recent winner of the Bellas Artes Margarita Michelena Literary Translation Award; Mario Murguía, who won the same prize last year; José Miguel Barajas, the translator of Mallarmé into Spanish; and José Luis Rivas, a poet who has translated works by Derek Walcott, John Donne, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot. READ MORE…