Language: German

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…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “To see a woman . . .” by Annemarie Schwarzenbach

June 25, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Natalie Mariko

we were meant to meet one another at the stranger’s threshold, along this obscure and melancholic borderline of awareness

This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Pride Month, we present a fiction excerpt from the desk of Swiss novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, written ninety-four years ago and now translated by Natalie Mariko. In these impressionistic scenes, the nameless, genderless narrator (a thinly-veiled insert for Schwarzenbach herself) is drawn continually to the thought of Ena Bernstein, their unseen fellow guest at an alpine ski-lodge. In Schwarzenbach’s hands, the gossipy high-society atmosphere of the ski-lodge gives way to a quasi-mystical perception of the natural world, which is reinforced by the ineluctable “oceanic unknown” of the narrator’s desire for women. “The ardent love which had always tethered me to this landscape grew in a violent way,” Schwarzenbach writes, as the narrator’s longing for Ena refracts the mundanity of everyday life into something beautiful and strange––a powerful reminder of how our desires can enrich the world. Read on!

To see a woman: just for a second, just in the short space of a look, and then to lose her again somewhere in the dark of a hall, behind a door I’m not allowed to open—but to see a woman and in the same moment to feel that she also saw me, that her eyes hung puzzled, as if we were meant to meet one another at the stranger’s threshold, along this obscure and melancholic borderline of awareness . . .

Yes, to feel in that moment how she also faltered, almost painfully halted in the hall of her thoughts, as if her nerves contracted, being touched by mine. And if I wasn’t tired then I wouldn’t have been bewildered by the day’s memories: still, I saw fields of snow, and thereupon the long evening shadows; saw the bar throngs, girls passing by to be sloughed like puppets from their partners, carelessly laughing back over their thin shoulders, the blustering jazz starting alongside their laughter. And before it blew again I took refuge in a small corner, Li waving there, her little face quivering white under high, shaved brows. She slid her glass back to me—stubbornly forcing me to drink the whole thing—and laid her slender hands on the Norwegian’s neck. She floated past dancing, and he hung with his eyes at her lips.

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Serpentine

June 24, 2024  |  in Essays, Retellings  |  by Kanya Kanchana

The loop of the ☥ ankh is the Ouroboros, the endless serpent that swallows its own tail, and there is a void at its heart. Mind the gap.

In our column “Retellings,” Asymptote presents essays delving into myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this rendition, Kanya Kanchana traces the winding path of serpents across world literature and translation in a longform lyric essay. Weaving between times and traditions, Kanya draws together the philosophical concepts, conflicting perceptions, and atavistic emotions that serpents inspire, such that we are not quite sure where one story ends, and another begins.

“In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water.”

– Roberto Calasso, Ka

cobra transparent

When the word nāga (Sanskrit: serpent) is uttered, the first syllable must rear its hood in the air like a cobra, and the second must root into the earth like the coil it lifts itself from. The sound is the word. Where the ouraeus, the symbol of the rearing Egyptian cobra, Naja haje, is found, it’s an unmistakable mark of sovereignty, the golden hood that guards the head that wears the crown. The symbol is the deed. Sound, symbol, story—myth is the skin beneath the skin of the world, that which shapes from within.

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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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Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

Our Spring 2024 Edition Is Here!

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

Featuring Andrey Kurkov, Michela Murgia, Katie Holten, and a spotlight on literature from the Faroe Islands

When we fall asleep, where do we go? Why, of course, to a #midnightgarden‚ filled with exciting discoveries from 32 countries, including interviews with Andrey Kurkov and Diamela Eltit, fiction by Michela Murgia and Khrystia Vengryniuk, apocalyptic drama from Honduras, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Ludovico Ariosto—specifically, of his Orlando Furioso, the bestselling book of the sixteenth century—as well as a Special Feature on Literature from the Faroe Islands, sponsored by FarLit and headlined by Kim Simonsen and Rannvá Holm Mortensen. Ahead of the 60th Venice Biennale opening this weekend, we are proud to unveil our own international showcase—illustrated with elan by Korean guest artist Joon Yoon—still the most ambitious of any literary periodical.

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Among the highlights in this edition is visual artist Katie Holten—herself a veteran of the Venice Biennale—who returns to our pages to discuss her rustling, arresting Language of Trees, a response to ecological catastrophe. Michelle Chan Schmidt reviews a similar attempt to capture new language, crisis language, when extremes brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called for A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War. Interviewing young Somali refugees for a dictionary entry, “Partire” or leave, Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah discovers how disasters—in this case, civil war and genocide—“reveal the limit of language.” In Fiction, a “great flood” forms the backdrop of Khrystia Vengryniuk’s mordantly funny but ultimately heartbreaking story about two star-crossed lovers. By contrast, LGBTQ+ rights activist Michela Murgia’s relatively uneventful piece centers a soon-to-be empty nester and the solution to her ennui that she tucks away in her wardrobe: a life-sized cutout of BTS boyband member Park Jimin.

Just this past week, the Financial Times reported that “rising nationalism and falling funding is reshaping the Venice Biennale;” at Asymptote, we find ourselves running up against the same constraints that keep the art world from fully realizing its potential (as a matter of fact, just carrying on remains a challenge because we are incorporated outside of the US and Europe, where most of literary arts funding lies). If you have benefitted from our work these past thirteen years, consider helping us grow this #midnightgarden as a sustaining or masthead member. Together, we can keep it alive.

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European Literature Days 2023: Literature for a Better World

March 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

From the famed literary festival in Krems an der Donau!

Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.

The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts. 

The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.

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What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

kluge

The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Translation Tuesday: “Parwana” by Lida Amiri

March 5, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Lida Amiri

One glance at the sky finally connects her with infinity, where she belongs.

This Translation Tuesday—three days before International Women’s Day—we bring you a tragic story self-translated by former Afghan refugee Lida Amiri—centering on the plight of a woman who is not free to pursue love. In her language, parwana refers to a creature that has wings but cannot fly. It is a fitting name for our despairing protagonist, who, up against forces larger than her, stages her escape. 

The night is her sole protector, her only companion. It represents shelter from the stares and noiseless chatter of passersby on the streets. People who recognize her whisper, “That’s the general’s daughter that I saw with another young man! How dare she stain the impeccable reputation of a national hero?”

To Parwana[1], her father’s military background has become a curse. With a swift and vigorous hand motion, she desperately tries to delete each of these stinging judgments from her mind.

Suddenly, Parwana stops her agonizing train of thought and notices her immediate surroundings. She sighs and has a last look around her lovingly furnished room. She is just one step away from a pile of mattresses without a bedframe, which she sometimes fell off of when the nightmares reminded her of her wrongdoings. The only piece of furniture in her room is the wooden chest of drawers next to her bed, which is decorated with her perfume bottle and her Surmi—a Kohl used daily to protect her from evil looks because, according to her neighbors, she has all a young woman could wish for: a loving family, a room in her parents’ house, a job as a midwife. Is she actually willing to risk it all? While her heart races as she reminisces, she looks in the small mirror on the chest of drawers before taking a deep breath addressing herself. “The situation can’t continue like this, and you know it. He will be the right one,” she says softly while sighing heavily.

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Between Languages: The Politics of Class, Race, and Translation in the Novels of B. Traven

February 26, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Josh Todarello

Such is how the frontier in Traven functions: an arena of capital that both equalizes and reproduces extant racial hierarchies.

The identity of novelist B. Traven has spawned a delightfully layered and debated array of theories, stipulations, and investigations. Best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, later adopted into a well-loved film by John Huston, Traven was the pseudonym of a German- and English-language writer who, in various hypotheses, has been the collaborative result of several individuals, an imprisoned actor, an enthusiastic explorer of Mexico, and a translator from Acapulco and San Antonio. The most fascinating aspect of this mysterious identity, however, lies not solely in the individual’s life, but also in the entangled multiculturalism and various iterations of his works, which render American landscapes in German language, examine the intersection of class and race politics, and create narratives in which complexities of social agency are examined in both local and international contexts.

If you’re reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its English translation, it would be be hard to guess that it was written by a German author, let alone intended for German-speaking leftists, living in German-speaking countries in the interwar period. Even in the original German, the book bears no obvious trace of Europe or European culture—aside from the language, of course. It feels, on the contrary, quintessentially American, falling easily into the category of the western and full of the genre’s tropes and generic dictates. At least for this reader, it felt odd to be reading one’s way through many of the familiar elements of the western, in a language not commonly associated with it.

The novel takes place in a post-revolutionary Mexico during the interwar years, and its protagonists are white American vagabonds, property-less and looking for work. There are oilmen, Mexican “Indians” and Mexican ladinos, or mestizos. There are bandits, train heists, and Federales. There is gunplay. And there is gold. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was originally written and published in German as Der Schatz der Sierran Madre by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1927, and was part of Büchergilde Gutenberg’s mission to provide impoverished workers with access to cheap entertainment and Bildung. The current Büchergilde Gutenberg website tells us, for example, that the publisher was founded in 1924 to facilitate easier access to Bildung for members of the working class, doing so by means of affordable but well-crafted, premium books. Bruno Dreßler, Büchergilde’s first chairman, had in mind the idea of a proletarian cultural community, a “proletarische Kulturgemeinschaft”; the publisher saw itself as part of proletarian literature and culture at a time when such a thing perhaps still existed, though its contours and possibility—or impossibility—were, even then, debated by Marxist critics and thinkers of every stripe. Even Diego Rivera, a card-carrying communist, argued that, properly speaking, there could be no such thing as proletarian art within capitalism. Only after the dictatorship of the proletariat has “fulfilled its mission,” Rivera writes, after it has “liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society,” can there be a proletarian art. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora!

Join us this in this week of literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora! From recent publications of women writers, to a collection of electronic-inspired poetry, to movements against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, read on to learn more.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Central America 

In December, Nicaraguan novelist and poet Gioconda Belli announced that Libros VISOR had just published a 900-page book collecting all her poetry books. Titled Toda la poesía (1974-2020), it includes a prologue written by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros. This publication came only weeks after Belli won this year’s Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, one of the most prestigious awards given to poets of the Spanish language. 

Earlier, in late November, Alfaguara put out a book entitled Desde el centro de América, Miradas alternativas, which includes short stories by twenty one Central American women. The collection includes the likes of Nicté Sierra, Marta Sandoval, and Ixsu’m Antonieta Gonzáles Choc, from Guatemala; María Eugenia Ramos and Jessica Isla, from Honduras; and Madeline Mendienta and Carmen Ortega, from Nicaragua. The book was put together by writer and researcher Gloria Hernández, who, in 2022, received Guatemala’s highest literary honor: the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. 

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Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

December 18, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

For our final post of the year, we decided to compile a list of opportunities for all you translators out there to apply to. Onward and upward!

Opportunities abound for the emerging translator!  Just in time for the year-end break—this will be our final post of the year—we sifted through the latest ones and compiled the best and timeliest for our new one-stop hub, “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation.” See you on the other side of the New Year!

AWARDS

SARAH MAGUIRE PRIZE

The 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation is now open for submissions. This international prize is awarded every two years to a translated book of poetry by a “poet living beyond Europe”. The winners will receive £3000, to be divided between the poet and their translator, and will be included in a Poetry Book Society promotion alongside up to seven other shortlisted titles. Past winners include Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and Chinese poet Yang Lian.

Founded in 2020, the Prize commemorates the Poetry Translation Center’s founder, renowned poet Sarah Maguire, and seeks to celebrate the art of poetry in translation, which the PTC calls “the lifeblood of poetry”. Applications close on Monday, January 1st, 2024.

Apply here.

WORLD LITERATURE  TODAY – STUDENT TRANSLATION PRIZE

World Literature Today offers an annual competition for students enrolled in translation studies programs worldwide, and applications are open! Consistent with WLT’s commitment to serving international and university communities alike, the Student Translation Prize seeks to recognize the work of emerging translators from anywhere in the world.

Entries should include a piece of translated prose (up to 1,000 words) or three pieces of poetry, along with a cover letter. $200 will be awarded to one prose translation and one poetry translation. Both will also be published online in the summer.

Applications are due January 11th, 2024.

Apply here.

MO HABIB TRANSLATION PRIZE IN PERSIAN LITERATURE

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UW is thrilled to announce that the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature is open for submissions for its second cycle. In partnership with the Mo Habib Memorial Foundation and Deep Vellum Publishing, this prize aims to commemorate the life of Mohammed Habib through the celebration of Persian literary works.

This cycle will focus on Persian poetry from the 10th century CE to the present day. Bi- or multilingual projects are more than welcome, as are collections of poems from more than one author. Applicants should submit a cover letter, a CV, and a sample of the proposed translation by March 1st, 2024. The winning translation will be awarded $10,000 and will be published by Deep Vellum.

Apply here. READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

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Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…