Language: Italian

An Interview with Mary Jo Bang on Translating Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

July 7, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I wanted my translation to honor Dante’s decision to write the poem in the vernacular instead of in literary Latin.

In her new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, translator Mary Jo Bang has brought to bear an eagle-eyed focus on the power of lyric poetry. This book is the last of the three that form Dante’s The Divine Comedy—the most widely read of the three being Inferno, where the punishment of the sinners in Hell mirrors the nature of the sins committed in their lifetimes. The same process is at work in Purgatorio, although there, punishment is structured instead as restorative penance, which, once completed, enables the souls to enter the blissful realm of the tenth heaven. In Paradiso, then, Dante travels through the nine spheres of the solar system until he arrives at the Empyrean, where he finds the saved basking in the Eternal Light of God’s mind. Speaking to those he meets along the way, Dante becomes aware that bliss isn’t the same for everyone; one’s ability to feel God’s love in the afterlife depends on the qualities of their time spent on earth.

By translating Dante’s language into modern American English and adopting a matter-of-fact authorial tone, Bang retains the elegance of the original diction. Throughout, she adopts a loose iambic structure and preserves the three-line stanza to echo Dante’s terza rima, an arrangement he devised to gesture to the Holy Trinity. All of these measures combine to honor the imagery and meaning of Dante’s original vernacular Italian, while also acknowledging the fundamental differences between the two languages.

Curious to learn more, I spoke with Bang about the act of “carrying” poetry across from one language to another, the nuts and bolts of her translation process, and how Heaven is different for each person lucky enough to have made it there.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time?

Mary Jo Bang (MJB): The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.

When I began translating the Comedy, I knew little to nothing about translation. I had taken two translation workshops when I was an MFA student at Columbia in the early nineties, working on translating a French novel, but after I finished my degree and moved to St. Louis to begin teaching, the novel stayed in the cardboard box it arrived in. I don’t know that I would have ever gone back to translation except that I read Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and marveled at the fact that in forty-seven translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno, no two were identical. This felt like a demonstration of the fact that there is no single “right” way to translate one language into another; that might be obvious to some but for me, it was a decisive revelation and one that has been at the forefront of my mind in all of the translations I’ve worked on since. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dear Italian School” by Marilena Delli Umuhoza

July 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Monica Martinelli

That Whiteness is taken for Italianness itself represents the very beating heart of this privilege.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a powerful essay by Italian-Rwandan author Marilena Delli Umuhoza, translated from the Italian by Monica Martinelli. A moment of casual racism in her daughter’s school play inspires the narrator to reflect on her own memories of bigotry as an African-origin woman growing up in 1990’s and 2000’s Italy. She traces how racial prejudice is passed down through children’s books, advertising, TV shows, and teachers; Black men and women depicted as criminals or sex objects, always, in some way, dirty. These tropes spill into modern immigration debates, where refugees are stripped of dignity, their suffering sensationalized: “And so there they were, those bodies, taking over my entire television screen without any respect for people in their most vulnerable moment: dead, naked, washed up on Italian shores.” Against this erasure, Delli Umuhoza insists on the significance of writing, of inscribing the truth of Black lives into history. Childhood racism leaves deep scars precisely because it is so pure; children, innocent yet perceptive, directly reflect the biases of society. Blending incisive cultural analysis with raw emotion, the essay makes clear why antiracist education must begin early.

A letter from an African-Italian mother

Last week I attended a musical at my daughter’s school. The show they put on was Around the World in Eighty Days, inspired by the movie recounting the adventures of Phileas Fogg.

After visiting European countries like France and Spain, welcomed by songs of joy and rather coquettish dancers, our hero comes to Africa. Welcoming him there is a person whose foolish way of speaking reminds me of the Italian dubbing actors in the film Gone with the Wind, with their mispronounced monosyllables in a typical “African” accent. I dug my nails into the fabric of my seat’s armrest, as I always do when I am nervous.

The journey continues toward the heart of Africa, where Fogg is chased by a group of Africans for unclear reasons (the acoustics were terrible and the representation pretty confusing). I thought to myself, I’m so glad they cut it. I was thinking of a scene that I had reported to the teacher six months earlier, after my daughter had come home in tears and asked me: “Mom, does grandma eat people?”

“Baby,” I replied, “what are you talking about? Of course not.”

“So why do they make us play African cannibals who eat Fogg at school?” 

“What do you mean?”

“In the scene where he gets to Africa, we have to say, ‘Mmmm … It smells so tasty! What do you say, shall we cook him?’”

I was speechless. READ MORE…

A Word Misunderstood, A Siege: An Interview with Maria Borio on the Italian Lyric

June 18, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation is, rhythmically, a second twin birth.

Plunging into poet and literary historian Maria Borio’s Italian-language collection, Trasparenza (2019), one finds a riveting poetic study on the human gaze, dis/connections of touch, and visual intimacies of modernity. This collection was later brought to the Anglosphere as Transparencies (2022/2025) in Danielle Pieratti’s translation for World Poetry Books. In Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), the celebrated scholar Arnaldo Colasanti painted an intriguing portraiture of Trasparenza, describing a blend of the pure and the impure, like the digital screen, an evocation of the imagistic clarity of snow and glass, ether and windows. For Colasanti, Trasparenza reveals desire only for it to be erased and emptied. However, he cautions against reading Dr. Borio’s poetry merely as abstract and argues instead that her work presents a resistance against the concrete, existing in a space that is tactile yet fleeting, spiriting language away towards solitude, lyrical disunity, and oblivion.

In this conversation thoughtfully translated from the Italian into English by Danielle Pieratti, I spoke with Dr. Borio, currently in the central Italian city of Perugia, on her poetry collections, particularly Trasparenza (Transparencies), and the poets and critics that define the Italian lyric tradition.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut into the Anglosphere, Transparencies (trans. Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2022), saw a re-edition in May 2025. Could you tell us what your creative ethos was when writing the poems in Trasparenza (2019)?

Maria Borio (MB): The English translation of Trasparenza led to a book that is slightly different from the Italian original; in fact, we even reconsidered the order of the poems and their division into sections. I would say that it became a transcontinental collection or, if you could call it this, a form of transatlantic poetry. I believe that the book’s core—thinking about transparence in our time—resonated naturally in response to these changes. How can poetry represent certain issues pertaining to those who live in the Western part of the planet—a realm in the midst of redefinition? Transparence connotes our relationships, real and mediated, as well as our way of living, of constructing, of being in the world. Isn’t the language of algorithms also presented as transparent? And can’t we say the same about AI? With one provision: taking care to avoid reducing our relationships and actions to a surface-lacking substance, which has only instrumental ends. From Italian to English, therefore, the book’s interrogation of these problems intensified: how do we avoid making transparence a double game? How do we prevent ourselves from getting caught up in common sense, or slipping into hypocrisy (even when we need it to survive…), or forgetting what responsibility means—and not just responsibility to ourselves.

AMMD: Looking back at your first poetry collection, L’altro limite (2017), and then to Trasparenza, what would you say are the most notable shifts in your poetic vision and approach to writing? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Thinking through Labour: A Review of The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati 

June 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

Fortunati sweeps us into understanding the re/production economies of the housewives, the prostitutes, and the workers.

The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati, translated from the Italian by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, Verso, 2025

Earlier this year, Indian Twitter spiralled into a full-blown meltdown after Mrs., the Hindi remake of the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, was released pan-India on the streaming platform Zee5. The film provides a picture of the world of Richa, a well-educated woman who recedes into the drudgery of housework; after marriage, her dreams and desires suffocated. I could not bring myself to watch the film, but I devoured the reviews. Many hailed the movie for its realistic rage against the patriarchy, but the bones of contention that the audience picked with the film were many. One Twitter user casually remarked that if the husband is the breadwinner, the least one may expect from the wife is to do the household chores. Reading these reviews and blithe takes, I was livid, and I could not quite put a finger on why.

I found the answer, cosmologically-willed, in Leopoldina Fortunati’s work L’arcano della riproduzione (first published in 1981), rendered into English by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono as The Arcana of Reproduction. Fortunati was a key member of Lotta Femminista, initially called Movimento di Lotta Femminile (Women’s Struggle Movement), and then finally Movimento dei Gruppi e Comitati per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Movement of Groups and Committees for Wages for Housework). English-speaking countries are more familiar with its alternative name: the network of Wages for Housework. As the name suggests, the international movement had a militant and anti-capitalist dimension, and its goal to secure pay for housework aligned much with the struggles for wages that were playing out in factories and universities at large. Together with companions Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, she wrote texts that reflected the movement’s goals and ideology; her Arcana of Reproduction emerged from these reflections. READ MORE…

The 2025 Turin International Book Fair: Going the Distance

May 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Turin’s International Book Fair made some tentative but promising progress to outline an expanded conception of Europe. . .

Now in its thirty-seventh edition, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, continues to be a vital occasion for the literary community, gathering a diverse and lauded array of writers from around the globe to speak about their craft and its reflection of the world. This year, the theme “Le parole tra noi leggere/ Words fall lightly between us” gestured towards the need for literature to create connections and compassions; in the following dispatch, Veronica Gisondi reports on the illuminations to be found in this “between,” capturing the intersections and collisions that marked this year’s Fair.

This year, the Turin International Book Fair gathered a constellation of voices that, like a compass, revealed multiple paths to traverse the conflicts of the present and the complexities that await us, prefiguring a future expectant with the consequences of increasing inequality, oppression, and unbridled political violence. In these crossings, the fair also bridged a distance—the one that separates Europe from the rest of the Mediterranean, its ancient cradle—which has, for too long, appeared bigger than it actually is.

Some of the speakers that enlivened the fair’s thirty-seventh edition—held on May 15 to 19 in Lingotto, a former Fiat car factory—dissected the impact of being subjected to settler-colonial violence and the potential of literature in resistance. A dialogue between the Palestinian short-story writer Ziad Khaddash and Palestinian-Syrian writer and journalist Raed Wahesh took place on the anniversary of the Nakba (a day that signals the start of a long process of occupation and expropriation); in observance, Grazia Dell’Oro, Wahesh’s Italian publisher, remarked that “for us Westerners, anniversaries are often a way to clean our conscience. But we believe that the lively literary life of the Palestinian world needs to be remembered and promoted here at the fair,” and further stressed the risks of “the victimization that comes with an Orientalist gaze.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Good Girls” by Olga Campofreda

May 27, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Federica Silvi

That ... is how snakes leave their old skins behind: they crawl out of their nest and keep rubbing against the ground, until they’re finally free.

For this Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant and introspective excerpt from Olga Campofreda’s novel Ragazze Perbene, translated from the Italian by Federica Silvi. A woman returns to her hometown for a simple mission: attending her cousin’s wedding. But her journey provokes uneasy reflections, as she tracks the trajectory of her cousin’s life, which has adhered to the conventional “good girl” narrative ingrained in their community, and measures its distance from her own. As much as she cherishes her life of openness and freedom, her homecoming resurrects the ghosts of other possibilities—and worse, the fear of not being able to maintain her new identity under the suffocating pressure of the past. Campofreda’s prose brims with quiet tension, exploring the friction between the selves we create for ourselves and the ones we can’t escape.

In the end, no one cheered. The plane glimmered in the sunset-red windows of the business district’s skyscrapers, then landed smoothly in Naples, but none of the usual hand-clapping followed. A single, half-hearted burst had all but died down by the time the wheels touched the ground. Some might blame it on the low season: at this time of year, all the passengers are foreigners, taking advantage of lower prices to visit the islands and hike on the Amalfi Coast. It’s the outfits that give them away, the summer clothes they start wearing before it’s even hot, the shorts and linen vests they bring out as good omens for the weather in the days to come. In the holiday dream world they purchased, there’s nothing but sunshine. They’ll find it even when it eludes them: a power they can only wield in the places they’re seeing for the first time.

“Are you from here?” the delicate woman sitting next to me asked, in English.  

Her husband had woken her when Vesuvius appeared out of the window. She kept pressing her finger on the glass in its direction, ecstatic, a white-haired child. 

“Are you from Naples?”

I nodded; she replied with a contented sigh, then turned away to gape at the scenery some more.   READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2025

May 12, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fani Avramopoulou, Jason Gordy Walker, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Nichole Gleisner, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, South Korea, Greece, and Poland!

This month, we’re introducing thirteen new publications from eleven different countries. A strange and visceral collection of poems that distort and reimagine the body; a contemporary, perambulating study of the contemporary city; a novel that forsakes linearity for a complex exploration of chance and coincidence; a series that splits the act of storytelling—and the storyteller—into kaleidoscopic puzzle-pieces; an intimate and unflinching look at motherhood and its disappearance of boundaries; and more. . .

Transparencies 2025 PROMO COVER

Transparencies by Maria Borio, translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2025

    Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Italian poet Maria Borio’s English debut, Transparencies, transports us to an Italy defined as much by glass, screens, and holograms as it is by history and landscape. Divided into three sections—“Distances,” “Videos, Fables,” and “Transparence”—Borio presents a world where past, present, and future converge toward an audible silence, where the self presents itself as genderless, morphable—the I becomes you becomes we becomes they—and the poet plays not a character nor a confessionalist but an airy, elegant observer, as illustrated in “Letter, 00:00 AM”:

At the end of the video, soundless voices,
hollowed-out faces scroll like the ground stumps
of legend: even people with desires

emptied like furrows in tar can carry
a fable. The screams are timbers, old water
they turn to bark, white knots, even.

Danielle Pieratti’s translations preserve the glassiness inherent in the Italian originals; she has strived for accuracy of voice and image, as evident in “Green and Scarlet” (“Verde e rosa”), an eight-part poem that considers natural, national, and human borders: “Between the trees there’s the border’s furrow / the heavy sign that stopped them / all around shapes spring up like nations.” In an interview at Words Without Borders, Borio recalls how she and Pieratti chose to use “scarlet” instead of “pink” when translating “rosa”: “ . . . in English it’s literally ‘pink,’ but . . . the color referred to the luminous atmosphere of a sunset in the woods, so ‘pink’ would have given too sharp an impression . . . Danielle came up with the word ‘scarlet,’ which . . . feels softer, more delicate, with a gradual outpouring . . . .” Such close attention to diction permeates the collection.

Although the book examines the modern world and its technology—recordings, photos, videos, cellphones—Borio refuses to be glitzy (she’s no Twitter-verse poet). Describing the London Aquatic Centre, she pens lines like, “The transparent organs overhead open / become a soft line chasing itself, / cleansing the breath’s dark colors . . .” and “Life is everywhere, in the curved line / we inhabit as though thinking.” Simultaneously detailed and abstract, her verse brings to mind Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, two influences that Pieratti mentions in her illuminating translator’s note—although there’s some European surrealism rolling through her veins, too: “The cactus spines clench their vertebra of water.” Such accents only add to her poetry’s dreamlike magnetism, its cultured mystique. READ MORE…

The Working Class Literature Festival: Forms Worth Fighting For

May 8, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Working-class literature, then . . . confronts us not with surrender, but with the need to react.

The Working Class Literature Festival, now in its third year, is looking towards the future: one of continual resistance against capitalist oppressions, global cycles of exploitation, and the exclusivity of cultural capital. With the themes of the first two editions being Genealogies and Geographies, the varied and passionate programme of 2025 is focused on Perspectives—corralled by a defiant and buoyant slogan at its center: “We will be everything.” This year, Veronica Gisondi reports from the Festival in Florence, the persistence at its core, and the contemporary context by which writers must address our classist social reality.

A spectre is haunting a factory on the outskirts of Florence. It is the spectre of class struggle, of community, of collective care: the life force with which Campi Bisenzio’s ex-GKN factory has been brimming since the mass dismissal of its workers in 2021. Home to the longest factory occupation in Italian history, the automotive components plant has been lending its premises to the Working Class Literature Festival since 2023. With more than seven thousand people attending this year’s festival, held from April 4 to 6, the popularity of Europe’s largest working-class cultural event can be read as a symptom of our time, where a widespread sentiment of distrust and frustration toward Italy’s famously conservative literary industry meets a shared need to carve out a space to reclaim, discuss, and problematize the power of working-class writing—a writing whose words are never given, but fought for—and a strong desire for unity and change.

The three-day initiative brought together blue-collar workers, trade unionists, writers, researchers, and a diverse range of publishing industry professionals to celebrate the power of class struggle, in the factory as much as on paper. Rather than being industry-backed, state-funded, or sponsored by banks (as is usually the case for major Italian literary events), the Working Class Literature Festival is independently subsidized. Thanks to the joint efforts of Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN, SOMS Insorgiamo, Edizioni Alegre, and Arci Firenze, in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the factory was transformed from a self-contained, closed-off world into a porous space for concrete action—a space, as artistic director Alberto Prunetti said in his opening speech, “for poetry,” that is, poiesis: a process of emergence through which “things are made” and “new imaginaries” can be built. “It is our duty,” he added, “to create a future where factory work and literature can once again converge.” Inspired by the impact of the GKN workers’ ongoing struggle, the festival aims to break the boundaries of individualism and subjectivation to encourage collective forms of debate and active dissent that concern work, culture, and the publishing industry alike. As Prunetti wrote on Jacobin Italia, “one of the festival’s features is that it crosses literature and politics, and makes literature a political act.” READ MORE…

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

May 5, 2025  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Daniel Yadin, Hilary Ilkay, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, Sauvryn Linn, and Sayani Sarkar

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

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

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

READ MORE…

What’s New In Translation: April 2025

April 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Dan Shurley, Eric Bies, Liliana Torpey, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from Brazil, Portugal, Switzerland, Colombia, Norway, Italy, Palestine, Cuba, Peru, Japan, Afghanistan, and Germany!

The brevity of a transcendent ecopoetics, a fierce diagnosis of the contemporary art world, the psychological torture of a toxic relationship, a gathering of formidable Afro-Brazilian voices. . . This month, we are delighted to introduce fifteen new works from around the world, from the intimate to the twisted, the reverent to the radical, of healing and breaking, of what goes on within us and between us.

images

 Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández, translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia, World Poetry Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Rhythm in poetry, Yeats told us, serves to “prolong the moment of contemplation—the moment when we are both asleep and awake” by balancing a monotonous formula of language with the surprise of new images, ideas. In his metered perfection, he reminded us that we are innately rhythmic creatures, alive by the steady pace of breath and heartbeat, habit-forming and fond of repetition, and every interruption to this enduring pattern is a miniature shock, a fracture, a revival.

The hundred poems in Gastón Fernández’s Apparent Breviary are full of interruptions: huge, gasping chasms of silence throwing poetic rhythm into some archaic past. A few pages in, I understood why their translator, KM Cascia, had admitted that the poems made them “squirm.” They unsettled me too. With no guiding cadence to the words, no comfort of the steady pulse, with language disorientating in its skeleton arrangement, there is a sense of learning how to read again, examining each word set firmly on its own—rare stars in the page’s matte sky. Max Picard had once brought up the idea that language is too self-conscious: “each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front than to the silence.” In Fernández, this isn’t so; here, language is conscious of its origin and reverent of its silent surroundings, and as soon as one acknowledges this fact, the vacancy of the negative spaces on the page begin to seem inviting. Instead of being read as simply text, there is something of Apparent Breviary that demands to be interpreted as score, in which the nothingness is full of measures, divisions, momentum. The poet demands we notice that the emptiness is alive: it breathes. READ MORE…

Crushing Millennial Ennui: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

March 27, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

Latronico’s novel is a deeply personal book of objects gazing back at us, full of questions about authenticity, reality, their significance.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

In the early 2010s, a specific gastronomic corner of the internet flourished alongside the rise of the Instagram aesthetic; food blogging evolved beyond sites run by home cooks from around the world, and social media brought its democratization to full swing. I too was among the converted. My weekends throughout grad school became increasingly spent wandering supermarket aisles in search of capers, plum sauce, sumac, fig jam, and macadamia nuts—which were especially hard to find in India at the time—while around me, artisanal coffee shops serving cold brews were just starting to appear, and the profession of pastry chef was becoming a lucrative pursuit. At the same time, a new generation of photographers emerged in Berlin’s culinary scene, sharing dreamy images of mid-century tables with pastel ceramic bowls of oatmeal and ruby-red berry coulis, positioned in wildflower fields with Photoshopped late-evening glow. Food, like everything else in life, became a highly publicized mode to exhibit the paragons of life, beauty, and self.

Vincenzo Latronico, a Milanese author originally from Rome, has previously written four books, but the Booker International-nominated Perfection is his first to be translated into English. Though the novel is affecting on several levels, it’s important to note that it will resonate differently with readers of various age groups. As a millennial, reading Perfection was like stepping into the looking glass; at times, it felt like the narrator’s striking delineation of the digitally idealized lifestyle, tinged with biting wit, was aimed directly at me. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Unknown” by Marianna Vitale

March 4, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Laura Venita Green

It reminds her of when she was a kid and she used to swim into open water, out to where she couldn’t reach, abandoning herself to it.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a delicate story of young love from Italian writer Marianna Vitale, translated by Laura Venita Green. We accompany high schoolers Sara and Lorenzo on their first date, which unfolds in fragments—clinking glasses, tentative touches, and finally, the shared thrill of a ride on a Ferris wheel. The freshness of their budding relationship imbues every moment with a tense beauty. But as their connection deepens, a sudden encounter with death shifts Sara’s perspective, forcing her to confront life’s essential ephemerality. Struggling to articulate her emotions to Lorenzo, she finds herself overwhelmed by the desire to let go. With its subtle exploration of first love and the inevitability of loss, the story intertwines themes of youthful passion and untimely death with lyrical elegance.

Leaning against a wall, his hands in his jeans pockets, Lorenzo has by now stopped tracking the minutes. He’d been told that girls make you wait, but Sara should have been there half an hour ago and he’s beginning to worry she’s changed her mind. 

The San Giuliano streetlamps tint the alleys with warm light, and the Saturday evening crowd mixes with the Rimini neighborhood locals. Lorenzo checks his phone again. Then he goes back to staring at his white Nikes and the frayed hem of his jeans. He unrolls his shirt sleeves because the air is growing cooler and more humid. 

When he looks up, he finally sees her: thin, straight legs moving in a hurry, wrapped in dark tights and shorts, a satin blouse that falls softly on her chest, revealing small freckles just above her breasts.

“I’m late,” Sara says.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, greeting her with a kiss on both cheeks. “Want to get a drink?” He points to the entrance of Retroborgo and guides her there, resting a hand between her shoulder blades, barely touching her. “I’ll go ask if we can sit outside.” 

She waits on a stool between barrel-shaped tables. Across the street, two little boys are playing soccer outside a house with red shutters. Sara thinks she’d like to live in this area, so close to downtown. Then she wouldn’t be stuck having her parents drive her around everywhere. 

“Okay, I ordered two spritzes,” Lorenzo says when he returns, sitting down next to her. “And they’re bringing something to eat.” 

“Great.” Sara smiles and exposes her imperfect teeth. They’re one of the first things Lorenzo noticed about her—her slightly crooked right canine overlapping her incisor. 

“You look really nice tonight…I mean, you always look nice.” 

READ MORE…

Handshake with the Devil: The Violin with Human Strings and Other Tales of Musical Madness by Antonio Ghislanzoni

March 3, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Richard Cho

[T]he real value of this collection is its aptly drawn portrait of the music world in nineteenth century Europe. . .

The Violin with Human Strings and Other Tales of Musical Madness by Antonio Ghislanzoni, translated from the Italian by Brendan and Anna Connell, Snuggly Books, 2024

Bach, Liszt, Paganini, Beethoven. . . these virtuosos have been immortalized in western societies—but what about the supremely talented musicians who clawed their path toward the zenith, only to ultimately fall short? In The Violin with Human Strings: And Other Tales of Musical Madness, written in Italian by Antonio Ghislanzoni and translated by Brendan and Anna Connell, the author paints the journey of four such less fortunate individuals. Throughout the collection, a recurring motif seems to ask: Is musical renown attained via wits and ambition, or via preternatural gift? Whatever the answer to the perennial debate on nature versus nurture in musical talent, the four stories here testify that a destructive impulse for mastery will eventually lead to madness.

A contemporary of revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824-1893) was a multi-talented Lombard who began his career as a musician (principally as a vocalist), but turned to devote the latter half of his life to writing, resulting in a prolific corpus of articles, novels, short stories, and some eighty librettos. He was also an important member of the Scapigliatura movement, a loose-knit group of artists in Milan who gathered after the 1860 Unification of Italy. An Italian counterpart to the French Bohèmi, the group idealized patriotism, anti-conformism, and intellectual independence, with its writers being receptive to international writers such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe—an influence that shows in Ghislanzoni’s fiction. READ MORE…