Language: Korean

An Existential Gangster Novel: On Un-su Kim’s The Plotters

October 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Kim’s novel joins recent [work] that offer[s] critiques of South Korean capitalist society and class—most notably Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.

Prize-winning South Korean writer Un-su Kim was first introduced to English readers in 2019 via The Plotters, a hitman thriller that follows protagonist Reseng, a man raised by his mentor, Old Raccoon, to be an assassin. Comparisons have been made to numerous other gangster works, such as films by Quentin Tarantino and the John Wick series, yet Kim’s take on the genre is compelling and unique. After the death of a close fellow assassin, Reseng begins to question his place in this lucrative yet nihilistic industry, as the novel takes a more existential turn. In this review—the first of four in a series spotlighting Korean fiction in partnership with Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)—Asymptote editor-at-large Darren Huang explores The Plotters as a political critique of Korean capitalism and considers whether it succeeds in subverting the gangster genre.

The soldierly heroes of literary and cinematic works in the gangster genre are often absorbed and then trapped within rigid political and cultural structures defined by their underworlds. In the 2019 Martin Scorsese film, The Irishman, Frank Sheeran, the hitman protagonist, played by a typically reticent and unsmiling Robert De Niro with his curled lower lip, is initially an outsider but assimilates into the Bufalino crime family by adopting the mobster ethos—cold-bloodedness, discreteness, and above all, unswerving loyalty to his superiors. He never seriously questions the instructions of his boss, even when they involve the killing of a longtime friend and mentor. In Mario Puzo’s crime novel, The Godfather, the tragic hero Michael Corleone at first renounces his family business of organized crime and detaches himself by escaping New York to settle in Italy. A number of incidents (including a car bomb explosion that inadvertently kills his wife and an assassination attempt on his father) compel him to return to New York, where he succeeds his father as head of the family organization. He expands his father’s dynastic empire and rises through ruthlessness and cunning to become the most powerful don in the country. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Hwang Chini by Hong Sŏkchung

September 1, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton

Satisfying one’s curiosity is like drinking salt water: the more of it you take, the thirstier you become.

This week’s Translation Tuesday transports us to sixteenth-century Korea in this excerpt from Hong Sŏkchung’s historical novel Hwang Chini. In this particular passage, our titular protagonist dons a disguise and explores the common neighborhoods of her city. Raised within an aristocratic family but soon to be made aware of her mother’s outcaste status, Chini is shocked and frightened by this formerly hidden underbelly of society. The legendary figure’s wit and daring are outpaced only by her curiosity, but the more she sees and hears, the more she is overwhelmed and unprepared. In language that is comedic, anachronistic, and surprisingly transgressive, Hwang Chini offers a contemporary take on a legendary historical figure. The novel’s fame also breaks political precedents: author Hong Sŏkchung received the Manhae Literature Prize, marking the first time a major South Korean literary award was bestowed upon a North Korean writer.  

Part One, section 12

After Chini has offered greetings of the evening to her mother she visits the kitchen maid’s room. This room has been kept heated, even now in the dog days of summer, ever since the maid suffered a stroke. Granny is there trying to sweat out a cold.

Chini feels a blast of heat as she opens the door to the cavernous room. Granny has burrowed into her bedding on the warmer section of the heated floor.

“How are you feeling?”

“Well, look who’s here! You came by earlier, and here you are again?” But Granny, face streaming with perspiration, is happy like a child at the sight of Chini.

“I gave Igŭm some ch’ŏngshimhwan for you,” says Chini. “It’s supposed to work miracles—did you try it?”

“I did! And I’ve broken into a good sweat and feel much better. But I’m afraid you’ll have to sleep without me tonight. You’ll have Igŭm, though.”

“That’s fine. Just make sure to take care of yourself!”

Chini stops in the kitchen to ask the maid to look after Granny, then leaves for her quarters. The moment she sets foot in the rear gardens, her proper-young-lady persona evaporates and the seething vigor and bursting vitality of a curious teen reveal themselves in a naughty, sparkling grin. She scurries off. READ MORE…

Something Like Delight: An Interview with So J. Lee

August 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The lines I love most in Korean are often the hardest to translate into English. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous language pairing.

For So J. Lee, 2020 has been a year of growth. Just two years after their first translations were published, the Seoul-based writer and translator became Modern Poetry in Translation’s current Writer-in-Residence, recently released the fourth issue of chogwa (their quarterly e-zine showcasing multiple translations of a single poem), and will publish their full-length translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla next month, followed by Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon and Lee Soho’s Catcalling in 2021.

For an emerging translator working in the midst of a global pandemic, Lee’s list of publications is undeniably impressive. But one of the many things that 2020 seems intent on teaching us is that growth can no longer be measured solely in terms of productivity and output. In correspondence and conversation, it’s clear that So J. Lee has already embraced a new kind of metric, acknowledging growing pains and citing introspections, laughter, and everyday pleasures as equally significant indicators of their progression. This was especially evident when I contacted Lee in June, keen to learn more about their forthcoming books, zine, bilingual events, and drag performance. I wanted to begin our interview with a discussion around the imminent publication of Unexpected Vanilla, but instead, Lee asked if we could start the conversation with an unusual announcement . . .

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, July 2020

So J. Lee (SJL): Can I start this interview by announcing my hibernation this winter?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course! Can I ask why you intend to hibernate?

SJL: When Kim Tae-ri was asked about her plans after shooting a film and a TV series back-to-back in 2018, she said, “I plan to enter hibernation. I grew ten cm over the winter break prior starting high school. Let’s see what happens this time.” I love her casual re-articulation of rest as an opportunity for growth. I mean, rest is also rest. I don’t want to glamorize busyness, in the slim chance anyone sees me as a glamorous being. My vibe is more Pizza Rat anyway.

STH: Apart from the obvious pressures facing the world at the moment, what has kept you from resting over the past few months?

SJL: Grief. Ineffable grief and rage. Somehow we have to rest and allow for joy amidst it all. I’m still practicing. 

I’m animated by my three forthcoming books, Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), all of which I reflect on in my recent essay, “Not Exactly a Sister.” I translate women writers who write about women for women, so the word Unni became an organic through-line for introducing their works all at once.

As Modern Poetry in Translation’s Writer-in-Residence, I’m also hosting a virtual workshop on Lee Jenny’s concrete poem “Space Boy Wearing a Skirt.” After that will be my interview with Lee Soho and the fifth issue of chogwa!

STH: Wow, you have been busy! Can we talk about your translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, which is set to be published by Tilted Axis next month?  In 2019, Asymptote published several poems from the collection, including my favourite, “Erasable Seeds.” The poem describes a connection between two people as “a newly thickening forest” grown from “small seeds.” I think about that poem a lot. Like most of Lee Hyemi’s work, it is incredibly sensual and also reminds me of that moment when you first read a poem or line in someone’s poetry or fiction that’s so striking, you know that you just have to translate it. Do you remember which line of Unexpected Vanilla did that for you?

SJL: I was assigned in a translation workshop to translate a poet I’d never read before, and I wanted to try someone younger than Heo Su-gyeong, whose poems I’d tried translating as an undergrad. Then a title caught my eye: Unexpected Vanilla. I read the poem “Femdom” in the final section and realized that this young Korean woman was writing surrealistically about kink! I wanted to tell all my friends about it, which remains my biggest motivation to translate.

I’ve written about the Unni line in “Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” so many times already, but it’s simply iconic. Plus, Lee Hyemi wrote a variation of that line in my copy of the book: “We must be one person, cunningly divergent. Sharing an intimate language.” I’ll always remember the way she pulled out a stamp shaped like a fish and blended multiple colors before pressing it to the page. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

May 11, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth, Edwin Alanís-García, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2020 Issue Has Landed!

April 16, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Anton Chekhov, Tsering Woeser, Phan Nhiên Hạo, Chus Pato and Alba Cid in our Galician Feature amid new work from 30 countries

Explore the grand scheme of things in Asymptote’s Spring 2020 edition “A Primal Design,” featuring poetry by Zuzanna Ginczanka and Phan Nhiên Hạo, drama from the great Anton Chekhov, Joshua Craze’s review of António Lobo Antunes’ latest fiction, and Fiona Bell’s essay on the “diva mode” of translation. Our Special Feature this season showcases Galician poetry, headlined by Chus Pato. The vivid colors of guest artist Ishibashi Chiharu set the tone for exciting new work from 30 countries and 24 languages, while Ain Bailey’s sonic art provides a fitting soundtrack!

The oracle reveals the obscure plan that drives history, and Galicia, as evoked by its poets, shimmers with oracular resonance. “Language endures / Bodies do not,” declares Gonzalo Hermo, and indeed, these verses seem meant for stone inscriptions. Lara Dopazo Ruibal’s work takes a more visceral approach: “the fig tree grows inside me while the scorpion hunts the ants coming out of my eyes.” But everywhere these poets deal in the essential, the “gold in its original depths,” as Alba Cid writes.

The primeval and the primordial abound in highlights like Matteo Meschiari’s dive into prehistory in his powerful fiction, “Red Ivory,” or Auschwitz survivor Edith Bruck’s lyrics, as immediate as they are minimal. Tareq Imam considers the sublime terror of blindness in a Borges-inspired tale, “Through Sightless Eyes”: truly we are as the blind before destiny. History, like that of Tsering Woeser’s immemorial Buddhist Tibet, provides an illusion of clarity in our confusion. Amidst all that disorientation, writes Seo Jung Hak, “Even if I scribble a poem, the absurdity like a fly who doesn’t bother to fly away somewhere is sitting on a chair like an old joke.”

As we sit quarantined in Plato’s cave pondering our collective conundrum, consider casting shadows of your own when you share news of the issue on Facebook or Twitter; as thanks, here’s a free flyer of the issue to print and share with friends!

If the work that we do touches you, consider signing up to our Book Club, or becoming a sustaining member from as little as $5 a month. We couldn’t do it without you!

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Translation Tuesday: “Mathematician’s Morning” by Kim So-yeon

February 18, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Megan Sungyoon

I have lived long forgotten such tears and such sighs

Acclaimed poet Kim So-yeon weaves abstraction into longing in this week’s Translation Tuesday. Kim’s speaker examines the life of a Mathematician haunted by memories of intimate sensations: an embrace, a heartbeat, the sound of an imagined breath. Fragments of the Mathematician’s embodied experience are juxtaposed with jarring moments of disembodied calculation. This confluence of abstraction and sensation becomes existential as the process of dying is compared to a triangle, a line, even absolute pi. Between these mathematical similes, Kim deftly illustrates a life confined by rational linearity, but which also pines for the tangible, the organic, and the non-linear. 

Mathematician’s Morning

I will die for a moment
like a triangle

Look around the quiet shadows of still objects
A birdcage starts moving around around

READ MORE…

Parasite Takes Best Picture!

February 10, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.

Chances are that you’ve already heard of Bong Joon Ho’s history-making feat at the Oscars yesterday following our prediction in December, but did you know that it wasn’t so long ago that Bong was on a blacklist, along with some 10,000 filmmakers deemed to be critical of the South Korean administration, and those people were prevented from receiving arts funding? As the New York Times notes, Parasite is the first movie not in English in the Academy Award’s 92 years to take the top award; “in a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.”

As we invite you to explore more of what South Korea offers to the world in our extensive archives (ranging from magical realist writing, experimental poetry, and the most inventive science fiction to surreal drama and playful Hangul text art—and including work by Burning director Lee Chang-dong), we hope you’ll also consider joining our mission to break down similar barriers in literature. By coincidence, we too do not receive arts funding, because the government of the country where we are incorporated does not consider our endeavor supportable. Take it from Eliot Weinberger, who has said, “Asymptote may be a small chisel and drill, but these things force cracks that, time and time again, have eventually brought the walls down.

Help us bring the walls down—become a sustaining or masthead member today.

What’s New in Translation: December 2019

December 16, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

Our selected works of translation this month touch on the eternal themes of narrative, identity, and the poet's voice.

It has been a wonderful year of covering, dear reader, the most fascinating translated works of world literature. Today, we are back with three more varied and exceptional books. Below, find reviews of a discursive and genre-bending Korean work, a powerful Uzbek novel that traverses existential questions of migration and hybridity, and the intimately potent lines of a young Argentine poetess. 

seven-samurai-swept-away-in-a-river.w300

Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2019

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

To Jung Young Moon, the author of Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, meaninglessness is a more accurate portrayal of reality than contrived narratives. Continuing the fascination of Vaseline Buddha, one of his earlier novels which delves into the mind of an insomniac writer, Moon experiments with how the novel as a genre may go beyond the typical constituents of character, plot, and structure, and whether or not readers are able to find enjoyment in navigating largely banal thoughts and experiences. 

Set in Texas, where Moon did a residency in 2017 (specifically, in Corsicana, which he refers to as “C, a small town near Dallas”), Seven Samurai culminated from his desire to write about the state. But Moon does not know much about Texas, nor does he pretend to do so. Meandering through a list of stereotypes, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to cowboys to the disdain for adding beans to chilli, Moon does not so much feature Texas as a place of interest, but rather as a springboard for his endless ruminations that find beginnings in almost anything, but that ultimately lead nowhere. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 28, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Varun Nayar, and Victoria Livingstone

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Eleven days after its launch, Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue continues to capture the zeitgeist. Many of its pieces, drawn from a record thirty-six countries, simmer with polyvocal discontent at the modern world, taking aim squarely at its seamy underbelly: the ravages of environmental degradation, colonial resource extraction, and media sensationalism of violence, in particular. If you’re still looking for a way in, perhaps our Section Editors can be of some assistance. Their highlights from the edition follow:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Microfiction Special Feature Editor:

Via frequent contributors Julia and Peter Sherwood, an excerpt from Czech writer and dramaturg Radka Denemarková’s latest Magnesia Litera Prize-winning novel, Hours of Lead, brings us into the bowels of a Chinese prison, bearing witness to a dissident girl’s defiance of state repression and censorship. Inspired by Václav Havel, the protagonist’s struggle is entirely private and self-motivated, untethered from any broader democratic collective or underground movement. Her guards are driven mad by her equanimity and individuality in the face of savage interrogation: “Even her diffident politeness is regarded as provocative. As is her decency. Restraint. Self-control. Humility. . . The guards find her very existence provocative.” Renounced by her parents and rendered persona non grata, “a one-person ghetto,” by the state, her isolation is both liberating and the ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice.

Meanwhile, poet Fabián Severo—the only Uruguayan writing in Portunhol, the language of the Uruguayan frontier with Brazil—revels in an act of presence just as radical and defiant of the mainstream, resisting the state’s attempted erasure of his language. Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translation sings: “This language of mine sticks out its tongue at the dictionary/ dances a cumbia on top of the maps / and from the school tunic and bow tie / makes a kite / that flies / loose and free through the sky.” Don’t overlook the luminous poems of prolific French and Martinican Creole writer Monchoachi, whom Derek Walcott has credited for “completely renewing our vision of the Creole language.” “The Caribbean could be considered a workshop for the modern world,” he conveys in Eric Fishman’s English translation, “with its deportations, its exterminations, and also its ‘wildly multiple’ side, its ‘ubiquity of voices and sounds.’” READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 21, 2019  |  in News  |  by Andrea Blatz, Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Another issue, another record broken: Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue features work from an unprecedented thirty-six countries. Looking for a point of entry? Consider our blog editors your guides. Their selections here, which range from Korean poetry to Russian drama, will set you off on the right foot. 

“Why do I think October is beautiful? / It is not, is not beautiful.” So goes a poem by the late Bill Berkson. It is not—as we know when the grey settles and looks to stay—a particularly delightful month, but if all the poems featuring October attests to something, it is that this time, its late and sedate arrival, is one that enamors poets. So it is that a vein of poetics runs through our Fall 2019 issue, and the poetry section itself is one of tremendous artistry and vitality. From the stoic and enduring lines of Osip Mandelstam to a brilliant translation of Sun Tzu-Ping’s strikingly visual language, Asymptote has once again gathered the great poets from far reaches. 

READ MORE…

How Should We Review Translations? Part III

September 26, 2019  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Ellen Jones, Johannes Göransson, and Katherine Hedeen

Reviewing poetry in translation means writing about the power of art. It means writing about something the market doesn’t want us to write about.

In this third and final installment, we hear from Johannes Göransson and Katherine Hedeen, both of whom direct our attention to what we should consider when engaging with poetry in translation.  Göransson details the idea of a deformation zone that disorients our conventional understanding of the relationship between the original and the translation. Calling on us to care about poetry in translation precisely because the market does not care about it, Hedeen envisions the practice of reviewing these translations as an act of subversion and as a gesture of solidarity. Be sure to check out parts I and II if you missed them. And if you’re interested in reading even more, at the end of today’s installment, Criticism Editor Ellen Jones has offered a list of other contributions to this ongoing and important conversation on what it means to review translations. 

 

Deformationszon

Viltstängslet har upphört
fladdermusar fittar sig
kring krubbet
Vårt pösmunkfetto slaggar
I sin goda roa,
som stötdämpad
av svallningar
I knubbet

— Aase Berg 

Deformation Zone

The wilderness fence has ceased
flutterbats cunt
around the grub
Our doughnutfatso slops
in peace and quiet,
as if shockmuffled
by ripples
in the plump.

— Translated by Johannes Göransson

 

1.

Anybody who is willing to engage deeply with a foreign text in translation can write a review of such a work. And it’s important that you do. You don’t need specialist knowledge of the foreign culture, nor do you need to be able to read the original. All you need to do is to open yourself up to poetry—even poetry that may come out of traditions different from those you are used to.  READ MORE…

How Should We Review Translations? Part II

September 25, 2019  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Lauren Albin, Matt Reeck, and Sue Hyon Bae

Above all, the translated poem allows us into its world—which exists somewhere between a language we don’t know and a language that we do.

In this second installment of our forum on reviewing translations, Lauren Albin and Sue Hyon Bae, two of the translators of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, reflect on their engagements with both the poet’s work and the culture in which it was produced. They highlight the dangers of adopting the role of an interrogator and emphasize the need for good faith in any encounter with a translated work. Today we also feature a contribution from Matt Reeck, who takes the opportunity to reflect on the ways that reviews might take into account contexts of reception and underscores how the idea of world literature can restrict our ability to understand local specificity as it attempts to develop a global framework. If you missed the first installment of this forum, be sure to check it out here, and stay tuned for tomorrow’s contributions from Katherine Hedeen and Johannes Göransson.

I want to point out this sentence in Matt Reeck’s review of Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, which becomes the foregrounding reason for his question of whether Korean poetry should be made more Korean in translation: “Kim’s poems are not confessional (which might make them indicative of the writer’s life and culture), nor are they written in a style that’s reflective of a social reality.” The reviewer’s desire for the poet’s confession quickly brings to mind one of the seminal poems of Kim’s collection—“Cultural Revolution in My Dream”—where Ms. Photon, a symbol of the bright light used by an interrogator to extract confessions, uploads a confessional software to the poet’s body. What I mean to say in drawing this comparison is that, Reeck got it wrong. Kim’s poems are confessional, but perhaps, they are not the confession that the reviewer wishes to hear—a situation that recalls Ms. Photon, who keeps on interrogating the poet even after there are no real crimes left but only a continuously generated confession. Therefore, the reviewer rejects Kim’s poems and along with them he rejects Kim’s social reality and Kim’s Korea, asking for translations that are more Korean than the originals and pressing for a false confession. 

Moving away from Reeck’s review, when the reviewer of translated work plays at interrogator, the perspective of the translated poet is immediately endangered. The interrogator is a figure employed by repressive regimes to reconstruct narratives, to revise the truth, to rewrite what actually happened, and to reconstruct history. Interrogators often already know what story they wish to tell and work to illuminate only that reality. An interrogator is also someone who has inherent power over another. While Ms. Photon extracts false confessions, the sun, in Kim’s “Lady Yuhwa,” “streaming like a searchlight / pursues and violates the woman” of the poem. A reviewer who steps into the role of interrogator assumes power over the poem and violates it intentionally or unintentionally by forcing it to conform to their own ideas about what it should be; silencing the poem, instead of allowing the work to speak in its own language of idea, even when that language seems to push at the boundaries of our minds.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 6, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Quyen Nguyen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Follow our editors through France, Japan, and Vietnam as they bring a selection of literary news of the week.

This week, our editors are bringing you news from France, Japan, and Vietnam. After quiet summers in the literary world for many countries, September brings the literary scene back to life. In France, the anticipation is building ahead of the most prestigious literary prizes being awarded. In Japan, a new edition of a historic quarterly is uniting Japanese and Korean literature through a shared feminist voice. And in Vietnam, the launch of a new anthology, as well as events held by prestigious translators, celebrate the ties that are created through translation.

Sarah Moore, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from France

September in France marks the rentrée littéraire, with hundreds of new titles published before the big award season starts in November. The prix Fémina, prix Renaudot, prix Interallié, prix Médicis, and the prix de l’Académie française will all be contested, as well as the prestigious prix Goncourt.

Amongst the French titles announced for the rentrée, Amélie Nothomb’s Soif (Albin Michel, 21 August) is highly anticipated, although not at all unexpected—an incredibly prolific author, she has consistently featured in the rentrée littéraire every year since the publication of her debut novel, Hygiène de l’assassin, in 1992 (Hygiene and the Assassin, Europa Editions, 2010). With a narrative that takes the voice of Jesus during the final hours of his life, Soif is sure to be as audacious, controversial, and successful as ever for Nothomb.

Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel, La Mer à l’envers (P.O.L, 2019), examines the migration crisis, narrating an encounter between a Parisian woman and a young refugee, rescued from a capsized boat. Many of Darrieussecq’s novels have already been translated into English, including her first novel Pig Tales (Faber & Faber, 2003), and, most recently, The Baby (Text Publishing, 2019). An interview with her translator, Penny Hueston, for Asymptote can be read here and an extract of her translation of Men was part of Asymptote‘s Translation Tuesday series for The Guardian.

READ MORE…

The Summer 2019 Issue Is Here!

July 18, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Dive into new work from 30 countries!

Wake up where the clouds are far with Asymptote’s Summer 2019 edition—“Dreams and Reality” brings you stunning vistas from 30 countries, including new fiction from Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, an exclusive interview with Edith Grossman, translator of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and never-before-published translations of Nicole Brossard, recent winner of Canada’s Lifetime Griffin Trust Award for Poetry. In our Special Feature on Yiddish writing, published with the generous support from the Yiddish Book Center, you’ll find everything from Isaac Berliner’s dreams of ancient South America to Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s modern-day America.

In Leonardo Sanhueza’s retelling of intimate life before, during, and after Chile’s Civil War, each poem an unforgettable portrait of a colonist, dreams are harbingers of death. In “A Rainy Tuesday,” Bijan Najdi’s nonlinear journey of grief, on the other hand,  dreams are bulwarks against the almost certain demise of missing loved ones. When the veil breaks, the real returns. Internationally acclaimed Korean poet Kim Hyesoon tackles the reality of violence head-on in her latest collection, reviewed by Matt Reeck. For artist Jorge Wellesley, the emptiness of slogans lies exposed in images of rotting, blurred, or blank billboards. In a candid essay, Fausto Alzati Fernández confesses to the rituals of drug addiction, some of which attempt “to grab hold of reality and strip it.”

READ MORE…