Language: Mandarin

What’s New in Translation: November 2024

November 11, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Jonathon Atkinson, Rachel Stanyon, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan!

In this month’s review of newly released titles, we’re looking at works from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan. From a haunting volume of ecopoetics to the first book in an acclaimed metaphysical septology, from powerful anticolonial verses to a meditation on the art of translating, read on for some of the best work being released now in English!

Balle CALCULATION vol1 rgb

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Review by Rachel Stanyon

After an unremarkable day spent on a business trip in Paris, Tara Selter is enjoying breakfast in her hotel when it strikes her that it is yesterday again. In the first book of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eighteenth of November begins repeating itself.

What possibilities exist upon the dawning of an old day? Are there wrongs to right, missed opportunities to seize, risks to take or temper? Balle’s heroine does not seem to perceive any such problems or desires; she likes her fairly routine job as an antiquarian book dealer, and works alongside her husband, Thomas, whom she loves. She does not seem to want for nor regret anything, and has blind faith in Thomas, who believes her when she tells him about her repeating days (at least the first umpteen times).

So why has her time “fallen apart”, and what can be gleaned from observing this procession of almost identical days—slowly, meticulously, rhythmically—through the diary Tara keeps? (In this version of eternal return, some of Tara’s physical imprints on the world remain indelible.) Book I details a year (the first of many?) spent haunting the all-too familiar patterns of her husband, all the while lost in loneliness and musing on the volume of her existence. Is she an all-consuming “beast, a pest” or a “tiny monster in an immense space”? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Charlie Ng

The latest in literary updates from Palestine and Hong Kong!

With a slight delay due to technical issues, in this week of dispatches from around the world our Editors-at-Large introduce the most impactful releases from their regions as of late. From Palestinian poetry that “transcends mere expression” in its beauty and purpose, to a number of works that promote public engagement with literature in Hong Kong, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Ibrahim Nasrallah, the acclaimed Palestinian poet and novelist, has recently released a poignant collection of four new poems. The collection is now translated from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine and will be published by World Poetry. Written in the shadow of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, these verses serve as a powerful indictment of global indifference towards the Palestinian plight, echoing the enduring tragedy of the Nakba that began in 1948. 

“I write now so that I do not die,” Nasrallah asserts, emphasizing the urgency of his message. He believes that with each attempt to erase their existence, Palestinians become more defined, more visible. These poems, dedicated to Gaza—a small yet symbolically vast territory—transform its struggle into a universal fight against darkness and tyranny. As Pierre Joris notes, Nasrallah’s work transcends mere expression; it embodies a visceral scream of the body, mind, and spirit, affirming the existence of Palestinians while mourning the losses of those killed and the land that remains elusive.

READ MORE…

The Teacher’s Task: Translation in a High School English Classroom

September 4, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Kena Chavva

They had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?

Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own? 

It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.

For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:

In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.

Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.

READ MORE…

“My-selves” in My Languages: A Discussion with Paloma Chen

August 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Conner

. . . sometimes “you” are “me,” and there is no distinction, and we are a “we,” but other times I am not even “me,” I am just void, 空.

Born in Alicante, Valencia, poet, researcher, and journalist Paloma Chen dedicates herself to advancing migrant justice in Spain. Her first collection of poetry, Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Calling On All Silent Majorities, Letraversal, 2022), explores the depths and diversity of the Chinese diasporic experience in Spain through a kaleidoscope of voices, encompassing mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers, while at the same time always challenging the suppositions of language. “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” published as an app in 2023 and translated by Paloma and her colleagues into Catalan, Mandarin, and English, renews the form of 山水诗, or “poetry of mountains and waters,” by pairing pixel art depicting scenes from China and the Chinese diaspora with poems that deepen the speaker’s relationships with their multiple and ceaselessly transforming selves. In the following interview, I spoke with Paloma about the importance of orality and quotidian language in her poetry, writing in community, and the multiplicity of the self.

Julia Conner (JC): In your essay “No tengo más que una literatura y no es la mía.” you mention how you envision Invocación embodying a Chinese diaspora collection of poetry, much like Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus being an Asian American poetry collection. When writing Invocación, how did you imagine your work in conversation with previously published literary works, both from Spain and abroad?

Paloma Chen (PC): I really like Asian-American poets like Sally Wen Mao, Marilyn Chin, Franny Choi, and Li-Young Lee, so their poetry was a great inspiration for me, as I wanted to write in Spanish, for readers in Spain, but taking into account my Chinese roots. Most of their works were truly enlightening and helped me build my own poetic language. I was trying to carve out a little space, one in which I can also find poets like Berna Wang, Minke Wang, Ale Oseguera, or Gio Collazos, that I could find liberating, one in which I could express the complexities regarding identity that I was all these years reflecting about. There is no me without all those before me, and all those walking with me right now. There is no Invocación without all the amazing books and artwork I had the privilege to encounter, without hundreds of fruitful conversations and lived experiences. I was writing for my friends, the amazing community of artists and activists, not only from the Chinese community, but from the anti-racist, feminist, Queer movements present in many places. I did not know if my book, which I thought was a very specific work by a Spanish-Chinese girl talking about her reality growing up in a little restaurant in rural Spain, could have the potential to connect with readers abroad, but I am happy to know that maybe it has.

JC: Many of your poems from Invocación center on speech and communication, fluency, disfluency, and the function of language. “Pero habla,” for example, repeats the visually interrupted line “pala/bras part/idas que hi/eren.” Your work also has powerful oral and rhythmic qualities to it. How do you see the relationship between the themes of your work and your poetry’s orality and visual form on the page?

PC: I guess that for a writer and a poet, reflecting about language itself is quite common. In my specific case, reflecting about identity inevitably leads me to reflect about language, as identities, languages, and cultures are so closely interrelated. Also, I do not think poetic language is that different from the quotidian tool we use to communicate daily. Our every-day interactions are full of poetry. The fact that in my normal life I am used to thinking about communication, fluency, and disfluency doubtless permeates my writing. I have always struggled to communicate, to express myself in the way that society demands me to. I studied journalism at university because I was truly worried about it back then. Some people think of me as being quite shy sometimes but, in a huge contrast, quite expressive in my poetry. For me, writing poetry is establishing a conversation with another true self, a self empowered by voice, body, presence, rhythm, a self that is connected with the environment and less in its own head. Because I value orality, I like to experiment also with the visual form of the verses in the page, so the reader can also have some visual clues of tones, silences, vibrations, etc.

READ MORE…

The Languages and Literatures at Play in Hong Kong: Jennifer Feeley on Translating Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless

July 25, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

I love the idea of translating something that people say is not translatable, because everything is translatable.

Jennifer Feeley is the Anglophone voice of renowned Hong Kong writers such as Xi Xi 西西, Wong Yi 黃怡, and Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—whose thrilling and chilling Tongueless is our Book Club selection for June 2024. Set in a vividly multilingual Hong Kong, Tongueless is a heartrending horror novel about the human face of language disappearance, and what it means when we no longer have the words to speak to one another. Despite the contemporary social and political alienation depicted in this vivid novel, Sinophone Hong Kong literature is flourishing in English, German, Italian, and other European languages, testifying to the diversity and dynamism of the Hong Kong literary scene. Asymptote is grateful to Jennifer Feeley for her humour as she shares the process of translating Tongueless; her generosity in recounting the complex heritage of literary Chinese(s); and her commitment to championing stories from Hong Kong for global readers.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): How did your interest in Hong Kong literature arise?

Jennifer Feeley (JF): In the summer of 2005, I attended a poetry conference in Beijing, where I met the Hong Kong writer and scholar Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞, also known as Yasi/ Yesi 也斯, or PK Leung. When PK came back from his trip to the mainland, he spent an entire day showing me around, and we talked a lot about Hong Kong poetry.

He recommended the work of Yau Ching 游靜—who’s also a filmmaker—and suggested that I also take a look at her film Ho Yuk 好郁 (Let’s Love Hong Kong), one of the earliest lesbian films from Hong Kong. Later in my graduate school career, an essay I wrote on Yau Ching’s poetry became my first academic publication. That was when I really started to consider Hong Kong literature—particularly poetry—and its genealogy. How do we define and categorise Hong Kong poetry? Can we do it by language?

As an academic at the University of Iowa, I taught Hong Kong cinema and literature, and began to write about Hong Kong film and research musical films from the 1960s. As I noted that a significant amount of Hong Kong literature had yet to be translated into English, I became increasingly frustrated. Even when translations existed, many were not available outside Hong Kong. For instance, I wanted to teach Eva Hung’s translation of Xi Xi’s My City《我城》, which was published by Renditions in Hong Kong in 1993, but the bookstore was unable to order it. I could only teach part of the novel through PDF versions of my copy, due to copyright restrictions.

When I finally bought a copy of Xi Xi’s Selected Poems, I fell in love with her work: her language was such a challenge. Purely for fun, I began to translate them. Shortly after, I was approached by an editor from Zephyr Press, who invited me to translate a book by an excellent Mainland Chinese poet. I liked this poet, but I was so in love with Xi Xi’s poetry that I decided to take a risk. I translated a sample of her work, and they obtained the rights to publish it. READ MORE…

Announcing our June Book Club selection: Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa

June 27, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Tongueless . . . [mirrors] Hong Kong’s plurality and [elucidates] the darkening, authoritarian clarity of Hong Kong’s future.

Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless was published before the 2019 pro-democracy protests that saw two million people take to the streets in Hong Kong, but its prescient atmosphere of psychological horror and brilliantly embedded language politics anticipated the curtailing of Hong Kong’s linguistic and social liberties after 2020. Demonstrating Lau’s percipience and sensitivity, Tongueless is a timely and vital addition to the growing corpus of Hongkongese literature available in English. Jennifer Feeley’s masterful translation follows in her track record of translating titles from Hong Kong—most recently Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast (New York Review Books, 2024), for which she was awarded a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley, Feminist Press (US) and Serpent’s Tail (UK), 2024

Allegory depends on wordplay, and Tongueless starts with its title. The two ideographs in the original Chinese title, 《失語》, stand respectively for ‘loss’ and ‘language’. Together, they can both denote aphasia, a form of brain damage that hampers speech, as well as a Chinese expression that refers to a ‘slip of the tongue’. In Jennifer Feeley’s acerbic translation of this novel by Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—originally published in 2019 in what the copyright page calls ‘Complex Chinese’—《失語》becomes Tongueless. Lau’s psychological story of horror and loneliness in Hong Kong transfigures the metaphorical resonance of tonguelessness—losing one’s language, or mother-tongue—into a near-literal embodiment of mutilation and physical deprivation, a bloody allegory for the silencing and violence that Lau charts through the interpersonal and institutional politics of contemporary Hong Kong society.

READ MORE…

When Shadows Evade Shadows: Wen-chi Li on Ko-hua Chen and Taiwan’s Tongzhi Literature

July 17, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Queer Taiwanese literature has inherited the motives of escape and exile from its pioneer writers.

Historicising tongzhi wenxue, or gay literature, in Queer Taiwanese Literature (2021), Howard Chiang finds the origins of this political and literary movement in the “changing sexual configurations of the post-WWII era and the militancy and vibrancy of tongzhi 同志 activism in the 1990s.” Since its origins, the writers and texts of this subgenre have been prolific and varied, from avant-garde politico-cultural magazines such as Daoyu bianyuan (Isle Margin) to Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, Tsao Li-chuan’s The Maiden’s Dance, and Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. But what can be considered as the movement’s foundational text is Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen, a writer, visual artist, and critic who came out of the closet in that historical decade, making him Taiwan’s first openly gay—or tongzhi—writer. With more than thirty books and a body of work that span from poetry, film criticism, novels, paintings, scripts, photographs, and song lyrics, he merges in writing the thematics of Buddhist philosophical thought, science fiction, and porous queer masculinities. Chen, like his tongzhi writer-contemporaries, is living proof of a literature that has been tested by time, fortified by the activism of its believers, and has withstood the police brutality of the state and the skewed conservatism of religious groups. Decapitated Poetry came out in its Chinese original in 1995, and was published last April by Seagull Books in English translation by Colin Bramwell and Taiwanese anthologist, poet, and scholar Wen-chi Li.

In this interview, I asked Wen-chi about the history of tongzhi literature, the diverse Sino-specific gendered identities of Taiwan, the dynamics of co-translating Chen’s poetry collection, and the post-Sinophone/Japanophone futures of contemporary Taiwanese literature.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In the introduction to Decapitated Poetry, you and co-translator Colin Bramwell “felt that it was important to give a sense of the broadness of Chen’s output as a writer,” referring to the poet’s transcending beyond the corporeal-cerebral binary. Can you speak further about your experience in co-translating the aesthetic and thematic expanse of Chen’s oeuvre? How was the selection process of the poems in this collection? 

Wen-chi Li (WCL): When we submitted a translation sample to Seagull Books, we originally chose Chen’s work “Notes on a Planet,” which was composed from 1978 to 1980. One of the editors, Bishan Samaddar, replied to us that he was searching for “explicit poetry” for the Pride List series, and this queer sci-fi might be too lyrical and spiritual. I said to Colin that we could then instead directly focus on the works in Decapitated Poetry. The text was a milestone in queer Taiwanese literature, the first to intentionally expose homosexual lewdness and muscle love in Sinophone communities. We thought its English collection should provide a broad view of Chen’s eroticism, so later works like “Body Poems” were also included in the compilation—but we still could not forget the glamour of “Notes on a Planet,” which intertwines topics of gay exploration and posthumanism in the form of lyrical epic (something so unique in world literature). Colin also thought that putting “Notes on a Planet” in the last part of the English collection created an upward scale from concupiscence to otherworldliness, from corporeality to spirituality. The English collection harmoniously combines such opposite elements.   READ MORE…

Traitor to Tradition, Resister to Remorse: A Conversation with Kiran Bhat

April 13, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to shift the story before the labels set in; I want to blur the border before it has had time to be constructed . . .

Khiran Bhat is true to what he says he is: a “citizen of the world.” Among other things, he has authored poetry volumes in both Spanish and Mandarin, a short story collection in Portuguese, and a travel book in Kannada. He is also a speaker of Turkish, Indonesian, Hindi, Japanese, French, Arabic, and Russian, and has made homes from Madrid to Melbourne, from Cairo to Cuzco.

In this interview, I asked Bhat about writing across genres, self-translating from and into a myriad of languages, and being a writer who identifies as planetary, belonging to no nation—and thus, all nations at once. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a polyglot, a citizen of the world, and a writer “writing for the global,” are there authors (especially those writing in any of the twelve languages that you speak) whom you think were not translated well, and therefore deserve to be re-translated? 

Kiran Bhat (KB): What an interesting question! I’m rarely asked about translation, and since I dabble in translation, I’m glad to see someone challenge me on a topic that speaks to this side of myself. 

It’s a hard one to answer. I would pose that almost all books are badly translated because no one can truly capture what an author says in one language. Every work of translation, no matter how ‘faithful’ it aspires to be, is essentially an interpretation, and that interpretation is really a piece of fiction from the translator. Some people really want ‘authenticity,’ but when I read a translation, I just want something that compels me to keep reading (probably because I’m so aware of the ruse of it all). 

For example, a lot of people prefer the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, but I fell in love with the Constance Garnett translation. This might have been because it’s easy to find on the Internet and I was reading it on my computer while waiting on a ferry crossing Guyana and Suriname in 2012, but Garnett’s effortless storytelling style really made me fall in love with Pierre and Natasha. I can understand why technically Pevear and Volokhonsky are truer to Tolstoy’s sentences and paragraph structures, but I feel riveted when I read the Garnett version. I want to turn the pages and find out what’s going on, and I think that’s important as a reader: to get lost and immersed in a fictional world.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Yen Ai-lin

August 30, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Jenn Marie Nunes

I throw my shadow into the water / I live in a strange high-rise across the river

This Translation Tuesday, we invite you to savour three poems by the award-winning Taiwanese poet Yen Ai-lin, whose work meditates on femininity, motherhood and the body. The poems here, translated skilfully by Jenn Marie Nunes, reflect the changing trajectories of Yen’s poetics as they move chronologically from “Wintering Love Animals” (first published in 1982) to “Femaled Ocean” (2008) to “Reed’s Song” (2017). Throughout this suite of raw and imaginative poems, Yen’s frank and sensuous voice shines through. 

Wintering Love Animals

In winter
we burrow in the nest of blankets,
like animals seeking warmth.
Dear child,
you greedily suck my nipple,
wet mouthing, as if to say
“Your two breasts are so primitive,
your nipples so classical,
your temperature so Eastern……”
Yes, our position
is a primeval act seeking fire
through friction, endlessly mining
our own civility for fuel.

Dear child,
before sleepiness attacks
we’re both Pleistocene creatures,
still longing for a life erect. 

But, let’s stay curled in bed!
Use flesh to build the first cave,
conceal our reluctant evolution.

Femaled Ocean

Originally the shore had no shore
Waves just came and went
Enter Buddhist nature
Without a sense of time
Simply chewing over the taste of earth READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Chen Xianfa

January 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Romaine Scott

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems by the Lu Xun Literary Prize-winning writer Chen Xianfa. Chen’s meditative poems often begin from the plain contemplation of a minute object—a butterfly, the rain, an earthworm—only to draw them into a larger field of philosophical ideas where language and nature’s presumed certainties are interrogated. Reflecting on her translation of these poems, Romaine Scott emphasises “the process of dissolving linguistic and cultural borders to arrive at The Third Shore,” invoking Yang Lian’s notion of translation as forging a new element. So too does Chen write: “There is no such thing as an expression set in stone,” observing a word’s numerous metamorphoses. Immerse yourself in the sparse beauty of Chen’s poems where even a speck of the world can be made anew. 

Lanruo Temple

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’
There is no such thing as an expression set in stone
Nor can I speak unequivocally of a gust of wind
and though the temple may be built upon a speck
of dust, it will, nonetheless, collapse from within
There are moments when a butterfly is motionless
‘To live’ requires fewer strokes of the pen than ‘to take wing’

Taking Shelter From the Rain

It’s raining. In the square many people are running about blindly
a piece of clothing held over their heads
Of course, they are not actually blind
their eyes are simply fixed on taking shelter from the rain

Before the square was built, this was a shantytown
beneath whose poor-quality
bitumen roofs
the smell of poverty, excitement and rebellion rubbed shoulders
with the tavern’s moon. Heaven knows how many nights we
toasted each other READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 4, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, MK Harb, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest from Japan, Taiwan, and Lebanon!

As certain places are heating up with a flurry of events, others are remaining cautious and mindful. Still, the good thing about the page is that it remains steadfast, and our work remains something that we can always turn to, celebrate, and share in. This week, our editors are once again bringing you the latest in world literature news, with a new Japanese literary translation workshop centering on heritage speakers and people of colour, a newly virtual Taipei Literature Festival, and a new winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award. 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Poet and academic Iman Mersal has won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award! Her creative non-fiction work, In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat, is part journalistic excellence, part poetic elegy, all while maintaining the sensibility of writing in the life of a complex character. It traces chronicles the late Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayat, her struggles with mental illness, and her tragic death in the 1960s.

What’s new in Arabic literature? Banipal Magazine’s Spring issue is out, and it’s dedicated to Jerusalem and the acclaimed Palestinian auteur, Mahmoud Shukair, who has penned over forty-five books and six television series. This comes at a time when the Arab literary scene has overwhelmingly expressed its solidarity with the Palestinian people. Also on the subject of Palestine—this spring, I interviewed Palestinian-French writer and researcher, Karim Kattan, over here at Asymptote where we discussed belonging, the craft of writing, and other curious things. Also, Palestinian-Chilean writer Lina Meruane has a new novel out; Nervous System, translated into English by Megan McDowell, deals with the daunting specter of writer’s block. Read a review of the acclaimed work right here on the Asymptote blog!

How about some Arab cabaret? Well-read academic and translator Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring 20’s is an engrossing retelling of vagabonds, feminists, and performers as they defied gender norms, transgressed class lines, and created iconic productions. Another beautiful and timely publication by Saqi Books is We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. Edited by British-Palestinian writer, Selma Dabbagh, the anthology celebrates and examines the tradition of erotic writing in Arabic literature and its many women pioneers. Lastly, yours truly has a short story out with The Bombay Review, dealing with censorship and artificial intelligence. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: An interview with Anton Hur followed by a reading by Yilin Wang

February 26, 2021  |  in Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

Welcome to the first podcast episode of 2021!

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Join podcast editor Steve Lehman for a conversation with current contributor Anton Hur on his journey as a literary translator and his “Fictional Notes toward an Essay on Translation” that was published under the aegis of our “Brave New World Literature Feature” spotlighting the unique relationship between authors and their translators. Stay until the end to hear writer, editor, and Chinese-English translator Yilin Wang read five poems by Qiu Jin—also featured in our milestone tenth anniversary issue—in both Mandarin and English translation. For more literary discoveries spanning 31 countries, visit our new issue here.