Language: Norwegian

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty! (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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Our Fall 2024 Edition Is Here!

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

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

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

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

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Knausgaard Summons the Devil: On the Global Novel

But “what if,” asks Knausgaard, “Bellori’s ideas had won through, and Newton’s had sunk into oblivion? We’d now be living in a different world.”

In the following essay, Elisa Sotgiu considers the latest fiction series by Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist who rose to global fame for his groundbreaking and controversial autobiographical saga My Struggle. Below, Sotgiu examines Knausgaard’s positioning in the literary canon, the critical reception of his novels, and the warped reflection of our world lurking beneath the characteristic mundanity of his oeuvre.

Like all famous authors of the past half century or so, Karl Ove Knausgaard is routinely asked about his creative process. He always replies with characteristic understatement, maintaining that he hardly knows what he’s doing when he sits down to write. He has no plan to speak of and does not make drafts or even sketch a plot; he simply starts with a rough idea of a situation or a character and follows it until it develops into something interesting. To be sure, the method is not conducive to brevity, and since as a rule he does not delete or substantially revise anything, his books tend to leaven into multi-volume series. His new cycle of novels, which started with The Morning Star (published as Morgenstjernen in Norway in 2020, and in English translation in 2021), was supposed to be a trilogy, but as of October 2024 five lengthy volumes have already been completed, with one more in the making.

It is probably this reckless expansiveness, however, that lends Knausgaard’s writing its inherent curiosity, its compelling tension. Anything can happen at any moment on the page; both reader and author are figuring it out together. In a literary world where novels are published on the basis of their polished pitches and synopses, Knausgaard’s liberty to send three pages a day of an undefined project to his editor (Geir Gulliksen at Forlaget Oktober) and have them published as they are is nothing short of miraculous. The resulting impression of open-endedness and unfiltered immediacy prompted some, at the time when Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle (Min kamp, 2009-2011, translated into the English by Don Bartlett in 2012) was galvanizing United States American and United Kingdom writers of autofiction to declare that the author’s humdrum confessional style was the literary counterpart of social media exposure. Similarly, the sprouting and shifting form of the Morning Star cycle could be considered apt to the era of ever-growing, unmediated Wattpad novels, more so than all the conventional stories that have been plucked from self-publishing platforms, neatly packaged, and endowed with an ISBN.

Knausgaard’s books are original, even ground-breaking, but they do not appear so at first. In fact, it is when Knausgaard becomes aware of their potential novelty, and embraces it, that the best outcomes are achieved. This is what happened in Book Two of My Struggle, when Knausgaard realized that he was not writing a novel with a beginning, climax, and ending, and decided instead to devise his own formal rules. And it has happened again with the third volume of his new series, titled Det tredje riket and now published in Martin Aitken’s English translation as The Third Realm by Penguin Press. What Knausgaard has recognized in The Third Realm is that something unexpected has emerged from his free flow of words. In the first interviews he gave after the publication of The Morning Star, Knausgaard had claimed that his initial idea for the novel was simply to have a gallery of different characters react to the presence of something unknown, a new star. But as in a psychoanalysis session, his unmeditated writing brought to the surface all the things that have been repressed in the polite republic of (global) letters. Within an international literary field where progressive social commentary is the prevalent mode of narration, Knausgaard conjures up hellish creatures, the after-world, religious horror, the politically sinister, and the Devil himself.

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Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Kristin Vego

Just in time for the weekend, a sparkling conversation with current contributor Kristin Vego!

In the second podcast episode centering on contributors to Asymptote’s landmark 50th issue, Danish-Norwegian author Kristin Vego joins Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak in conversation. Her story, “All Things Lovely,” as translated by Jennifer Russell, represents her debut in the English language. Vego’s story also arrives at a moment when Norwegian literature is receiving global attention with last year‘s Nobel Prize in Literature going to Jon Fosse. Kristin Vego speaks of the “ghost of childhood” inhabiting a story of a young girl leaning into adulthood during a summer holiday within a Nordic landscape. Russell’s translation of Kristin Vego’s story sits alongside new work from 35 countries and 21 languages in the Winter 2024 issue, dedicated to the theme of coexistence. Listen to the podcast now.

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

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A Year of Reading the World

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

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

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

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

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

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

Casting the Spell: Damion Searls on Translating Jon Fosse’s A Shining

There is this very human, normal, everyday level, and at the same time there's this big, spiritual, complicated stuff.

Jon Fosse’s A Shining is both a luminous entryway for newcomers to the Norwegian author, and a fine distillation of Fosse’s long-running themes for familiar fans. We are proud to feature this latest English offering of the Nobel laureate as our October Book Club selection, and in this monthly interview with the translator, Damion Searls talks to Georgina Fooks about following rhythms, the translator as reader, and making his own rules. 

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.  

Georgina Fooks: To begin, congratulations on the Nobel Prize! I know the Swedish Academy likely would have been reading Fosse in Norwegian, but there’s no doubt that your translations of Fosse into English have been so important for the increased critical reception of his work.

Damion Searls: Thank you! Something that’s worth telling people who aren’t in the book business – I know Asymptote is well aware of this – is that for better or for worse (mainly for worse), English is the language that matters professionally for world literature. A German publisher told me a couple of years ago that if they have a book, they can get it translated into five or six languages, but it’s not until it gets a review in the Guardian UK or in the New Yorker that they can sell it to twenty or thirty languages—and they also told me that this is increasingly the case. English really is the gateway to bigger success for every other language; it’s not going to be a worldwide, translated-everywhere success unless it goes through English first.

The thing about Fosse—which Americans and English audiences don’t really know—is that he’s incredibly famous worldwide as a playwright. He is, from what I’ve read, the most produced playwright alive today. There have been productions of his plays in fifty languages all over the world, and it’s just never taken off in England or America. And there is a question asked about Fosse’s work: is it inaccessible? Well, if he’s the most produced playwright in the world, then by definition, it’s accessible. He was honoured with many prizes in Europe and in Norway before the English translations.

It’s not the case that the English publication raised him from obscurity, but it does seem to be a kind of stepping stone to things like the Nobel or to more translations. I know that now, Septology is being sold to dozens more languages than it had been before. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Lonely Wrinkle on Her Forehead” by Roskva Koritzinsky

It felt good to give the girl the seat at the table that was usually hers, the apple tree whose buds were about to blossom...

This Translation Tuesday, we serve a rich allegory, a domestic scene patiently rendered by Norwegian writer Roskva Koritzinsky. A Lonely Wrinkle on Her Forehead is an exquisite study of human-animal, mother-child positionality both immersive and instructive. Hear from translator Bradley Harmon on the deliberate language and detached tonality that defines this work:

“The work of Norwegian writer Roskva Koritzinsky is characterized by a cool, contemplative atmosphere, inhabited by a voice that is enigmatic and ethereal but, importantly, also patient and precise. Every sentence, every word she writes is important. For many writers, this might a style that is too concrete, too fixed, but with Koritzinsky it’s the exact opposite. The keyword is atmosphere, an atmosphere that blooms into an existential scale from her careful composition. For example, the reader will notice the somewhat strange use of the definite form of the nouns for mother, daughter, dog, and so on. Further, Koritzinsky is insistent on the use of ‘the mother’ or ‘the daughter’ rather than the more intimately relationally ‘her mother’ or ‘her daughter.’ While it is the case that using the definite article in English might be seen as an overtly literal translation of Norwegian, as to opposed to a more ‘natural’ rendition with the possessive article, Koritzinsky is adamant in maintaining the distance that this word choice conjures. This is consistent across her other stories but is particularly pronounced in this one.”

When she came home in the afternoon, the seven puppies had vanished.

Their mother was lying in a corner of the living room, whimpering. She felt its belly and made sure the puppies weren’t in there. So they must’ve been somewhere else.

She stood by the window and looked out at the landscape. The murky murmur from the woods and fields, it had scared her for the first few years she lived out there, but eventually she’d gotten used to it.

Forgotten it?

In any case, let it become a part of herself. The song from the countryside had seeped almost imperceptibly into the house, like poison.  

She shuffled over to the couch and sat down. The dog bed was in the corner. The blanket on which the week-old animals had been lying was gone. Someone must’ve come into the house—the door was always unlocked, she’d always taken pride in it, to come from the city and do as they did in the country, put the key in a drawer and forget it was there, not so much out of trust in the neighbors as an entrenched notion that one was a stranger to the world. But then Someone had wrapped the blanket around the puppies and carried them outside. Their mother hadn’t defended them, she let it happen. Now she was lying in the corner of the living room, crying. 

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Spring 2023: Highlights from the Team

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? Here are some personal recommendations from our amazing staff!

I read the Spring 2023 edition of Asymptote as the NBA playoffs began in the United States, and Damantas Sabonis (son of legendary Lithuanian player Arvydas Sabonis) and the Sacramento Kings faced the defending-champion Golden State Warriors in a first-round matchup. I was immediately drawn to the nonfiction piece “Liberating Joy” (tr. Delija Valiukenas) which centers the 2003 European Basketball Championships and the collective joy that the Lithuanian team, Žalgiris, inspired in their fans all over the country. Author Julius Sasnauskas, also a priest and monk, approaches the topic from his unique perspective, incorporating Catholic doctrine into his narrative which intertwines sports, culture, and national identity.

 —Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant

Alaa Abu Asad’s interview with J Carrier, for the very nature of its form, felt at times reductive of his rich investigations into the everyday, but the poetry in Asad’s visual pieces aptly captures the sentiment of (un)belonging.

Resonating very much with Hannah Arendt’s quote “it wasn’t the German language that went crazy,” Yevgenia Belorusets’s interview with Eugene Ostashevsky begins with her love of the Russian language. It’s only right that “no language can be mobilized against the tremendous violence offered by war […],” and this renders many writers and artists hopeless especially in times of insurmountable physical and linguistic violence. Yet it is still, somehow, language that rebuilds one’s voice and keeps one conscious. Ostashevsky’s question is also very apt in this regard when he argues “the idea that any language can’t express the full range of human relations and emotions is false.” Belorusets’s answer, “maybe it’s easier for us to think that it is the language that is under threat,” is at once the most poignant critique of and piercingly emotional charge against the “easier” indictment of language.

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

A highlight of our animal-themed Special Feature, Yolanda González’s “Song of the Whale-road”(tr. Robin Munby) is so dense and weighty in meaning that I feel the reader cannot but be transformed; the original piece, as well as the translation, so deftly compresses eons of whale-years and experience into an exceptionally moving and eloquent and elegant piece. I particularly love the ambiguity of the pronouns—it takes a few readings to wrap your mind around the narrative voices and personages, which further adds to the ‘darkness’ of the piece and the impression of coming out into the ‘light’ of mental clarity with each read.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Let it Go by Mariana Berenice Bredow Vargas, has an urgent, propulsive rhythm in Forrest Gander’s translation, and, in the stunning audio version by the author, feels almost like a hymn, each mesmerizing, sweeping me into the vision of the poem. After reading the dazzling Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug (trans. Kari Dickson), I was thrilled to see “But Out There—Out There—,” a nonfiction piece by Øyehaug, this time in Francesca M. Nichols’s translation, and this essay is similarly, satisfyingly interior, funny, inviting, and surprising, although it is itself focused on the quality of “incompleteness,” which, for Øyehaug, makes writing a novel so difficult. The excerpt from Wu Ming-Yi’s Cloudland, translated by Catherine Xinxin Yu, is concerned with a relationship between text and life, which is similar to the relationship between dreams and experience. This delicate story of a man, following the traces of his late wife’s short story about cloud leopards, into a mountain forest, where he uploads mapping data and images into a cloud of a different sort, was one of the most memorable pieces in the issue, and I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the English publication of the novel. I’ve been intrigued by what I’ve heard of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, but even if I hadn’t, Alex Lanz’s review would have been well worth the read for Lanz’s kaleidoscopic descriptions and grapplings with the book’s allusions and form, and with Cărtărescu’s “Bucharest, that ‘open-air museum’ of melancholia.”

 —Heather Green, Visual Editor

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To See a Mother Through the Eyes of a Child: On Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead

“The first song I ever heard was Mum crying by my cradle.”

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, Verso Books, 2022

In a charming 2017 interview with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth sang the praises of Kierkegaard, quoting the proto-existentialist on life being a task and an adventure—the adventure just to be you, “every single day with great fervor and responsibility.” Her novels, over a dozen of them, instantiate this charge, with several following characters grappling with existential crises precipitated by a sense of alienation from their families, their past, and their own authentic selves. 

Such a crisis breathes life into her latest novel, Is Mother Dead, out with Verso Books and translated by Charlotte Barslund. Joanna is the narrator and protagonist, a successful artist in her mid-sixties who is estranged from her family, which inevitably causes an estrangement from her past and—she wonders—her true self. Confronting her family—her mum and the woman’s role in affecting the formation of Joanna’s self in particular—becomes the task of Joanna’s art and her life, this adventure driving the novel.

What could cause a rift in a family so enduring that decades later, a daughter is forced to stake out her mum’s apartment just to confirm she isn’t dead? Writing with a rush of anxious interiority beautifully reproduced by Barslund’s translation, Hjorth spins out Joanna’s hopes, fears, and half-suppressed memories in obsessive and propulsive run-on sentences, full of self-reflexive questions and crushing doubt. Though Joanna’s “default setting” is feeling alone in the world, she is compelled to confront her mum to understand something deeper about herself—to consult her deepest self, because “. . . we all carry our mothers like a hole in our souls.” Her mum has no interest in such confrontations or consultations, and therein lies the conflict. 

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On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

How to Start Women in Translation Month Off Right

Stock up this August with some of our favourite presses and titles!

The impetus to read women is very similar to the desire to read the world; one does not necessarily do it out of a purely social cause—though that can hardly be argued against—but because the profound, intelligent curiosity that sustains the act of reading can only be validated by reading variously, probingly, and with an awareness of life as it is being lived now. Even as the world of letters is slowly ridding itself of entrenched biases and definitions, it remains an indisputable truth that the idea of being a woman in this world continues to throb with chaos and fragility, and increasing globalist awareness only reinforces the fact that womanhood remains replete with mystery, inquiry, and greatly variegating methods of approach.

To find the language that does justice to this experience of living—whether or not womanhood is the subject—requires a persevering intellect and originality that one finds in the greatest of minds. A reader does not pick up a work of translated literature to learn how being a woman is done in that part of the world, but to be allowed entrance into a vast, ridiculously under-explored, realm of humanity, whose inner workings often prove to be—as a result of challenges that must be overcome—intellectually complex, stylistically thrilling, and revolutionary in their uncoverings of human nature.

That is why I, for one, am grateful for the existence of causes like Women in Translation Month, which celebrates the excellent work produced by women around the world and also urges towards an increased conscientiousness about our reading choices. In solidarity with our fellow comrades who support global literature, below are some incredible opportunities you can take advantage of this August.

Many presses are currently offering promotions for the duration of WIT Month. One of our favourites, Open Letter Books, is offering a generous discount for the women-written and women-translated books in their lineup. Some recommendations I can make confidently include Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea, a gorgeously lyrical fiction of 1920s Barcelona; Marguerite Duras’ The Sailor from Gibraltar, of that terrific Durassian ardor and intimate poetry; and Can Xue’s Frontier, masterfully multilayered and graceful in its surrealism. Fum D’Estampa, a press specialising in Catalan literature, is also offering discounts on all their titles, with Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s brilliant melding of the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years among them.

The wonderful Charco Press, which time and time again has brought out exceptional Latin American works, has put together special bundles of their textsthree carefully curated sets of three books each. “Revolutions” includes Karla Suárez’s Havana Year Zero, a sharp and attentive novel about unexpected connections during Cuba’s economic crisis; “Interior Journeys” features the subversive, cerebral work of Ariana Harwicz; and lastly, “Stories of Survival” gathers narratives of persistence against violence and trauma, with Selva Almada’s incredibly powerful Dead Girls among them.

World Editions is another publisher getting it right, partnering with Bookshop to provide a list of highlighted titles. Included is Linda Boström Knausgård’s October Child, a poetic and elegant autofiction about the escaping borders of reality in her experiences with mental illness and memory loss. The Last Days of Ellis Island, the award-winning novel by Gaëlle Josse that centres around the painful tenets of migration, is also up for grabs. READ MORE…