Language: Portuguese

Winter 2014: A Rookie Among Giants

September 13, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Alexander Dickow

Living now under the shadow of Trump, the contents of the issue seem even more desperately near to us.

It takes a while for the blog to hit its stride. Editing to a quarterly schedule is different than editing to a daily one, we quickly discover. It does not help that both ‘founding’ blog editors jump ship within three months (Nick’s elegiac last post goes up on 30 October; Zack’s 31 December). Fortunately, the rest rally and get us through. (One bright spot from that time is Patty Nash’s breezy roundups—a breath of fresh air.) Five weeks after it inaugurates, Aditi Machado’s post on the blog gets picked up by Poetry’s Harriet Blog, joining mentions in BBC Culture and The Guardian. The Guardian article gives a nod to Asymptote’s first-ever London event in January 2014, also the first of many multi-continental events in honor of our 3rd anniversary. These go on to include panels and readings in New York, Zagreb, Boston, Philadelphia, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sydney over the next three months. A point of pride: determined to organize an event in Asia, I somehow manage to pull off a reading without a single team member on the ground, thanks to NYU Shanghai, contributors Eleanor Goodman and Eun Joo Kim, and a friend who happens to pass through. In New York, under real threat of snowpocalypse, Asymptote supporters Eliot Weinberger, Robyn Creswell, Idra Novey, Jeffrey Yang, and Daniella Gitlin all show up to our anniversary event at Housing Works emceed by then Assistant Managing Editor, Eric M. B. Becker, to read alongside Cory Tamler, first prize-winner of our inaugural Close Approximations translation contest (as written up in WWB Daily’s dispatch here). Here to get you excited for the Winter 2014 issue (featuring, among others, a translator’s note that I got J. M. Coetzee to write) is Alexander Dickow, runner-up to that very contest and Asymptote Communications Manager since April 2017. But, first, check out Winter 2014’s issue trailer—probably our best ever—by then Video Producer Sarah Chan.

I knew of Asymptote since its inception in 2011, but it was only in January 2014 that I was named runner-up in the first edition of Asymptote’s Close Approximations translation contest. That contest has had a lasting impact on my work: I later won a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant to finish translating Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, which was first showcased in Asymptote and is now under consideration by a major publisher. Evoking the Winter 2014 issue of Asymptote, then, cannot not be a little about my own relationship to Asymptote, even though I was an eager young rookie among the issue’s giants— J. M. Coetzee, Jana Beňová, and Michael Hofmann, to name a few. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

August 24, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Julia Sherwood, and Lindsay Semel

Print houses and jury panels are busy, autumn is coming.

Fall’s footsteps can already be heard in literary circles. As summer hosts its last open-air festivals, prize organizers and publishers are gearing up for a new season of surprises. In today’s dispatch, our Editors-At-Large from Europe tell us more about what is going on in the Czech Republic, Portugal, and France in this transitionary period. Come back next week for this summer’s last dispatch. 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Czech Republic:

Held from 1 July to 4 August at venues in five cities – Brno, Ostrava, Wrocław, Košice and Lviv – across four countries, Authors‘ Reading Month (ARM) may well be Europe’s biggest literary festival. It is certainly a major logistical feat: now in its 19th year, the festival featured 100 authors from six countries. Turkey alone, this year’s guest country, was represented by more than thirty authors, including Nedim Gürsel,  Murathan Mungan, Ayfer Tunç and Çiler İlhan. A strong Czech contingent featured prize-winning novelists Bianca Bellová and Josef Pánek, bestselling writers Michal Viewegh and Alena Mornštajnová, as well as a plethora of poets.

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What’s New in Translation: June 2018

June 4, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Poupeh Missaghi

Float away with one of these three new June releases.

Time for another round of translations hitting bookstores this month. June sees the publication of new translations from Morocco and Portugal. As always, check out the Asymptote Book Club for a specially curated new title each month.

ahmed b

The Hospital (translated by Lara Vergnaud) and The Shutters (translated by Emma Ramadan), from the French by Ahmed Bouanani, New Directions, 2018

Reviewed by Poupeh Missaghi, Iran Editor-at-Large

Two books by Ahmed Bouanani, Moroccan writer, poet, illustrator, and filmmaker hit the English literary scene this June.

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In Conversation: Ketty Valêncio, Founder of Livraria Africanidades

May 31, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Lara Norgaard

Teaching someone that she can be anything she wants to be is revolutionary, and that’s why what I do is activism.

Selling books can be a form of political activism. That’s according to Ketty Valêncio, who founded the initiative Livraria Africanidades, a unique bookstore in São Paulo that only sells books that focus on and valorize black women.

Africanidades Bookstore began online in 2014 and opened its physical location in December 2017. The walls of its new home have murals created by black women artists and its bookshelves are lined with fiction, poetry, feminist theory, nonfiction, and even cookbooks, the vast majority of which are written by black authors from Brazil’s peripheries. The space carries the fruitful results and future promise of selling books by authors who reside on the margins of the Brazilian publishing scene—or who are excluded entirely from the traditional literary market.

Here, Ketty Valêncio tells Asymptote Editor-at-Large in Brazil, Lara Norgaard, some of the challenges for women of color in Brazilian publishing and the power of increasing visibility for writers of color, both in Portuguese and in translation. 

Lara Norgaard (LN): How did you come up with the idea for the Africanidades Bookstore?

Ketty Valêncio (KV): The bookstore came about because of my struggle to understand myself as a black woman. I never felt that I fit in anywhere. And then I came across Afro-Brazilian literature, texts that have black characters as protagonists. I understood my blackness through literature, through these books written by black authors and also by a few white authors who place value on black characters. I came across these narratives and thought, wow, there are people writing about me, about who came before me, about my ancestors and my memories.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

April 20, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Christopher Chan, and Rita Mattar

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Albania, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Spring is creeping in and we have just launched a very special and very exciting new issue full of amazing literary voices from around the world, including Jon Fosse, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Lee Chang-dong. Check out the Spring 2018 issue here! In the meantime, we are here with the latest literary news from around the world. This week we report from Albania, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Albania:

Classic and contemporary Albanian literature is heavily focused on male authors and the male experience, a status-quo challenged recently by “Literature and the City.” Throughout April and May, journalists Beti Njuma and Alda Bardhyli will organize the second installment of this event consisting of a series of discussions and interviews exploring trends in contemporary Albanian literature. This year the encounters will highlight the work and world of Albanian women, through discussions with authors including Flutura Açka, Lindita Arapi, Ardian Vehbiu, Edmond Tupe, and Fatos Lubonja. A particularly exciting event was the conversation conducted with Ornela Vorpsi, a prolific author who writes in French and Italian but who remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone sphere. So far, only one of her books has been translated into English by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck: The Country Where No One Ever Dies.

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In Memoriam: Victor Heringer

March 29, 2018  |  in News  |  by Alice Sant'Anna, Lara Norgaard, and Rita Mattar

Borders, designed to be crossed and, whenever possible, abolished, were recurrent themes in Victor's oeuvre.

Today we bring you a reflection on the life of Brazilian writer Victor Heringer. Victor’s elegant and thought-provoking non-fiction piece “Notes for a General Theory of the Arriviste” was featured in the Summer 2017 issue of Asymptote where we have been long-time admirers of his work. Victor, who would be thirty this week, passed away on March 7, 2018. Today we celebrate his literary work.

Victor Heringer was a multi-genre, multi-faceted artist. It’s not enough to remember him as “Victor, the poet” or “Victor, the writer.” Victor drew and made films and sound installations. He wrote poetry, nonfiction, novels. It was as though the borders between genres were not so fixed or important. Indeed, borders, designed to be crossed and, whenever possible, abolished, were recurrent themes in his oeuvre.

“Being Brazilian, and especially being from Rio de Janeiro, was something I had to learn how to do,” said the writer, born in Rio in 1988, in an interview. “I spent my childhood moving between cities and countries, mostly Argentina and Chile. For a few years, I was sure I would stay in Santiago forever and become a Chilean citizen. When I came back to Brazil as a teenager, it took me a long time to lose the accent. I felt Chilean. In Chile, I’d felt Argentinian; in England, Brazilian; in Peru, where I am now, I’m starting to feel that I am nothing at all, maybe just a stateless person with documents and a few languages mixed up in my head.”

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Translation Tuesday: “Pyrotechnics” by Adriana Lisboa

March 27, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Adriana Lisboa and Edgar Garbelotto

A boy had a dream about fireworks.

In this piece by Adriana Lisboa that could be classified as micro-fiction or a prose poem, a reader discovers a poet who has transformed fireworks into words. Reminiscent of the Brazilian writer’s longer work, the piece plays with the possibilities of language and its sound in a way that is surprising to the reader. Enjoy! 

A boy had a dream about fireworks.

Years later, he found out that words sometimes formed verses. He became a poet and during his entire life he wanted to describe the itinerary of that dream from his childhood. He dug through dictionaries and discovered the possibility of creating hybrid images like mermaids or manticores. Verses that sounded like freshly brewed coffee, that corrupted like pure sugar-cane rum, that saved like a white lily.

Years later, he published his anthology of poems. The last one was called The Parallel Fires and it was the realization of his life project: fireworks transformed in verses.

Years later, a certain reader bought the anthology. When she was reading the last poem, she noticed that the words took on different colors and shone against the black background of the white page, obfuscating the stars, and impregnating the whole book with a discreet smell of gunpowder.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 9, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Erik Noonan, and Theophilus Kwek

Our weekly roundup of the world's literary news brings us to France, Singapore, and the United States.

It’s Friday, which means it is time to catch up on the literary news from around the world, brought to you by our fabulous Asymptote team! This week, we highlight France, Singapore, and the United States. 

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from France:

As previewed in our January dispatch, Paris is getting ready to host its annual Book Fair, starting March 16. The spotlight this year will be on contemporary Russian literature, with thirty-eight guests including Olga Slavnikova, Vladimir Charov, and Alexandre Sneguirev—all previous winners of the Russian Booker Prize. But even before the fair opens its literal doors, another event is organized in Southern France to satisfy those readers that can’t make it to Paris. Bron, a commune of Lyon, will hold its first Book Festival, dedicated entirely to contemporary fiction, between March 7 and 11. The festival celebrates those French authors who showcase the heterogeneous nature of the novel itself, with a spotlight on the works of Jean-Baptiste Andréa, Delphine Coulin, Pierre Ducrozet, Thomas Gunzig, and Monica Sabolo.

March is also Women’s History Month and French publishers have joined in the effort to promote literature by women and on women. Folio, a Gallimard imprint, has launched its “Femmes Prodigieuses” (“Brilliant Women”—a play on Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend”) campaign on social media, urging readers to read and share the works of their favourite women authors. Folio’s own suggested reading list include classics and contemporary authors, from Virginia Woolf to Marie NDiaye and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Beyond just the campaign, publishers are celebrating Women’s History Month by simply publishing more women. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir “L’age de discrétion” (“The Age of Discretion”), analysing womanhood at sixty and beyond, will be published for the first time as a standalone book. Albin Michel, another major publisher, will publish Susan Rubin Suleiman’s “La question Némirovsky,” a biography of Irène Némirovsky, of “Suite Française” fame, to paint a portrait of a great, and yet forgotten, author.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2018

January 22, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by David Smith, Sarah Booker, and Stefan Kielbasiewicz

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Winter 2018 issue!

To celebrate our seventh birthday here at Asymptote, the blog editors have chosen some of our favorite pieces from the Winter 2018 issue to showcase. This issue truly shines with a diversity of voices and literary styles, including a special feature on micro fiction, and it was such a pleasure for us to read through it. With work from thirty different countries, this issue has been gathered under the theme of “A Different Light.” Enjoy these highlights!

I’ve always admired Asymptote‘s advocacy for literatures that not only are underrepresented, but that take chances, resist easy reduction or interpretation by the reader. Poems that dare to be “the awkward spectacle of the untried move, not grace” (to borrow a phrase from American poet Don Byrd). Poets like Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. The poems from Arachnid Sun shock me with their bold imagery, impelling me to read again and again. I latch on to certain repeated images: insect, illusion, blood. And definitely a noticeable theme of authoritarian rulers: “spider-eggs perfuming the silence the dictator” and “harpoon the king-shark who flees the riverbeds of polar scrubland.”

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Roberto Piva, a Living Library

January 3, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Juliana Bratfisch, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Nathalie Stahelin

When a library such as Roberto Piva’s is reborn—especially through each reader bringing his legacy to the present—, a shaman is reborn with it.

It’s four in the afternoon and I step out to walk through the streets of downtown São Paulo, looking for what is left of a city I have not actually experienced but have imagined from Roberto Piva’s books. With a sense of nostalgia, I identify mythic street corners, revamped bars, buildings, parks, and statues, but time keeps grinding on and it weighs heavily on the landscape. That boy walking through Praça República, listening to that song “Deu Onda” for the umpteenth time, looks nothing like the kids who wandered around here sixty years ago, always carrying with them a book by Lorca, Artaud, Ginsberg, or Jorge de Lima. In a final, delirious attempt, I pause on a detail of the landscape: I look up, to the top of Edifício Copan, but Polén and Luizinho, spewing all the semen in the universe, aren’t there, either. The little that remains of that nostalgic delirium borne of reading a book may perhaps be found in the place where I’m headed, the second floor of number 108 on Avenida São João: the Roberto Piva Library. There they assemble the books, manuscripts, and other traces of an important poetic oeuvre that is more widely known because of its eccentric author’s cult status than because of a systematic study of his texts.

If we try to insert him in the history of Brazilian poetry beginning in the 1960s, Piva resists, a dissonant voice. But perhaps the silencing of his work ought to be reevaluated. When we read much of the bibliography about the author, we are left with the impression that the reception following the launch of Paranoia turned out to be a fairly isolated case: first, in the 1960s, there was a moralizing silence from critics in which they agreed to read him in direct association with Surrealism. Later, in the 1970s, there was the strange inclusion of his writing in the anthology organized by Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda with twenty-five other poets. In the following decades, there was the “co-optation” of his poetry by homoerotic literature. Finally, he would come to occupy his current position with the launch of his “Collected Works” by Editora Globo, which won over a far wider public and continues to be rediscovered.

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My 2017: Jacob Silkstone

December 29, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Jacob Silkstone

Perhaps the fitting thing to do would have been to throw the book into the water and let the waves close over it...

Assistant Managing Editor Jacob Silkstone travelled between several countries and two distinct stages of his life in 2017—and still had time to read a ton of literature! Today, in our final column, he reflects on the books that accompanied him on the move.

* * *

“If I imagine something, I see it. What more would I do if I travelled? Only extreme feebleness of the imagination can justify anyone needing to travel in order to feel.”

The complete edition of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (translated by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa) finally became available to English readers in 2017, and I first read Bernardo Soares’ hodophobic lines in an Airbnb flat in Portugal at the 40-degree height of summer. The water supply had been temporarily cut off and for hours the taps dribbled a thin brown fluid, but I had Soares’ life “of slow rain in which everything is … half-shadow” to keep me occupied.

In a year that began with the Trump travel ban and continued to be marred by small, scared attempts to shelter from the world behind various walls (both real and imaginary), it seems worth playing Devil’s advocate to Soares/Pessoa: perhaps there can be some justification for travelling “in order to feel.”

This year, I moved between several countries and two distinct stages of my life—having finally proposed after nearly nine years in a relationship, I got married in July. The evening after the wedding, I gave my copy of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness away on a whim to one of our guests, a foreign correspondent working in the Middle East. That copy subsequently embarked on a journey Arundhati Roy would have been proud of, travelling from Beirut to Syria to Yemen. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: Language, Meet Arto Lindsay

November 10, 2017  |  in Podcast  |  by Arto Lindsay and Lara Norgaard

In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast, Editor-at-Large Lara Norgaard speaks with the experimental Brazilian-American musician, Arto Lindsay.

Music and literature meet at the crossroads of Portuguese and English—what happens? Arto Lindsay. In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast, Editor-at-Large Lara Norgaard speaks with the experimental Brazilian-American musician of DNA and Ambitious Lovers fame. They discuss his unique combination of Brazilian and American influences which range from candomblé to Emily Dickinson. Together, they unpack his expansive and multilayered works while reflecting on the role of language and translation in negotiating identity.

Produced by: Lara Norgaard
Editor and Host: Dominick Boyle
Audio Editor: Dominick Boyle

Music: “Ilha Dos Prazeres” “Unpair” and “Seu Pai” by Arto Lindsay, used with permission.

 

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 13, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moses, Tomás Cohen, and Tse Hao Guang

Your news from the literary world, all in one place.

Here we are with this week’s news on exciting developments in the world of literature! Our Editor-At-Large for Singapore, Tse Hao Guang, updates us on new translation initiatives and experimental literary events. Sarah Moses, our Editor-At-Large for Argentina and Uruguay, fills us in on recent literary festivals and on an event honoring everyone’s favorite cartoon cynic. Finally, Tomás Cohen, our Editor-At-Large for Chile, tells us about some exciting new publications appearing in the region.

Tse Hao Guang, Editor-At-Large, with the latest updates from Singapore: 

In the spirit of experimentation, stalwart independent bookstore Booksactually devised a Book Prescription Day (Sep 30) in conjunction with #BuySingLit, inviting the public to meet seven authors one-on-one as they administered literary balm to all manner of ailments. Literary nonprofit Sing Lit Station put on a zany, rave-reviewed, pro-wrestling-meets-spoken-word spectacle Sing Lit Body Slam (October 6-7), selling out on opening night. Sing Lit Station also announced the 2018 Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry, awarding the best poems published by SEA-affiliated journals to a combined tune of SGD$2500 (USD$1800). Finally, Singapore played host to the 2nd Asian Women Writers’ Festival (September 29-30), with Singaporean novelists Balli Kaur Jaswal and Nuraliah Norasid speaking alongside other writers from the UK, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India.

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