Language: Romanian

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our section editors guide you through the riches of our Spring 2020 issue!

Our Spring 2020 issue has arrived amidst a rising desire for unity and community. As we seek new sights from views made familiar by isolation, Asymptote is proud to have gathered some of the most vivid and singular works from literary talents from thirty countries, so that we may all benefit from the vitality of their distinct imaginings and realities. Here, our section editors share their favourites and guide you around this edition’s abundance of ideas and inventions.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Galician Poetry Feature Editor:

If you enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, you’ll probably love “Red Ivory” by Italian writer Matteo Meschiari from the new issue: like the film, it’s a survival tale set in the extreme cold (in the Siberian permafrost, to be specific), riveting in its depiction of the elements, narrated urgently with brilliant flashes of lyricism—including one electric moment of human contact collapsing 12,000 years. By the end, it’s also a möbius strip of a story posing big existential questions. (Don’t miss the edifying note by emerging translator Enrico Cioni, who did an amazing job rendering the story.) The omniscient narrator of Mirza Athar Baig‘s “Junkshop” transports us similarly through history—this time centering around the objects of a contemporary junkshop—infusing an everyday scene with wonder at just how much we don’t know. Many delights abound in the Galician Poetry Feature headlined by Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Alba Cid (translated by Jacob Rogers, who also helped put together the Feature), but be sure to acquaint yourself with Luz Pozo Garza, one of Galicia’s literary greats, who passed away at age 97 less than a week after the release of the issue. In the selection that translator Kathleen March presented, she used cadences of the canticle and other musical forms to sing of an ecstatic yet bittersweet love for an evanescent world.

From Henry Ace Knight, Interviews Editor: 

Kamila Hladíková’s conversation with Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the Spring issue’s interview section centers on the precariousness of Tibetan cultural memory and the poet’s resistance to its wholesale erasure. Citing Milan Kundera and Edward Said, Woeser suggests that the survival of marginalized collective identity is incumbent upon the insistence of individual eyewitness memory and testimony. “The history of a nation consists of the personal histories of its people,” she writes. “Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’; but in Tibet, it should be, ‘I remember, therefore we are.’”

From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor: 

Following the footsteps of the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, Durian Sukegawa writes about a journey he made in 2012, traversing a landscape reshaped by the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the year before. Alison Watts’s vivid translation of Sukegawa’s written account of this journey acquaints us with the personal and political stakes of living in post-Fukushima Japan. Part travelogue, part political meditation, Sukegawa’s writing pairs the beauty of the Japanese landscape with the ugliness of government negligence. At the heart of this piece is a desire to bear witness to the lives rendered invisible in the eyes of the mainstream media and the country’s disaster management apparatus. In its sober reflection of the human cost of events still fresh in Japan’s collective memory, Sukegawa’s piece also conjures an eerie relation to the current pandemic we’re living through.  READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 20, 2020  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Spring 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and twenty-four languages, as well as a Galician Poetry Special Feature. Not sure where to begin? Our blog editors can help, as they reveal their top picks from the new issue below:

It’s difficult to write, these days. In this state of global precarity, wrenching us from our patterns into stasis, the days stretch towards their completion; daily urgencies take on a more sinister tone, heightened by circuity. There is indeed time, heavier in our stock, yet the dilemma remains: the heaviness, the disintegration of form, the failure of words to justify their surroundings. After a while I realized that it is because in order to write, and to write forcefully, the writer must be able to imagine a world in which their text survives, and contributes. Yet the time has arrived, much sooner than anticipated, of a future in pieces. I’ve never been one to envision literature as a portal for escape—it seems to me that the most sublime of texts enforce us into the deep centre of the world we live in. So from Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue—a wondrous collection of work that arrives, across boundaries, to strike a new presence—I selected certain poems that bring a special dignity to our capacity for visioning.

Natalia Toledo’s poems, translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda, stir vibrant tremors across the senses. Precise in intimate reference and conditioned with everyday magic, her language is of the sacred nature we infuse into the ordinary in order to contextualize the world to our definitions. Take “Prayer”:

For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.

READ MORE…

Riveting Reviews: An interview with the European Literature Network

April 9, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

Our goal is to support others working in this area: publishers, translators, the trade, and bring them all together.

Over the past ten years the European Literature Network—a tiny organization, run on a shoestring budget—has firmly established itself as the foremost champion of European writing in the UK. Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, caught up with the network’s founder and driving force, Rosie Goldsmith, and editor, West Camel.

Julia Sherwood (JS): Rosie, your name has become synonymous with European literature in the UK. You’ve chaired numerous European Literature Nights and, more recently, the jury of the EBRD Literature Prize. I can barely imagine the UK without your organization but some Asymptote readers, who are based elsewhere, may not be so familiar with what you do. Can you tell us what got you to start European Literature Network and what it does?

Rosie Goldsmith (RG): It all started with the European Literature Night (ELN) at the British Library in 2009, hence the rather long name, European Literature Network. I was asked to chair that and be one of the judges. We had to select from about 50-70 texts. Initially it was just me—I’d just left my job with the BBC, I had time on my hands, and when ELN was over, I felt that the momentum should be kept. After a trip to Brussels for the European Union Literature Prize with some twenty editors and publishers, I suggested that we keep this going. So many great books are being published but few people know about them, so I decided to do something I care passionately about and help everyone in the trade connect and get these books to the public. I organized the first meeting at the Goethe-Institut London and later we started meeting at Europe House, which was run by the European Commission but has sadly ceased to operate after Brexit. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from Albania, France, and Japan!

Many countries around the world are now weeks into their lockdown, but literature continues to thrive and is necessarily concerned with the current crisis. In Albania, literary events are moved online whilst booksellers are expected to continue working; in France, a Romanian writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime sadly passed away from coronavirus. In Tokyo, pandemic literature sees a revival. Read on to find out more! 

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

There was a moment when it felt like an early April literary dispatch from Albania would just be a chance to mourn the events that I was excited about but that never came to pass. Albania registered its first cases of COVID-19 on March 8 and went into full lockdown less than 48 hours after. That obviously means that for almost the entire duration of March, literary news and activities have been scarce. There was one event that I was sad to see postponed: a panel and discussion to be held on the lost voices of Albanian women writers, something that was long overdue.

That being said, Albanians with a literary inclination have found other ways to remain engaged with their reading lists or interests. Radical Sense is a reading group that meets weekly in Tirana to read and discuss radical leftist texts at 28 November, a versatile bookstore/safe space for readers and activists, among its many other uses. Although the physicality of the charming attic where these discussions are held is sacred to the group, participants have taken a page from universities and workplaces across the globe and have just held their first online book club meeting through Zoom. Readings and discussion happen in English, so for those who live in Albania and are interested in participating, you can check in with the lovely owners of 28 November here for more details. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by C.D. Zeletin

March 31, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Andreea Scridon

We find Elysium in each other, / It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Asymptote remembers the life and work of acclaimed Romanian poet C.D. Zeletin. The three selections below exemplify Zeletin’s prosodic brilliance and his masterful juxtaposition of nature with emotional memory.

Translator and our own Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon honours the late poet:

“C.D. Zeletin, born Constantin Dimoftache (1935 – 2020), was a Romanian poet, essayist, translator, and medic. He was a professor of biophysics at Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest. He published forty books during his lifetime, including translations of Michelangelo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine into Romanian (among many others), as well as his own poetry. He was awarded a series of international prizes for his work, and was decorated with the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian state. Zeletin died on February 18, 2020, exactly one year after we published a story on his work. We mourn his loss with immense regret.”

It’s no longer enough for the soul

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say just: you, you, you, and you,
so it seems to me, in these strange timely spheres,
that in you I enumerate my hours and my years,
and you, from my ever weaker hesitation
grow of yourself an independent incarnation.
We find Elysium in each other,
It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.
To left and right, look up or down
you move, I move, we live without duration,
the sunbaked sweetness of stagnation . . .
Our lives braid into one another—a rope for a maroon
strewn out between the frigate and pontoon,
through which there is no chance in storms
to hide our grain of sand’s small form.
By memory we rise and fall at helm,
encountering the venom of the same realm,
of pleasure locked in a kiss,
as butterflies over a flower’s deep abyss.

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say: you, you, you, and you . . . READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2020)

February 13, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

We’re bursting out of the gate with publications galore!

Other than editing your favorite literary journal, what have Asymptote staff been up to in the New Year? Catch up with our talented team with this latest quarterly update.

Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem,” is finally coming out with Seagull Press at the end of February 2020 in Communications Manager Alexander Dickow and Sean Reynolds’s English translation; it is already available for preorder here. Alexander also published the story, “Rican’s Tale of the Expedition to Perigonne,” in Big Echo Critical Science Fiction.

Assistant editor Andreea Scridon read excerpts of her translations from the Romanian at a poetry reading in Pembroke College, UK, on February 12.

The  TA First Translation Prize was announced on February 12, and the runner-up went  to People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated by Charlotte Whittle and edited by our new Copy editor Bella Bosworth.

Contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac published her translation of Croation author Kristian Novak’s Dark Mother Earth with Amazon Crossing on January 14.

Editor-at-large for Morocco Hodna Nuernberg‘s co-translation, with Patricia Hartland, of Raphael Confiant’s Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem was published by Lavender Ink / Diálogos in January 2020.

Editor-at-large for Iran Poupeh Missaghi published her debut novel trans(re)lating house one with Coffee House Press on February 4. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 7, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng and MARGENTO

This week's latest news from Hong Kong, Belgium, and Romania!

This week our editors bring you news of the effects of coronavirus on cultural events in Hong Kong, as well as news of the Romanian writers taking center stage at a Belgian arts festival, and new publications in Romania that address its troubled but intellectually rich past. Read on to find out more!  

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

As China’s coronavirus pneumonia epidemic shows no signs of slowing down, Hong Kong is now under the threat of the wide-spreading virus and the possibility of a community outbreak of the disease. While the Hong Kong government refuses to take decisive measures to close the border to ban visitors from the Mainland even in face of a strike from the medical workers, many art and cultural events have been cancelled due to the temporary closure of venues managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, including the programs at the Hong Kong Arts Festival and Art Basel.

Meanwhile, local poetry publication Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is calling for submissions for its special issue on “Virus,” which is going to address the recent virus panic from a poetic perspective. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2020. The magazine accepts both Chinese and English works. Moreover, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is going to host a session on “Poetic Women in Translation” to explore how female sensibility is reflected in poetry and its translation. The event will feature translator Jennifer Feeley, Hong Kong poet Ng Mei-kwan, and Cha’s founder and editor Tammy Ho. READ MORE…

The Personal Apocalyptic Journey: On Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star

December 19, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by MARGENTO

Only long, silent, patient, and focused respites spent really close to things . . . will perhaps spawn such indelible images.

Clay and Star: Selected Poems of Liliana Ursu, translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Etruscan Press, 2019

With an impressive record of thirteen collections in Romanian and five collections in English translation, it is no wonder Liliana Ursu has now arrived with a generous (over seventy pages) collection of selected poetry, published by Etruscan Press in Mihaela Moscaliuc’s translation.

It is just that, unlike your usual (American) volume of selected poetry, the book does not divide the poems by their appearance in previous collections, but simply lists their titles in the contents, every now and then mentioning under their last line where and when they were written. Other poems mention the location in the very title—Văratec Monastery in northern Romania, for instance, is both frequently present and representative of the poetics, but Sibiu, Bucharest, Boston, and San Francisco also appear—while others are dedicated, in their epigraphs, to people met in those places. The book thus amounts to a sort of journey that, while capturing fleeting specifics of literal locales in snapshots, is most prevalently a progress of the soul.

The confessional therefore sets the tone, but is at the same time placed in multifaceted perspectives that render the speaker both observant and observed. The title of a poem meaningfully speaks—for instance—of the “poem composed while being watched by a bird.” The multiple angles are accompanied by a functional synaesthesia that brings together the senses and speech alike. READ MORE…

The Troubling Biography of Corneliu M. Popescu

November 21, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Andreea Scridon

Rhyming “outblaze” with “always” suggests an intuitive understanding of the English language.

In 1977, a massive earthquake erupted from sinister pith of the Vrancea Mountains, with a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter Scale. The city of Bucharest partially crumbled on top of itself. In weight of damage, that meant destruction to approximately 33,000 buildings, wounds to 11,300 people, and death to 1,578 people—including actors, singers, film directors, writers . . . and a nineteen-year-old translator named Corneliu M. Popescu.

Born at the end of the 1950s, a decade that represented the height of communist censorship, Corneliu Popescu was ultimately swept away by the violent waves of the era he lived in. The sporty and sociable son of a lawyer, “Cornel” was offered a good education: while most people studied Russian in school, Cornel studied English with Ion Kleanthe Gheorghiu, who had been Romania’s ambassador in London, shortly before being imprisoned for anti-communist activities. Much of the boy’s short life seemed governed by the power of the moment, polymorphous in its guise as coincidence or destiny: perhaps subconsciously aware of the importance of now, he was effectively a savant, translating Treasure Island into Romanian at age ten. At around sixteen, enamored with the foamy intensity of Mihai Eminescu’s poetry, he began translating the poet, something only his parents and teachers knew about. Agreeing to postpone publication so that he could fully dedicate himself to preparing for medical school (a scholarship at Humboldt University had been lined up for him), Cornel edited his manuscript up to the day of his death: March 4, 1977. As he had arrived home from a tutoring session earlier than expected, the earthquake caught up to him at home. He was found in the arms of his mother the next day, amidst the rubble.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 4, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, MARGENTO, and Quyen Nguyen

Catch up on this week’s latest news in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Romanian authors around the world.

This week, our reporters tell us about the literary response to the demonstrations in Hong Kong and the translation of protest poetry by The Bauhinia Project, book fairs in Vietnam, as well as guiding us through the many Romanian writers performing at the largest Central European literary festival, the Author’s Reading Month festival. 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

The extradition bill demonstrations in Hong Kong have been ongoing for four months and show no signs of stopping. There has been countless speculation over the city’s standing as a financial and trading center, but what has happened for certain is the plethora of art created in response to the movement. In an interview on the subject of contemporary art, a museum curator placed her bets: “The greatest art is going to be produced in Hong Kong.”

The same could be said for its literature. Since June, Hong Kong’s literary scene has actively documented current happenings through poetry, fiction, and criticism. Numerous local literary magazines, including Fleur des lettres, Voice & Verse, and Formless, are running issues dedicated to the protests, and the activity is not restricted to within the city’s borders. In particular, there is an initiative to translate protest poetry from Hong Kong for an international audience. In July, The Bauhinia Project was launched by an anonymous Hong Kong poet in Berkeley, California. Named after the city’s flower emblem, the project gathers poetry submissions and testimonials in text or audio from anonymous sources. The submissions are then translated into English and made into postcards. So far, the postcards have been displayed in a series of exhibitions held in Germany as well as different cities in California. The Bauhinia Project is also curating events on the extradition bill movement. On September 25, a panel discussion on misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding the protests abroad were held at Moe’s Books in San Francisco and featured six speakers, among them Hong Kong poet Wawa, previously interviewed on Asymptote on her medium-pure poetry, and writer Henry Wei Leung.

I will also moderate a discussion on civil society and literature between writer Hon Lai Chu, who spoke about politics and literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this year, and playwright Yan Pat To, whose latest play, Happily Ever After Nuclear Explosion, premiered in German at Munich’s Residenz Theater and subsequently in Cantonese at Tai Kwun, an arts and heritage site in Hong Kong, and South Korea’s Asia Playwright Festival. The event is part of Goethe-Institut Hong Kong’s wider series on civil society and art, which previously covered independent films, LGBT, and moving images. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 13, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andreea Scridon and Barbara Halla

In Romania and Albania this week, literature abounds.

Any occasion to celebrate language is a happy one, as demonstrated in this week’s dispatches from Romania and Albania. With events honoring Romanian Language Day and an emphasis on Albanian literature in Italy, the forces propelling the continuation and evolution of literary language are well and alive. Read on for the news, reported from the ground by our committed editors.

Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor, reporting from Romania

Romanian Language Day has officially been celebrated on August 31 since 2011. This year, I had the privilege of being in Romania to observe this holiday, more specifically to find myself in Cluj-Napoca, a city with a powerful literary scene thanks to its academic and historical tradition. The event dedicated to this occasion (held one day before, on August 30) was held in an interwar casino revamped into an art gallery in Cluj’s central park, and the general public ranged from the city’s literary elite to a group of kids in baseball caps.

Horia Bădescu, one of the representative literary figures of the 1960s (available in English and French translation) and historian and writer Ovidiu Pecican spoke on the history, significance, evolution, and particularities of the Romanian language, while professor of journalism and writer Ilie Rad and translator Gabriela Lungu (who has translated books like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Alessandro Baricco’s Mr. Gwyn, among many others, from Italian to Romanian) discussed the originality, richness, and their own intimate perceptions of the Romanian language.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2019)

August 14, 2019  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

We've been keeping busy!

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they’re not busy advocating for world literature? Answer: Quite a lot! For those interested in joining our team, please note that we have just completed the first phase of our recruitment drive and will conclude the second and final phase by the end of the month. It’s not too late to send in an application!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow published two poems in Plume, in English and French versions.

Assistant editor Andreea Iulia Scridon‘s poem, Glossa, a re-writing of Mihai Eminescu’s Romanian poem of the same name, has been published by WildCourt.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi‘s Italian translation of Ewa Chrusciel’s Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014) was released in May by Edizioni Ensemble. 

Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO, editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova) has been featured in a Romanian poetry anthology in Italian translation, Sette poeti rumeni (Seven Romanian Poets) edited by Matteo Veronesi.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2019

July 22, 2019  |  in News  |  by Andrea Blatz, Nina Perrotta, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our editors have you covered with a lovingly picked selection from the Asymptote Summer 2019 issue!

If you have yet to fully traverse the sensational depths of Asymptote‘s Summer 2019 issue: “Dreams and Reality,” you can step out on the roadmap written by our blog editors, who have refined their selections—with considerable difficulty—to a handful of their favourite pieces. Between an erudite Arabic mystery, non-fiction from Romania’s foremost feminist writer and theorist, and a tumultuous psychological short story which delves into our perception of sanity, this reading list is a doorway into the vast cartography of this issue, unfurling into the rich imagination and profundity of the heights in world literature.

Something about summertime makes me want to read detective fiction, so I was excited to learn that Asymptote’s Summer 2019 issue, released this past Thursday, features a murder mystery. I was even more intrigued when I learned that the story in question, “Culprit Unknown” by Naguib Mahfouz, was originally written in Arabic. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy Swedish mysteries just as much as you do—but I think we can all agree that the Scandinavians have had a monopoly on detective fiction in translation for far too long.

“Culprit Unknown,” translated by Emily Drumsta, follows Detective Muhsin ʿAbd al-Bari as he tries to solve a series of grisly murders. Muhsin does everything he can, but each killing is a perfect crime: the murderer leaves not a single trace behind, and as the deaths pile up, the tension in the neighborhood becomes unbearable. Besides pacing the story perfectly, Mahfouz infuses “Culprit Unknown” with light humor and unexpected (but welcome) philosophical musings, as in the exchange below:

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 19, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, and Xiao Yue Shan

This week, we’re talking about poetry in Transylvania, storytelling in Marrakech, and LGBT literature in Taipei.

It would be difficult for even the most hardened of cynics to bemoan the state of literature after having read the news coming from around the globe this week. Our editors report on a stunning international festival of poetry in Transylvania, the determined literary representation of an “unofficial” language in Morocco, and an abundance of musical, literary, and theatrical events taking place under the open skies of Taipei.

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the Z9Festival in Sibiu, Romania

The forecast called for a 60 percent chance of rain, but the sun was still wispily gathered in the early evening, so rows were laid out in the courtyard and the fifth edition of Z9Festival, the young literature festival based in Sibiu, began.

Founded in 2015 and sponsored by the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, the festival gathers poets from nine countries around the world to share their work with the Romanian public; the name can be read as either New Zone or Zone Nine, in an ode to both its focus on writers under forty and its international reach. So it is that in mid-July 2019, writers from the UK, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, China, Russia, and Romania descended upon the picturesque landscape of Sibiu to join one another in a night celebrating poetry, and its inherent ability to dissipate borders.

READ MORE…