Language: Spanish

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 19, 2020  |  in News  |  by Josefina Massot, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

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

Asymptote’s momentous fortieth issue features brand new work from thirty-two countries, a Dutch Literature Special Feature curated by 2020 International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison, and a literary roster spanning classics like Tagore, heavy hitters like Harwicz, and rising stars like Fabias. Dizzy yet? We’re here to help.

In the Chinese language, we never use the abstract noun of beauty. Instead, beauty is always a quality, a trait something possesses. There is, for example, no real way to express the notion that “beauty is all around us”; instead, one would say, “everything here is beautiful.” I find something wondrous in this distinct nature of what beauty is. It is a wandering state, a constantly mutating definition, a metamorphosing form that adapts to whatever subject it is applied to—never fixed, never permanent. Something is beautiful not for its appeal to the pure nature of beauty, but for its unique addition to the myriad of beauty’s appearances.

I was once again reminded of this definition while reading through the Fall 2020 issue, in which the writings from thirty-two countries have compiled and allowed the contours of literary beauty to vacillate and transmit. The various Englishes that evolve via translation do not subscribe necessarily to the English that certain texts are born to, instead bringing the colours and geometries of their own language, imparting a distinct and knowing pleasure. In Stella N’Djoku’s poems, the brief lines are vehicles for a cyclical musicality, emphasized by the rhyming Italian but also vivid in the tender translation of Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, sensitive in their lineation. The verses are potent with grief, but positions it within the great immeasurability of the world—creating a familiar dwelling for grace amidst pain, and the poem as our path towards that space.

As if yesterday today tomorrow
were not places
and were here now
in centuries.

In the two poems of Kashimiri poet Nādim, one is also reminded of the singular iterations of his the poet’s original language. As translator Sonam Kachru informs us in his translator’s note, “[Nādim] is thinking of [Kashmir’s] history—a history revealed, in part, through the history of its poetry.” There is then, an impression that we are not privy to when reading in translation, yet the poem still transmits the meditative, majestic quality of scanning the poetic horizons for something that reverberates from the past into the present, and back again. The stoic power of lines like:

I will not sing—
I will sing today no song of Nishat or Shalimar, no annealed song of waters
engraving terraced gardens, no bower songs of bedded flowers;
No soft songs flush or sweetly fresh, not green dew songs
nor songs gentle and growing—

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 16, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Chamini Kulathunga, David Boyd, José García Escobar, and Julia Sherwood

The latest literary news from Japan, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, and Central America!

This week, our writer’s bring you the latest news from Japan, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, and Central America. In Japan, renowned writer and symbol of the #MeToo movement Shiori Ito is poised to reach a wider international audience with the forthcoming translation of her memoir, Black Box , and was named one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2020” by Time Magazine. In Slovakia, three prominent Slovak writers feature in a new interactive map made by University College London and Eva Luka was named as winner of the national poetry award. In Sri Lanka, October’s National Reading Month has begun, with winners of the recently announced literary awards selling fast. And in Central America, Guatemalan poet Giovany Emanuel Coxolcá Tohom won the Premio de Poesía Editorial Praxis, whilst José Luis Perdomo Orellana took home Guatemala’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. Read on to find out more!  

David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan

In September, Time Magazine named Shiori Ito one of the “100 Most Influential People of 2020.” Ito is a journalist, activist, and renowned symbol of Japan’s #MeToo movement, who—in the words of sociologist Chizuko Ueno—“has forever changed life for Japanese women with her brave accusation of sexual violence against her harasser.” Ito’s account of her experiences, Black Box, which was first published in Japanese in 2017 by Bungei Shunju, is due to be published next year in an English translation by Allison Markin Powell, whose previous translations include The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami and The Boy in the Earth by Fuminori Nakamura. Powell’s translation of Ito’s work will be published by Tilted Axis Press in the United Kingdom and Feminist Press in the United States.

Since the book’s publication in 2017, Powell says, “Ito’s message seems only to have grown more important, more urgent. Black Box is not a rape memoir. It’s a manifesto to tear down the system. Ito methodically maps out the ways in which institutions failed her, and how almost everyone attempted to gaslight her at each stage. Her perseverance is an inspiration.”

On her own experience working to bring Black Box into English, Powell says, “I’ve had to develop strategies so as not to take on too much of the trauma myself.”

In August, Ito sued LDP member Mio Sugita, “claiming that [Sugita’s] repeated ‘likes’ of tweets abusing her character constituted defamation,” as reported in The Mainichi. Sugita, who is known for having called the LGBT community “unproductive” in the past, has this month courted controversy once again, by admitting that she said “women lie” about sexual assault, after initially denying having made such a remark. As noted in The Japan Times, Sugita’s party was “slow and lukewarm” in their response. The lawmaker has not faced any penalties. READ MORE…

Our Fall 2020 Issue Is Here!

October 15, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Andrés Neuman, Ariana Harwicz, and Rabindranath Tagore amid new work from 32 countries, including a Dutch Special Feature

We are proud to present the Fall 2020 issue of Asymptote, debuting new work from 32 countries:.  

This cornucopia of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, reviews, and more includes such treats as a sparkling new translation of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s century-old fiction, an exclusive interview with rising star Andrés Neuman, and Elisabeth S. Clark’s polyphonic book concertos. 

Perfectly timed to coincide with Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison winning the 2020 International Booker Prize, our Dutch Literature Feature, guest curated by Hutchison, zooms in on the emerging and established voices of a small but mighty country. Here you can sample the English debuts of Curaçao-born Radna Fabias, whose first collection swept up an unprecedented number of major poetry prizes, and of Sinan Çankaya, whose best-selling memoir My Innumerable Identities recounts his efforts to combat racism in the Dutch police from the inside—only to be othered for his Turkish origins. 

Elsewhere, Ali Lateef’s bittersweet “The Belle and Gazelle Statue” uses a public monument to illustrate the changing face of Tripoli after the 2011 Libyan Civil War. The unease of our current moment is captured in Ariana Harwicz’s “Longevity,” a cathartic tale about the effects of a pandemic-caused lockdown on a small rural community in France. Somewhere between nature writing and memoir stands Itō Hiromi’s essay on migratory plants and how the concept of “the Other” manifests in different cultures. The lure of the foreign propels both Vadim Muratkhanov’s dispatch from Tashkent’s labyrinthine Tezikova market and Hungarian essayist Noémi Kiss’s travel into the remote wonders of Azerbaijan.

Wherever we are, we find comfort in the global literary voices of our time, for even when they reveal harsh truths about our world, they give us hope, inspire mutual understanding and heal divisions. Please help us spread the word about Asymptote’s latest issue by downloading and distributing our Fall 2020 flyer/postcard, or by posting about it on Facebook or Twitter. 

To promote this brand-new issue, we’re holding another giveaway contest: Share any of our #Fall2020 posts on social media to stand a chance of winning an Asymptote Book Club subscription. Every retweet or share will be counted, and there’s no limit to the number of entries you can enter. We’ll announce the lucky winner on Monday, November 2!

What’s New in Translation: October 2020

October 12, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, George MacBeth, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

The Visceraless State: An Interview With Cristina Rivera Garza

October 8, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

[W]riting is a community-making practice . . . intimately, necessarily connected to the communities in which we live and which, ideally, we serve.

Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is a foremost voice in contemporary Mexican literature. Known for her frequently dark subject matter and hybrid styles, her work focuses on marginalized people, challenging us to reconsider our preconceptions about boundaries and transgression. She has won major literary awards and is the only author to have twice won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award (in 2011 and 2009). Her latest work to be translated into English, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, has just been published by Feminist Press and is a hybrid collection of journalism, crónicas, and essays, that explore systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. To coincide with its much-anticipated release, Asymptote’s Assistant Managing Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with Cristina Rivera Garza about the ideas behind this compelling work.   

“Let me just bring some tea, and I’ll be right back!” Cristina Rivera Garza dashed out of her Zoom screen briefly before settling back into her chair and adjusting her glasses with a warm smile, her air of familiarity challenging the oppressiveness of the geographical and technological distance to which we’ve lately become accustomed. In the following interview, we discuss Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, the striking latest collaboration between Garza and translator Sarah Booker. She reflects upon the demands that she makes of syntax, the enigmatic character of reality, the importance of solidarity and imagination, and how she and Booker coined the term “The Visceraless State.” Very much of the borderland between Mexico and the United States, her work meets the global, contemporary moment not despite its specificity, but because of it.

 —Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Lindsay Semel (LS): You’ve stated in interviews, and it’s apparent in your work, that you intentionally test the limits between what language normally does and what it can do in order to discover new experiential possibilities between writer, text, and reader. I wonder if you could point to places in the text where you tested and stretched the limits of Spanish but were not able to do so the same way in English and vice versa. How do Spanish and English need to be challenged differently?

Cristina Rivera Garza (CRG): Every single project has to challenge language in specific ways. It always depends on the materials that I’m exploring, affecting, and letting myself be affected by, and there are specific ways that you can do that both in English and in Spanish. I tend to write longer sentences in Spanish and more fragmentarily in English, for example. When I am getting too long-winded in Spanish, I try to convey that thought with the directness and economy I associate with my relationship with English. At times, I try to use the semicolon in English, just because it is more common in Spanish and I want to see what happens to both sentence and sense. Constantly borrowing from English and borrowing from Spanish and taking traces and echoes from one language into the other, trying to honor and replicate the tension and friction that maintains them together where I live and how I think, has been almost a natural way of continuing to challenge both.

Sarah [Booker, translator of Grieving] is such a deft translator and we now know each other quite well. She’s been translating my work for a number of years and we have a very open, fluid conversation as she goes into the translation process: less a process of moving language from one context to a another, and more a search for similar effects based on the affective capacities of host and receiving languages. I work closely with syntax, especially if I’m exploring issues such as violence and suffering. Pause, breathlessness, all those aspects of a body going through tremendous pressure or pain inflicted—in terms of keeping both form and content responding to the same challenges, it is important that syntax and semantics are somehow reflecting and embodying that experience. That’s when writing occurs.

I think of translation as a creative process too. I see Sarah as my co-author and her work as a way through which I receive my book back anew. I think she’s a poet at heart. I don’t know if she knows that, but all those experiments with language, that’s something she’s very deft at. READ MORE…

Not Strictly a Serial Killer: An Interview with Carlos Busqued

October 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Samuel Rutter

A “monster” is made of the very same stuff as people who are, in theory . . . normal. We’re much closer to being monsters than we’d like to admit.

In September of 1982, Ricardo Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires. The crimes happened in close physical proximity and over a short period of time, but to this day, neither the perpetrator nor the many teams of experts who have treated Melogno have been able to discern a motive. Writer Carlos Busqued spent over two years interviewing Melogno and compiling the material that would eventually become Magnetized, published in English for the first time in June 2020 by Catapult.

The novel’s translator, Samuel Rutter, exchanged a series of emails with the author that touched on the writer’s process, the singularities of Ricardo’s case, and life in Buenos Aires under quarantine.

Samuel Rutter (SR): How did you first learn about Ricardo Melogno, and is his case still well-known in Argentina today?

Carlos Busqued (CB): No, quite the opposite actually—it was quite a sensation when it first happened, but the news cycle at the time didn’t cover it for long. Ricardo committed the murders right at the end of the last military dictatorship—two months after Argentina lost the Falklands War—so his crimes were quickly buried under an avalanche of news and exposés that were even more macabre.

I was a kid at the time of the murders and never heard about them back then—I lived in Chaco, a province in the far north of Argentina, so we didn’t read the press from Buenos Aires so much, and we only got some of their TV channels. So it was many years later that I stumbled across Ricardo’s case by chance. I got to know someone who worked on his treatment team, and I noticed that on the occasions I joined the team for after-work drinks or a birthday party, they tended to speak of Ricardo with empathy and curiosity. Every now and again they’d speculate about one or another detail of the crimes, which piqued my interest right away.

SR: What drew your attention to the case as a writer? Was there something in particular that inspired you to write about it?

CB: It was the strangeness of the whole thing, the fact that there really was no motive. Even today there is very little understanding of crimes with no known motive, and barely any research on the subject. A person who commits four identical murders is not acting randomly, but even so, neither Ricardo nor the numerous teams of specialists who examined him have been able to come up with a motive. Broadly speaking, when someone kills, they do it to survive. How that applies to Ricardo’s mindset when he committed the murders remains a complete mystery. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 2, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jovanka Kalaba, Nestor Gomez, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador!

This week our writers bring you the latest literary news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador! In Taiwan, renowned writer Huang Chun-ming has brought out his latest novel and Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s new essay compilation, Hers, has just been published. In Serbia, the annual Shakespeare festival, Šekspir Festival, has begun, and the Reading Balkans 2021 programme has launched in collaboration between Goga Publishing House, PEN Centre, and others. In El Salvador, a new blog run by Nelson Alonson, Una Verdad Sin Alfabeto, and publishing house Editorial Kalina have run online debates about Salvadoran writing and diaspora literature. Read on to find out more! 

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

The autumn equinox has brought drizzling rain to cool Taiwan down from the previous summer heat. During the final quarter of 2020, while hoping our global readers will all stay safe and healthy, several literary and movie events are taking place in Taiwan. With online screenings and live discussions being streamed, it might be the best time for an easy access to Taiwan’s recent cultural events, no mater where you are.

The renowned Taiwanese novelist and playwright, Huang Chun-ming’s (黃春明, 1935-) latest novel (Hsiu-Chin, the Girl who Always Smiles,《秀琴，這個愛笑的女孩》) was just published by Unitas Magazine’s publishing house. The story centers around a village girl from northeastern Taiwan entering the film industry accidentally in the 1960s, when Taiwanese-language films were at their peak. Huang’s novella was featured in our past issue, with the translator Howard Goldblatt’s moving account of his long-term friendship with Huang. At the same time, the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s (閻連科, 1958-) essay compilation, Hers (Tamen,《她們》), was recently published by Rye Field Publishing Company in Taiwan, unprecedentedly featuring stories of women the novelist encountered, inside and outside of his own family. Perhaps most unorthodox is the publication from Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association of their eight-year project that interviewed seventeen lesbians over fifty-five years old in Taiwan, to be published by Locus Publishing Company in October. This groundbreaking book on the life experiences of “lao-la” (「老拉」) in Taiwan, literally meaning old lesbians, is not only about their personal memories and struggles of being lesbians in the conservative Taiwanese society before the 1990s, but also a literary historical review of Taiwan’s gender equality and LGBTQ+ movements since the 1950s.

READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Carolina Orloff

September 29, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Carolina Orloff

There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not.

As National Translation Month draws to a close, so does our four-part special feature on the subject—a series of first-hand, original essays by key players in the translation process: an author, a platform, a translator, a publisher. And since translating also means shifting coordinates, we made sure to hit four different corners of the world. Over the course of the past few days, we’ve brought you a Romanian poet, a Chinese online literary hub, and a Turkish translator, all at the very top of their game. Today, we wrap it up by traveling from Buenos Aires to Edinburgh with Carolina Orloff, co-founder and publishing director of the award-winning Charco Press (we figured the trip was worth postponing our usual “Translation Tuesday” column, back next week).

In this thoughtful, moving piece, Carolina masterfully intertwines personal experience with theory. She dives into the challenges of living between languages (she’s a longtime Argentinian expat in the UK), explaining how that has influenced her own views of translation and, more broadly, Charco’s publishing philosophy. From missing dulce de leche to musing about Benjamin, she covers almost as much ground here as she’s done throughout her life as a bona fide globetrotter.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Jorge Luis Borges

When I think about translation, I’m seized by a host of thoughts and emotions—some varying, some constant. It goes beyond the years I’ve spent studying and writing theory, or the fact that I’ve been living between languages (‘entre lenguas,’ to quote the extraordinary Sylvia Molloy) for more than half my life now: there is something within my matrix, my emotional framework, that is made of languages, of gestures from different cultures, different geographies. As is the case with many compatriots, I’m a second-generation Argentinian (most of the country’s indigenous population was wiped out by a nefarious ‘whitening’ campaign during the late 1800s); like many in my generation, I have also emigrated from that southern land. All my grandparents were foreigners, and I use this word with the utmost care and precision. My parents fed off that simultaneously strange and normalised state of living in Buenos Aires while immersed in the echoes of Russian, English, Yiddish, Polish, and Andalusian Spanish. They soaked up these acquired traditions and dressed them up in new meaning—a meaning that they could call their own and that could be freer, albeit loaded with so many other foreign codes. In sum, they were constantly translating.

I recall a conversation I had with a fellow student once, when I was at the University of York. His porteño accent was much stronger than mine. I was twenty years old and had been living in English for three. When I asked him when he’d last been to Argentina, he said nonchalantly that he had actually never ‘crossed the pond.’ His mother was from Buenos Aires and yes, he had been born there, but when he was just one or two years old, they had left for Sweden in search of political asylum. They had never returned. It was an epiphanic moment for me. And now that I am a mother, an Argentinian mother living in Scotland with a daughter born in Edinburgh, I can’t help but re-signify it. There is so much of us in the language we inherit, the language we’re nursed in. Our mother tongue defines us, whether we like it or not, and I feel that there is no satisfactory way of translating that identity; it can only be transmitted. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 25, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Carol Khoury, and Eva Wissting

At home or not, travel the world with the latest in literary news.

This week, our editors from Argentina, Sweden, and Palestine have plenty to report. In Argentina, readers have paid homage to writer Rodolfo Fogwill on the tenth anniversary of his death, and a new imprint has been translating classics of Argentine noir into Greek; in Sweden, the annual Göteborg Book Fair is taking place online; and in Palestine, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail has been nominated for a US National Book Award, whilst a new exhibition at the Palestinian museum has hosted a series of authors, including Mahmoud Shukair. Read on to find out more!

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Ten years ago, Argentina’s literary world was stunned at the news of Rodolfo Fogwill’s death. The writer, whom The Guardian called “loud-mouthed, provocative, and downright rude,” loomed large in Argentine letters, by dint of both his literary accomplishments and outsize personality. (His anti-war novel Malvinas Requiem was written in one cocaine- and whiskey-fueled week, and remains the only novel of his translated into English.) Last month, the country commemorated the decade since Fogwill’s death with a slew of virtual tributes: The National Library of Argentina’s YouTube channel featured a playlist of interviews and other audiovisual artifacts of his career; his publisher, Alfaguara, hosted Fogwill Week on their social media channels; and readers and writers paid homage to a writer whose works have remade the literary landscape. The enfant terrible lives on.

In Greece, classics of Argentine noir are finding new life with Carnívora, a new imprint dedicated to translating and publishing Latin American crime fiction in Greek. “In Argentina, literary talent abounds, and we could say that the reading public in Greece has had a kind of literary love for Argentina since the Latin American boom,” Carnívora editor and translator Aspasía Kampyli told La Nación this week. “That’s why it’s no coincidence that the first two writers we published, Guillermo Orsi and Raúl Argemí, have been Argentine, and the reception from critics and Greek readers has been especially warm.” In less than a year since its launch, the imprint has also won design awards for its logo and book covers. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but Carnívora’s positive coverage bodes well for Latin American noir in Greece.

More recent works are also getting buzz in foreign markets. Asymptote’s own Sarah Moses translated Agustina Bazterrica’s novel about a cannibalistic future for the human race, Tender Is the Flesh, for Pushkin Press (UK) and the Scribner (US). The book, recently reviewed in The New York Times, is available now in the US. Though it’s not traditional noir, Bazterrica’s book seems to fit Carnívora’s description of the genre: “crimes wrought by history or tragedy.” Perhaps we’ll soon see the novel in Greek. READ MORE…

Dancing on a Digital Pond: the International Poetry Familia

September 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches  |  by Edwin Alanís-García

Latinidad contains multitudes . . . an array of intersecting races, gender identities, languages, religions, and nations.

The age of social distancing has left even the introverted among us seeking community. For poets in particular, whose work continues to seek establishment and verity through the inherited traditions of oration and public gatherings, being deprived of the physical realms in which one can share and revel in poetry together has been especially lonesome. As we adapt, rally, and shift into virtual spaces, however, one encounters equal joy and substance in the connections fostered beyond the locality, as notions of community expand beyond physical closeness. One momentous event that took full advantage of this moment in time was LatinX: International Poetry Familia, which connected a brilliantly variant array of Latinx poets from the U.S. and the U.K. in a celebratory reading. With bodies of work that newly tread and interrogate the disparate facets of identity, these contemporary poets embody a politics of pride and revelation, lessons learned during the journey one takes to arrive at oneself. Asymptote’s own assistant editor, Edwin Alanís-García, reports from the event.

Lest locked up poetry aficionados forget, there was once a time when people gathered in public spaces to hear poets read or recite their work. For the uninitiated, such events help poets stay connected with their community and fellow writers, while helping grow a (hopefully book-buying) fanbase. At the risk of waxing poetic (no pun intended), these readings are the heart of an ancient vocation—a tradition going back to the epic poets, who sang about transnational sagas, and later the wandering troubadours, who brought their musical repertoires to the countryside. Even now, poets tour their countries like rockstars, sometimes to the same acclaim. Or so they did, until the pandemic hit.

For those ensconced in major literary hubs such as London or New York City, the shift to virtual readings was—and perhaps still is—a pale simulation of the real thing, a necessary adaptation meant to keep newly published books marketable. In the rest of the connected world, however, this shift has opened new doors for rural and otherwise isolated audiences. And within certain literary circles, it has created entirely new forums for artistic exchange.

One such event took place this past June. The transatlantic reading “LatinX: International Poetry Familia” was meant to celebrate the diverse roster of Latinx poets in the United States and the United Kingdom. Featured voices from the U.S. included Francisco Aragón, José Olivarez, Jasminne Mendez, Antonio López, Janel Pineda, Malcolm Friend, and co-hosts Carlos Andrés Gómez and Diannely Antigua. Among their U.K. counterparts were Leo Boix, Maia Elsner, Patrizia Longhitano, Kat Lockton, Marina Sanchez, and Juana Adcock. The nearly two-hour event was organized and co-hosted by scholar, artist, and activist Nathalie Teitler, co-founder (with Leo Boix) of Invisible Presence, a U.K. initiative dedicated to promoting the work of British Latinx writers; Teitler is also credited with founding the country’s first mentoring and translation programs for exiled writers.

The reading was in celebration of two recent anthologies of Latinx poetry: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, published by Chicago-based Haymarket Press, and Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers, published by London-based flipped eye publishing (sic). Each participant was invited to preface their reading with a one-minute excerpt from a Latinx song of their choice. Dancing (albeit socially distant and through a Zoom screen) was encouraged; as Teitler said in her opening remarks, it was the readers’ way of affirming that, “yes, sí, we’re still alive.” Her words can be interpreted as a statement about our collective resilience in the face of the pandemic, but also a poignant endorsement of poetry as a tool of resistance across Latinx communities—a testament to Latinx survival in the face of colonial and anti-Black violence. The entire event, in fact, was an extended moment of resistance. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 28, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, Kwan Ann, and Shawn Hoo

This week’s literary news from Singapore, Argentina, Sweden, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Argentina, Sweden, and Malaysia. In Singapore, the shortlist for the Singapore Literature Prize was announced; in Argentina, the Asociación Argentina de Traductores e Intérpretes has been celebrating National Translation month with a series of talks; in Sweden, the annual crime fiction festival Crimetime has begun; and in Malaysia, Erica Eng became the first Malaysian winner of the Eisner Award. Read on to find out more!

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore

Singapore’s premier literary award, the biennial Singapore Literature Prize, held a virtual awards ceremony for the first time last night, and handed out prizes across the nation’s four official languages (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, and English). Notably, Marylyn Tan made history with her queer and transgressive poetry collection, GAZE BACK, when she became the first woman (and lesbian) writer to win the top prize for Poetry in English. Other big winners include Wong Koi Tet (published by City Book Room) and Sithuraj Ponraj, who walked away with two prizes each. Evidently, the arts have continued to feel the negative repercussions of the pandemic, as the top prize money was slashed from SGD$10,000 to SGD$3,000 this year due to a lack of funding.

Prior to the ceremony, Unggun Creative’s Jamal Ismail—who won the Merit Award for his novel Tunjuk Langit (Pointing the Sky)—had bemoaned the lesser prize money, but wondered if winners could alternatively be awarded the “translation of their works into other languages.” Literary translations across languages in Singapore remain an under-tapped potential.

Hearty congratulations to previous Asymptote contributors who made the shortlist: Hamid Roslan, for his inventive and cacophonous bilingual collection of poetry, parsetreeforestfire; and Amanda Lee Koe, for Delayed Rays of a Star, a novel that unfolds an ambitiously transnational history through the lives of cinema icons Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich, and Leni Riefenstahl.

In other prize-related news, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize—formerly reserved for Singaporean writers—was for the first time this year open to submissions from Southeast Asia. This year’s winning novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, is written by Kuala Lumpur-born Joshua Kam and has just been released. Pre-orders are underway for the books by the other finalists who hail from across the region. With the emphasis on regional submissions continued for next year, the Singapore-based prize looks set to become an important institution shaping the regional English-language publication scene.

Finally, an online symposium held on August 12 explored the role of the anthology in Singapore’s literary ecosystem, and put the nation’s feast of anthologies into focus. In fact, the latest anthology to arrive just this month, Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (eds. Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, and Tse Hao Guang), describes itself as a literal feast: “a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijsttafel.”

READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ariana Harwicz

August 27, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

I try not to be labeled as a feminist writer because I don’t want to be pigeonholed.

It seems fitting to crown our triple Women in Translation feature with something of a triple threat. On the one hand, Argentine Ariana Harwicz’s work has been published in fifteen languages, most notably English: her debut novel Die, My Love (translated by Carolina Orloff and Asymptote’s own Editor-at-Large Sarah Moses) was a 2018 International Booker and 2020 BTBA nominee. And yet, despite a hailed career in writing, Harwicz feels almost closer to translation—a love partly fueled by her experience as a longtime expat in France. Her latest book deals with exactly that: in the short and deliciously sweet Desertar (forthcoming in Spanish from Mardulce), she and French-Argentine translator Mikaël Gómez Guthart ponder the twists and turns of the craft.

But Harwicz isn’t just a woman in (and in love with) translation; adding to her appeal here is that, much to her chagrin, her work has been routinely couched in terms of her womanhood. In this interview with Blog Editor Josefina Massot, she talks about how even well-intentioned feminism can be used for literary profit, what it’s like to give voice to a man, and why she views her translators as lovers. Dealing no cheap punches or punchlines pour la galerie, Harwicz isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers—and that is, in part, what makes her such a welcome voice in the context of WIT: thoughtful criticism is arguably the highest form of respect.

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Josefina Massot (JM): In Desertar, you claim books are no longer a linguistic fact but a “thing,” a product of the publishing market—which, in turn, often bows to ideological trends. One of these trends is a somewhat bastardized feminism—a particular strand of feminist discourse that you’ve also questioned. I can’t help but ask, then, at the risk of stirring up controversy: how do you feel about Women in Translation Month to begin with? No one doubts the good intentions of many of its advocates (Asymptote among them), but it’s worth asking whether it might not be exploited by others.

Ariana Harwicz (AH): It’s a very complex issue, and any attempt to annul, minimize, reduce, or stifle that complexity leads to a dangerous trap. If I told you that I straight-out condemned this celebration, this month devoted to women in English translation, I’d be sabotaging a literary movement that I, too, celebrate: at the end of the day, I’m one of these women, and being translated into English has opened many doors to other languages, cultures, and translations (pretty much all of them, in fact, except for Hebrew); there’s nothing more interesting to me than infiltrating these new environments. Some of my opinions are pretty different from those of many female colleagues, or just people I run into in general, but in order to be heard, read, or access the ongoing literary and political conversation, I must first be translated. If I get wrapped up in my own thoughts or turn to ostracism, I’ll only lose.

So, do I support the increased visibility of female literary discourse and poetics through initiatives like WIT? Absolutely. Do I support the application of gender-based discourse to literature? No. Do I support the marketing of women or social, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities? No. Do I think this rhetoric is a sign of the times? Yes. Do I think the publishing market profits from it? Yes. Do I think some presses abuse it? Yes, many do. But again, to be clear, I don’t condemn the drive for visibility—merely its exploitation.

JM: Speaking of exploiting feminist rhetoric as a marketing strategy, you’ve also complained about editors’ attempts to promote you as a female writer. You’ve said that you’ve had to fight in every language to avoid blurbs like “a feminist novel by a female rebel,” and that you weren’t always successful. How have publishers in different countries handled the promotion of your work in this regard?

AH: When the French translation of my first novel, Matate, amor (Crève, mon amour) was published by Seuil in January, I met up with several distributors. This is typical in France: the author holds a meeting with all the small bookshop owners. There are tons of independent bookstores here (which I guess is also the case in Germany and other European countries), and of course, they’re ultimately more important than the big chains in promoting non-commercial, non-bestselling literature. When I met with them, my editor (a wonderful editor and translator, too) described my book as “feminist punk” or something. I remember half-jokingly correcting him, but in doing that, I was also taking a political stance. We then had a chat and took a close look at the front and back covers of the book, after which I told him to scrap the term “feminist.” I always weigh in on this kind of thing, because it’s ultimately all about politics—the author’s and the text’s. For instance, if someone tries to push a sexy picture of me, or some crowd-pleasing slogan or a title that just doesn’t fit, I’ll have my say and they’ll usually listen.

I think I had the same issue everywhere. The novel has been translated into fifteen languages and published in Spanish by different presses, and I think they all tried to capitalize on the current moment, which clearly benefits female writing—especially if it’s strong, violent, and combative, which mine is. Still, there are differences among editors, because even if they all think this kind of marketing will benefit the book, some are not willing to make literary concessions to accommodate it; they’re not ultimately crowd-pleasers. Others are. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 21, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daljinder Johal, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from China, the United Kingdom, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Central America, and China. In China, the Shanghai Book Fair explodes with glitz and glamour in suspicious contrast with a supposed dedication to books and reading. In the United Kingdom, important translation mentorship and courses are adapting to online programmes to continue to discover and help emerging translators. And in Central America, Centroamérica Cuenta festival has created an exciting programme for its online events, whilst Guatemala’s Catafixia Editorial has announced new publications by three famed Guatemalan and Chilean poets. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

On August 12, the 2020 Shanghai Book Fair began its week-long occupation of the grandiose Shanghai Exhibition Center, bringing with it the usual munificence of new publications, symposiums, readings, and exhibitions. While large-scale, highly attended events may seem unwise at the moment, organizers ensured the public that plenty of precautions were being taken, with the keywords of “safety” and “brilliance” operating in tandem to cohere the theme of this year’s fair. Brilliant safety—or, alternatively, safe brilliance.

True to China’s dedication to establishing itself as a technological trailblazer and the foremost nation in holding dominion over the future—accentuated by the threat of COVID-19 against physical bookstores (and brick-and-mortar spaces in general)—this year’s fair adopted the modus operandi of utilizing the new to reform the old, as opposed to incorporating novel contents and technologies into the existing framework. What this means for the ancient medium of reading and writing soon became clear as the fair revealed a buffet of stratagems to morph the existing methods into multi-faceted, multi-sensory activities. Featuring isolated reading “pods,” cloud-based tours and libraries, virtual reality reading “experiences,” augmented reality reading “supplements,” “sound castles” which seemingly exist solely to provide to children books void of their need to be actually read, interactive reading featuring audio-visual installations, and robot “writing.” The embarrassment of instruments and innovations—which have become increasingly familiar to the arguably more tech-savvy Chinese population—appears to be entirely genuine in its motivation to increase readerships and engagement with literature, but also has the slightly queasy effect of concealing the book, and the function of reading itself, underneath a nebulous aggregate of superficial entertainments and twinkly charms. This is exemplified perhaps most sardonically by the AI library in the aforementioned sound castle, in which one may pick up a paper book and immediately be transported into an immersive, intuitive reading platform—what, one is likely to wonder, is the point of this book, when it performs a function identical to that of a switch or a button?

This obligation of technology to expedite and accentuate our experiences strikes me as one of its most suspect ends, in compliance with its subduing and totalizing tendencies; those among us who love reading acknowledge it as an active, pursuant undertaking, and engorging the transference of language with manufactured visions and kinetics undermines its innate and sublime power to invoke those senses and impressions by the individuating motor of human imagination. As enthusiasm for, and adoption of such technologies rise, a decline in creatively productive, sensually complex language will surely follow. Safe brilliance, indeed.
READ MORE…

Internal Harmonics: Fionn Petch on Translating Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering

August 20, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It is a very delicate balancing act . . . Any discordant note, and the whole might collapse.

True to its title and Sagasti’s style at large, our July Book Club selection reads like a Bachian fugue: it features countless shifts in pace, genre, tone, and content, but it weaves them into soulful patterns; it’s filled with deliciously nerdy in-jokes, but it ultimately strikes a universal chord. How does one transcribe such a complex score into English, making sure its author’s voice still sings? Fionn Petch has done it twice (he translated Sagasti’s Fireflies to great acclaim in 2018), and here he talks about it at length. One of many priceless takeaways: don’t get lost in theory—get lost with the author in a maze-like garden crammed with sculpture-poems instead.

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 USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Josefina Massot (JM): Like Fireflies, A Musical Offering flaunts a striking variety of literary genres: narrative, essay, aphorism, the occasional script-like quotation, and even something like blank verse (e.g., a fragment on the Voyager probe towards the end of ‘Sky Ants’). You’ve translated fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s books, among other things; did your experience with these different genres come in handy when translating Sagasti? Is there a genre you particularly enjoy working with?

Fionn Petch (FP): First of all, I’d like to thank you for a wonderfully insightful and deeply thoughtful review in Asymptote. It’s no exaggeration to say it brought new perspectives to the book for me.

Yes, it’s true that the short sections that comprise A Musical Offering switch between styles very rapidly. Sometimes, readers barely have time to find their bearings before they are propelled onto the next one. Of course, this is also a reflection of the swift changes in pace in the Goldberg Variations—which rather undermines the story that it was composed as a cure for insomnia! So in translating, it was important to be alert to these abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, and to what Sagasti is trying to get across with each section: evoke a feeling, make a subtle observation, set up an unspoken echo with another passage, or just convey a piece of information. Even the disarmingly straightforward segments that read like a line from a biography or encyclopedia require careful attention to how they are structured, as they have a very deliberate weight and emphasis. These are what Sagasti describes as ‘poetic facts.’

So there’s no doubt that all the genres you mention are relevant to draw on. You need a poetic ear for the specific weight of single words, a dramatist’s attention to gesture and glance—Sagasti is very precise in describing these—and you also need the innocence and sense of wonder often found in children’s literature. Of all the genres you mention, this last is undoubtedly the hardest to translate . . . But they all have their pleasures and challenges. READ MORE…