Language: Spanish

The Singing Knots of Jorge Eduardo Eielson: Room in Rome in Review

October 2, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarug Sarano

The white pages are treated like canvas, and the lines as singing knots.

room-in-rome-jorge-eduardo-eielson-rgb

Room in Rome, by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, translated from the Spanish by David Shook, Cardboard House Press, 2019

Knots
That are not knots
And knots that are only
Knots

  1. Peruvian poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson once said of César Vallejo: “There is no superfluousness in Vallejo’s poetry, just as there isn’t any in Christian mysticism, although for opposite reasons”. This reason, according to Eielson, is that Vallejo’s poetry, as opposed to Christian mysticism that supposes a martyrdom of the body, is “a descent of the body—fleshly and social—into hell, that supposes another martyrdom, that of the soul.”
  1. Eielson writes the fleshly and social descent of the body into the Eternal City. Just looking at the title of the opening poem confirms Eielson’s commitment to the body: “Blasphemous Elegy for Those Who Live in the Neighborhood of San Pedro and Have Nothing to Eat.” Room in Rome was written in 1952, shortly after he had left Peru for Italy, where he would settle until his death in 2006. Vallejo, his hero, would also leave Peru for France. Despite this, Eielson’s book was widely available until 1977. During this period, he produced the novel El cuerpo de Gulia-no (The Body of Gulia-no). Again, its title suggests a rigorous investigation of the body and its descent into the worldly. Eielson would write, in 1955, Noche oscura del cuerpo (The Dark Night of the Body)—a shout-out to the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross.)
  1. “i have turned / my patience / into water / my solitude / into bread”
    “here i am headless and shoeless”
    “our father who art in the water”
    “love will be reborn/ between my parched lips”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 27, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi, Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, and José García Escobar

Our wide-ranging literary dispatches this week cover protests, translations, and debuts.

This week’s dispatches report on a four-day literature festival in Italian-speaking Bellinzona in Switzerland, a new podcast dedicated exclusively to Guatemalan and Central American literature, as well as news of the arrest of journalist Hajar Raissouni in Morocco and a theatre group resisting such censorship and freedom of the press violation with a performance of Don Quixote.

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Switzerland

An interest in mapping (often the result of conquests and colonization) and remapping—rethinking what was erased and systematically left out in the mapping process—is at the core of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel. In Lost Children Archive, mapping is related to sound: “Focusing on sound forced me to hear as opposed to seeing, it forced me into a different rhythm. You cannot consume sound immediately,” she explains, “when focusing on sound, you have to sit with it, let it unfold.” It is within this rhythm, she adds, that English emerged as the language that was conducive to the writing of this novel, which she had begun writing in both English and Spanish simultaneously.

Luiselli reflects on this and other aspects of her writing in an intense conversation with Italian writer Claudia Durastanti, in the intimate setting of Bellinzona’s social theater. 

Every year, Bellinzona—the capital of Swiss Italophone Canton Ticino—hosts Babel Festival, a four-day event entirely dedicated to literature and translation. This year’s fourteenth edition, entitled “You will not speak my language,” explored the limits and boundaries of language and literature, as well as languages that are “imagined, invented, despised, censored, regional, silent, visual, and enigmatic.”

READ MORE…

How Should We Review Translations? Part III

September 26, 2019  |  in Essays, Reviews  |  by Ellen Jones, Johannes Göransson, and Katherine Hedeen

Reviewing poetry in translation means writing about the power of art. It means writing about something the market doesn’t want us to write about.

In this third and final installment, we hear from Johannes Göransson and Katherine Hedeen, both of whom direct our attention to what we should consider when engaging with poetry in translation.  Göransson details the idea of a deformation zone that disorients our conventional understanding of the relationship between the original and the translation. Calling on us to care about poetry in translation precisely because the market does not care about it, Hedeen envisions the practice of reviewing these translations as an act of subversion and as a gesture of solidarity. Be sure to check out parts I and II if you missed them. And if you’re interested in reading even more, at the end of today’s installment, Criticism Editor Ellen Jones has offered a list of other contributions to this ongoing and important conversation on what it means to review translations. 

 

Deformationszon

Viltstängslet har upphört
fladdermusar fittar sig
kring krubbet
Vårt pösmunkfetto slaggar
I sin goda roa,
som stötdämpad
av svallningar
I knubbet

— Aase Berg 

Deformation Zone

The wilderness fence has ceased
flutterbats cunt
around the grub
Our doughnutfatso slops
in peace and quiet,
as if shockmuffled
by ripples
in the plump.

— Translated by Johannes Göransson

 

1.

Anybody who is willing to engage deeply with a foreign text in translation can write a review of such a work. And it’s important that you do. You don’t need specialist knowledge of the foreign culture, nor do you need to be able to read the original. All you need to do is to open yourself up to poetry—even poetry that may come out of traditions different from those you are used to.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 20, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden and Janani Ganesan

This week, news of trans literature in Argentina, an inaugural book fair in Patagonia, and awards season in India.

Our editors report on literature’s integral role in political resistance and in supporting underrepresented voices, as feminist and trans theory workshops are organized in Buenos Aires and fuegino literature is promoted in Patagonia. In India, our reporter leads us through the awards season successes, celebrating many translated titles.

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

Last month, a primary election that predicted a decisive win for the opposition in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections sent the economy into convulsions, and the peso’s precipitous drop in value made headlines around the world. Amid the debate around the country’s future, the candidates have been conspicuously quiet on an issue important to many Argentine women: abortion, which remains illegal in most cases. But where the politicians are silent, Argentina’s women are not. Anfibia, a digital magazine of literary journalism launched by the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, is offering a workshop to challenge dominant ways of knowing and to provide women with tools to narrate experiences of violence. Also in this year’s lineup is a four-part workshop and practicum on trans theory, which seeks to answer whether it’s possible to develop a collaborative theory of the trans experience to guide, not only personal creativity, but also policy. Trans literature has won acclaim in Argentina recently. Rising literary star and trans writer Camila Sosa Villada, for example, unites literature and performance. According to a recent profile, “Camila is poetry onstage and puts her body on paper” (my translation). Her book Las malas was showcased at this year’s Feria del Libro in Buenos Aires, the largest book fair in Latin America. READ MORE…

Co-Translation: Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn on Translating Juan José Millás’s From the Shadows

September 19, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Jacqueline Leung

. . . Translation is a very curious combination of simultaneously being outside a text as an onlooker and deep within the guts of the thing.

For the month of August, Asymptote Book Club’s selection was From the Shadows, the English-language debut of acclaimed Spanish language writer, Juan José Millás. In the following interview, Asymptote’s Jacqueline Leung speaks to the novel’s translators, Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, on the pressures of translating a national literary hero, the various processes of co-translation, and how the novel’s pertinent themes of isolation and alienation relate to our current times.

Jacqueline Leung (JL): Juan José Millás is routinely recognized as one of the greatest writers in Spain today, and From the Shadows marks his long overdue debut into English. How (if at all) did these factors play into your process? I’m referring to critics’s inevitably high expectations regarding a literary master’s very first work in English translation, as well as the author’s own ability to potentially chip in on or judge the outcome. Was there an added sense of pressure or due deference on your end, or were you as free as ever to “play around”?

Daniel Hahn (DH): I don’t think it was a factor, actually—it’s certainly not something Tom and I ever discussed, whether between the two of us or with our publishers. You really just have to take each text as it comes, and simply commit to doing whatever it tells you to do, without fretting about expectations or reputations. Besides, while Millás is a big deal in Spain, I’m not sure the English-speaking world has been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to read this translation—for all intents and purposes, he’s being presented to the Anglophones as a debut. Of course, this first book could turn out to be a stupendous runaway success, which would indeed put extra pressure and expectations on book two, but if that added pressure is the price we have to pay for insane bestseller sales, I’ll take it . . . READ MORE…

Flowing Speech: On the Complexities of Audiovisual Translation

September 11, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

It’s really beautiful to get carried away by your emotions while translating.

Over the course of its four-season run, U.S. television show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend won acclaim and awards for its groundbreaking musical format, treatment of mental illness, and reinvention of romantic comedy tropes. Plus, it’s funny—really funny. Every episode contains jokes, quick banter, songs, and a slew of puns and double-entendres. Audiovisual translator Alicia González-Camino, who translated the scripts for Spanish dubbing, knew she’d have her work cut out for her. I spoke with González-Camino via email. Her responses to my questions, compiled below, illustrate her translation process and relationship to this project. Here she is, in her own words, discussing the show’s challenges and whether audiovisual translation counts as a literary art.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and translated from Spanish.

—Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

As a translator, I started out doing any translation that fell into my hands, mostly technical, and it was so boring. I didn’t enjoy translating at all. Audiovisual translation, on the other hand, allows me to be more creative. I have fun translating, and I can feel proud of the result when I successfully make a scene or especially complicated speech flow well and sound natural. It’s a kind of translation where, on the same day, you can have animated drawings with rhymes and little made-up names, something with mafiosos, full of cursing, and something funny and comedic. And in my case, since I translate from five languages, you can also change from one language to another in one day. The result is that you can have really engaging days thanks to the variety.

Plus, in the case of dubbing, the translation comes to life in the voice of the actors. And if you’re lucky, a translation of yours can become part of the whole country’s vocabulary when a show or movie is really well-known and some phrase takes hold in the popular lexicon for posterity. That hasn’t happened to me yet with my translations, but leaving my footprint through language seems incredibly fun to me, in addition to being an honor.

I guess audiovisual translation is somewhat literary, because we’re all tied to a style we have to respect. We approach works that have existing souls and, in some sense, we create works with new souls that our respective audiences can understand, provoking the same emotions and reactions as the original.

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All That Makes a Life: Jennifer Croft on Writing Her Memoir

September 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Translation requires striking a balance between two people’s voices that can be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

From being the co-winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize alongside the writer Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft has just been announced as a judge of the 2020 International Booker Prize. Croft works across Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, and is currently translating The Book of Jacob, a nine-hundred-page epic by Olga Tokarczuk. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.

In Homesick, Croft’s memoir, words and their meanings shift and shine through in unusual, tender, and life-transforming ways as the subject moves from a family home, to being the youngest person to be enrolled in her undergraduate class, to going through tragic heartbreaks. A most engaging read, the memoir itself has shape-shifted in interesting ways, having started as a Spanish novel and as a blog. The English-language version (Unnamed Press, September 2019) too is accompanied by photographs, which operate as their own language system, bringing, by turns, softness and sharpness to the storytelling. On the occasion of the release of Homesick, poet and previous Social Media Manager of Asymptote, Sohini Basak, spoke to Jennifer Croft over email.

Sohini Basak (SB): I want to start with the photographs. Could you tell us a bit more about the role of photography in childhood and consequently in your memoir?

Jennifer Croft (JLC): Although photography played an enormous role in my childhood and adolescence, I didn’t really remember that until I started writing Homesick. Because I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina when I wrote the book, I wrote it in my strange Spanish, which is both foreign (since I started learning Spanish only in my late twenties) and very local (since I’ve only ever studied and spoken porteño Spanish in Buenos Aires). In that first Spanish-language version (called Serpientes y escaleras, coming out next year with Entropía), that language provided a sense of suspense about where this character from Tulsa, Oklahoma was going to go next, and how she was going to end up speaking the way she did. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 30, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Julia Sherwood

From Olga Tokarczuk to Ana María Rodas, read on for the latest in global literature!

As Italo Calvino said; “Literature is like an eye that can perceive beyond the chromatic scale to which Politics is sensitive.” This week, our editors are spanning Poland and Central America this week to bring you news of literature festivals, celebrations, and renowned writers bringing international regard to their home countries, but also, reports of literature in acts of reclamation, restoration, and freedom. To reinstate humanity into issues that seem beyond individual control is a necessary use of language, and around the world, writers are taking up the responsibility.

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

In every corner of Poland, book lovers had a literary festival to choose from this summer. The Borderland Foundation, an international centre for dialogue in Sejny on the Polish/Lithuanian border, hosted a programme of discussions, workshops, and concerts from June through August, with guests including Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, who discussed The Road to Unfreedom with the centre’s director, Krzysztof Czyżewski (photos here). In July, the Non-Fiction festival in Kraków featured acclaimed non-fiction writers of the likes of Małgorzata Rejmer as well as rising new stars of literary reportage, such as Katarzyna Puzyńska, who has made a successful switch from best-selling crime to non-fiction, publishing two books of interviews with Polish policemen. Sopot Literacki, a literary festival in the Baltic Sea resort of Sopot, showcased literature from the UK from August 15 to 18, featuring, among others, novelist Sarah Perry, illustrator and comic book author Katie Green, and Reni Eddo-Lodge talking about her book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, as well as a debate among literary scholars on the current readings of the Frankenstein myth. And in the final week of August, Sopot’s sister city Gdynia renames itself the City of the Word, staging a literary festival focusing on Polish writers before the September 1 announcement of the 2019 Gdynia Literature Prize.

Jacek Dehnel, one of the authors appearing at the Gdynia festival this week, presented his latest book, Ale z naszymi umarłymi (But Together With Our Dead), a viciously funny and chilling apocalyptic satire in which Polish zombies go on the rampage and take over the world. The novel is appearing at a time in which rabid anti-LGBT propaganda, spread by the ruling PiS party in the run-up to the general election this coming October, is receiving vocal support from the Catholic Church, which has compared the LGBT movement to a ‘plague’, and a conservative weekly, Gazeta Polska, recently went so far as to print “LGBT-free zone” stickers. This summer saw a record number of Gay Pride parades held in twenty-three cities across the country in defiance of the hate campaign, and while most of the parades went off peacefully, march participants in Białystok, in the east of the country, came under violent attack from far-right protesters. Dehnel, who travelled to Białystok from his home town of Warsaw to address the crowd and has vividly captured the events in this harrowing report, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: From the Shadows by Juan José Millás

August 29, 2019  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Jacqueline Leung

With what appears to be an absurdist plot, Millás explores the psyche of an individual made redundant by society.

According to Sylvia Plath, August is an “odd and uneven time” so it’s all the more fitting that we’ve chosen Juan José Millás’ spectacularly surreal and cerebral novel, From the Shadows, as our Book Club selection this month. Millás is an author known for bringing existential thought into dreamlike spaces, and in this exemplifying work, the narrative carves a labyrinthine path through a mind withstanding both physical and mental confinements, and the language, rife with darkness and comedy, traces the fine walls of worlds both real and imagined with Kafkaesque soliloquy. 

The Asymptote Book Club strives to bring the best translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. From as low as USD15 a book, sign up to receive next month’s book on our website; once you’re a member, you can  join the online discussion on our Facebook page.

From the Shadows by Juan José Millás, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, Bellevue Literary Press, 2019

“Every love story is a ghost story”: David Foster Wallace’s epigraph encapsulates the phantasmagoric search for love and acceptance in Juan José Millás’ From the Shadows, the author’s much-anticipated English debut. Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, From the Shadows follows the story of Damián Lobo, an unemployed maintenance worker, who, in a strange turn of events, hides himself inside an old wardrobe and gets transported to the home of a young family. Instead of escaping from his physical confinement, Damián inhabits the space behind the wardrobe and becomes the “Ghost Butler,” a spectral being who tends to chores around the house in the daytime when the family is out and slips back to his hiding place in the master’s bedroom at night.

READ MORE…

What is Gained in Translation: Sarah Michaels and Jie Park on Teaching with Poetry Inside Out

August 26, 2019  |  in Asymptote for Educators, Interviews  |  by Barbara Thimm

Kids could really learn by doing both poetic, creative work and translation-based language work.

Poetry Inside Out is a cross-cultural literacy program designed to engage students from elementary to high school with collaborative literary translation. It was developed by the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, California, and is now used in schools across the United States. The process begins when students receive a “poetry package” containing a poem in a foreign language, a picture and biography of the poet (written in English), and a “translator’s glossary” that provides meanings for the words in the poem. Students then split up in pairs to translate the poem “phrase by phrase.” Once they agree on a translation, they meet up with another pair of students to compare translations and to work on it further to “make it flow.” Lastly, all groups share their translations and discuss the similarities and differences across each group’s translation as well as the poem’s possible meaning. I first encountered Poetry Inside Out in a teacher workshop and was struck by the intensity of the process and by the sophisticated thought processes seen in videos of sixth grade students engaging in Poetry Inside Out.

Sarah Michaels and Jie Park, both professors at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently received an “Engaging New Audiences” grant to develop a curriculum and a seminar for ESL teachers to learn and use Poetry Inside Out in their classrooms. Both have been observing and documenting the implementation of Poetry Inside Out at Worcester public schools for more than six years.

Barbara Thimm (BT): Poetry and translation are unlikely subjects and skills to be taught in elementary and middle school. When and why did you get interested in Poetry Inside Out?

Sarah Michaels (SM): I first heard about Poetry Inside Out from Marty Rutherford, who was working at the Center for the Art of Translation and really revamped and energized it. We got Marty to come out here and give a workshop to a bunch of us teachers and do a Poetry Inside Out lesson in one of the schools that we collaborate with. I picked it up as part of a first-year intensive seminar with undergraduates: we did Poetry Inside Out in an after-school program at the same school where Marty had done her first lesson. That got undergraduates working with sixth graders.

Then Jie arrived, and she brought it to some teachers she was collaborating with in another school—teacher researchers who taught ESL. Probably the majority of kids at that school who speak English speak a language other than English at home, so there were lots of English learners and lots of bilingual kids in these regular classrooms.

Jie Park (JP): I was introduced to Poetry Inside Out six years ago when I got to Clark, and it really resonated with me as someone who looks at language and literacy with immigrant multilingual youth. But to answer your question: The teachers I work with would all say that translation makes so much intuitive sense when you’re working with multilingual youth because it is something these kids already do at home, for family members, for friends, at school, for classmates, for their teachers. That is, we are building on a tool or practice that they’re already confident and quite familiar with, and they have lots of ideas about the powers of translation but also the responsibilities, the dangers, or the stress. This feeds into what we’re trying to do, which is to build on the assets that kids come into the classroom with, not seeing them as lacking in something but to ask what they already have that we can leverage to help them. That’s why I think translation makes so much sense.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 23, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andrea Blatz, Daniel Persia, and Janani Ganesan

This week’s literary news from Brazil, Texas, and Kashmir.

Our reporters take us to literary festivals in Brazil, to celebrations of Women in Translation month in Austin, Texas, and to Kashmir, where the voices of writers and journalists are revealing the urgency and importance of communication, free speech, and speaking out against injustice.

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

Identity, colonialism, and immigration were among the main topics discussed at the 7th edition of Litercultura (August 12-16), a week-long literary festival in Curitiba, Brazil. In conversation on this year’s theme, “Borders,” Italian writer and journalist Igiaba Scego explored her own family’s trajectory, tracing her parents’s migration from Somalia to Italy in the wake of Siad Barre’s coup d’état in 1969. Her novel Beyond Babylon—recently released by Two Lines Press, in a stunning English translation by Aaron Robertson—is a multigenerational story that explores the brutal dictatorship in Somalia and the challenges and discrimination still faced by Afro-descendants in Italy today. Scego seemed particularly at home with her Brazilian audience, perhaps because this was not her first time in Brazil; three of her books have been translated into Portuguese, and she was a headliner at the International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip) in 2018. Other participants at this year’s Litercultura included Patrícia Campos Mello (Brazil), Leonardo Padura (Cuba), Bernardo Carvalho (Brazil), and Juan Cárdenas (Colombia).

While Scego was closing out Litercultura in Brazil’s southern city of Curitiba, the 13th International Book Biennial of Ceará was just getting started, over 2,000 miles away in the northeastern capital of Fortaleza. Under the theme “Cities and Books,” this year’s fair (August 16-25) will unite some of Brazil’s most cherished writers, including Maria Valéria Rezende and Raduan Nassar. The goal of the Biennial is to create space for artistic and literary exhibitions while engaging the wider public in conversations around books, literature, and literacy. In ten full days of programming, the Biennial will welcome over sixty authors, including international writers such as Mia Couto (Mozambique) and former Asymptote contributor Abdellah Taïa (Morocco). Over the past two years, the fair has averaged approximately fifty-five thousand visitors per day, including children, young adult, and adult readers.

Together, Litercultura and the Biennial of Ceará remind us of the sheer size of Brazil, a country that continues to discover new talent within and beyond its borders.   READ MORE…

Collective Memory: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter: A Fiction in Review

August 21, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Worley

An exercise in the resilience of human memory, the novel integrates a broad swath of literary and global cultural touchstones . . .

Human Matter: A Fiction by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Eduardo Aparicio, University of Texas Press, 2019

As noted over the years by scholars such as Arturo Arias, Central American cultural production remains largely at the margins of academic study. As Arias points out in Taking Their Word, because popular knowledge of the region is so sparse, and because geographic ignorance (particularly in the United States) is so widespread, Central American immigrants will often identify Mexico as their country of origin, both for reasons of Latinx solidarity, and to protect themselves from discrimination and prejudice. This erasure is not even a recent phenomenon: the protagonists of the 1983 film El Norte, the Guatemalan-Maya brother and sister Enrique and Rosa Xuncax, are told to tell people that they are from the heavily Indigenous state of Oaxaca, Mexico, to avoid being taken advantage of in both Mexico and the US. However, from the United Fruit Company in the early twentieth century to the practices of Canadian mining companies, and even US president Donald Trump’s facilitating, in the words of the Guatemalan-American author Francisco Goldman, “organized crime” in Guatemala’s 2019 presidential elections, global forces have always played, and continue to play, an outsized role in the region.

Despite its apparently marginal status, the region has made a number of enduring contributions to world literature. Foremost among them is one of the fathers of Latin American modernism, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, not to mention one of the most important works of Indigenous literature in the Americas, the K’iche’ Maya Popol Wuj. Outside of these points of reference, however, much of the region’s vast, rich literature remains untranslated, which makes Eduardo Aparicio’s translation of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano as Human Matter all the more important.

Rey Rosa, perhaps Guatemala’s most important living novelist, has had an eclectic literary trajectory. Having gone to New York in the early 1980s, he eventually became the protégé of the US-expatriate author Paul Bowles, spending a good deal of time with the author in his adopted home of Tangier, Morocco, and even becoming executor of Bowles’s literary estate upon the author’s death in 1999. Tellingly, one of Rey Rosa’s previously translated novels, the magnificent The African Shore, deals with the intersection of tourism, privilege, and migration in the border zone not between Guatemala and the US, or even between Guatemala and México, but between Morocco and Spain.

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.

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Translation Tuesday: “I fell in love with a poet . . . ” by Manuel Tzoc

August 13, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Paul Worley

I fell in love like you fall in love with silence / and darkness (fears I’ve never conquered)

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the work of the Indigenous/Queer poet Manuel Tzoc. “I fell in love with a poet” comes from Tzoc’s theatrical poetry El jardín de los infantes locos y la escafandra de oro (The Garden of Insane Children and the Golden Diving Helmet). The poem, imbued with a strong, imaginative voice that comes through even in translation, is a love address to a poet—a poet that exists only within Tzoc’s address itself. This imagined lover/poet is a pastiche of Guatemalan and international attributes, past and future stories, and complex desires. Identity is woven together from what the addressed poet does and does not do, what he wears. To a certain extent, the poet as the subject of address in Tzoc’s poem is an ideal subject, but not an idyllic or stereotypical one. Desire is expansive, and by imagining and versifying the poet/lover, Tzoc is able to birth the ideal made possible in poetry to encompass the specificity and the variety of a intersectional Indigenous Central American/urban/Queer poetics.

I fell in love with a poet
a boy poet
with the attitude of a horrible little prince
I fell in love like you fall in love with silence
READ MORE…