Language: Spanish

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and MARGENTO

News from Spain and Nicaragua!

This week, our editors bring us news from their respective literary horizons and the many exciting publications being released to the delight of readers. In Spain, Romanian literature hits the spotlight as a the first text of a new series is released, covering the nineteenth century through to World War II. In Nicaragua, the lauded poet and author Gioconda Belli has announced her latest work. Read on to find out more! 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain

Within international contexts, the most important literary event of the past few months is the release of Grandes escritores rumanos (Great Romanian Writers), a collection edited by Alba Diz Villanueva and past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, and published by Huerga & Fierro (Madrid, Spain). The anthology is the first instalment of a series projected to cover Romanian literature chronologically, and samples the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, through to World War II. Numbering over three hundred pages, it starts off with both the original and the Spanish translation of the “great [three] Romanian classics”: the eruditely eclectic, formally exhaustive Renaissance man and “national poet,” Eminescu; the proverbially language-bending, comedic, and politically sarcastic playwright and short-story writer Caragiale (whom Eugène Ionesco referred to as his master, making him the true forerunner of the theatre of the absurd); and the linguistically-Gargantuan, (faux-)folkloric raconteur, Creangă. Among the featured twentieth century writers are the paradoxically modernist-traditionalist poet Tudor Arghezi, modernist-expressionist poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga, iconic Symbolist George Bacovia, landmark novelists Mihail Sadoveanu and Liviu Rebreanu, alongside significant women poets and fiction writers including Magda Isanos, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Henriette Yvonne Stahl, and Cella Serghi.

An impressive number of translators contributed to this literary tour de force—no less than sixteen—and the editors have structured the collection in a quite complex and polyvalent way. The subtitle reads Antología didáctica (course reference book), and indeed, in a Norton-anthology style, every section comes with a short introduction presenting each writer’s main stylistic features and contextualizing their contribution to the evolution of Romanian letters. Even more distinctively, at the back are quizzes addressing the writers’ style and language, as well as a rich “Further Reading” section providing more detailed bios, aesthetic commentary, and relevant historical background—plus comprehensive annotated bibliographies which act as a great resource for students but also scholars and literati, as they highlight the richness of relevant translations and criticism in both Romanian and Spanish (in Spain and Ibero-America). READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2024

August 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Matilde Ribeiro, and Sofija Popovska

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

In this month’s compilation of newly released titles, our editors take a close look at three works that cohere stylistic invention with unconstrained probings into reality. In a bold collection of psychogeography, Daniel Saldaña París vivifies the urban space as a transformative intersection of image and imagination. From Aimé Cesaire, one of the founders of négritude, an early dramatic work provides further insight into his potent discourse against colonial violence. And in the English-language debut of one of Latin America’s most vital political thinkers, a volume combining dialogue and essay introduces the essentiality of communal resistance in the thinking of Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar.

9781646222315

Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman, Catapult, 2024

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations. . . It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them. . .” writes Michel de Certeau in his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life. I thought of these words immediately as I immersed myself in the shifting landscapes of Planes Flying Over a Monster, a collection of ten essays by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman. In writing about (and moving through) Montreal, Havana, Mexico City, Madrid, and other places, Saldaña París engages in a transformative cartography, rearranging bits of metropolises in turn into a tangle of ruelles frequented by a secret writer; a map of zones where different types of drugs can be purchased; a junction between “three different groups playing the same son cubano tune at different rhythms on three different corners of the plaza”; and a stretch of space-time existing only momentarily within a locked gaze between a shy, adolescent cult member and his adult self. Tracing the connections between places, people, and events, Saldaña París creates a sense of communion with the world that is at times uneasy, yet always shot through with radical tenderness and a rare species of honesty—the kind that doesn’t confuse itself with the truth. This self-awareness, rooted in the memoir aspect of the collection, intensifies the realism that the genre of nonfiction always purports to provide, yet only occasionally delivers.

The collection’s closing essay, “Assistants of the Sun,” is also the beginning of the story—chronologically speaking. In it, we meet a young Saldaña París, dragged into joining a cult by his father and uncle. The sect’s activities happen during nature retreats, and include rituals of varying extremity—anything from walking in a neat line to a live burial. Saldaña París is forced to confront these memories years later, watching footage of these events while sitting with his partner Catherine in a borrowed Brooklyn apartment—an arrangement he mentions multiple times throughout the essay, as though attempting to anchor himself amidst the flood of disturbing recollections. He faces the past with striking empathy—remembering his father as “softness personified, mildly alcoholic, holding down three jobs . . . and a radical advocate of tenderness,” despite his having roped his son into a scam. This compassionate clarity, spanning all ten essays, is consonant with the author’s mission—relayed to him by an extra-terrestrial during a cult activity—to “help the sun to illuminate the world.” READ MORE…

Ways of Seeing: On Humberto Ak’abal’s If Today Were Tomorrow

August 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Miranda Mazariegos

What do they think, those who we believe don’t think at all?

If Today Were Tomorrow by Humberto Ak’abal, translated from the K’iche’ and Spanish by Michael Bazzett, Milkweed Press, 2024

To read Humberto Ak’abal is to be transported: first to the Western Highlands of Guatemala, full of mountainous forests and ravines where corn grows amid the mist, and then through the natural world and toward everything it encompasses—the elements, their sounds, and even their language. In a world where the sun eats the mist, butterflies kiss the earth, and peach trees weep, the boundaries of the conscious world expand to envision a new, shared world. 

Humberto Ak’abal was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named Book of the Year by the Association of Guatemalan Journalists, and he was awarded the Golden Quetzal award in 1993. A world-renowned Guatemalan poet, Ak’abal oscillated between writing in K’iche’—his mother tongue—and Spanish, the official language of Guatemala. This new collection, published by Milkweed Press in June, spans five sections, each delving into a different facet of the poet’s oeuvre, while always retaining his essence, humor, and care for the natural world. 

READ MORE…

“My-selves” in My Languages: A Discussion with Paloma Chen

August 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Conner

. . . sometimes “you” are “me,” and there is no distinction, and we are a “we,” but other times I am not even “me,” I am just void, 空.

Born in Alicante, Valencia, poet, researcher, and journalist Paloma Chen dedicates herself to advancing migrant justice in Spain. Her first collection of poetry, Invocación a las mayorías silenciosas (Calling On All Silent Majorities, Letraversal, 2022), explores the depths and diversity of the Chinese diasporic experience in Spain through a kaleidoscope of voices, encompassing mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers, while at the same time always challenging the suppositions of language. “Shanshui Pixel Scenes 山水像素场景,” published as an app in 2023 and translated by Paloma and her colleagues into Catalan, Mandarin, and English, renews the form of 山水诗, or “poetry of mountains and waters,” by pairing pixel art depicting scenes from China and the Chinese diaspora with poems that deepen the speaker’s relationships with their multiple and ceaselessly transforming selves. In the following interview, I spoke with Paloma about the importance of orality and quotidian language in her poetry, writing in community, and the multiplicity of the self.

Julia Conner (JC): In your essay “No tengo más que una literatura y no es la mía.” you mention how you envision Invocación embodying a Chinese diaspora collection of poetry, much like Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus being an Asian American poetry collection. When writing Invocación, how did you imagine your work in conversation with previously published literary works, both from Spain and abroad?

Paloma Chen (PC): I really like Asian-American poets like Sally Wen Mao, Marilyn Chin, Franny Choi, and Li-Young Lee, so their poetry was a great inspiration for me, as I wanted to write in Spanish, for readers in Spain, but taking into account my Chinese roots. Most of their works were truly enlightening and helped me build my own poetic language. I was trying to carve out a little space, one in which I can also find poets like Berna Wang, Minke Wang, Ale Oseguera, or Gio Collazos, that I could find liberating, one in which I could express the complexities regarding identity that I was all these years reflecting about. There is no me without all those before me, and all those walking with me right now. There is no Invocación without all the amazing books and artwork I had the privilege to encounter, without hundreds of fruitful conversations and lived experiences. I was writing for my friends, the amazing community of artists and activists, not only from the Chinese community, but from the anti-racist, feminist, Queer movements present in many places. I did not know if my book, which I thought was a very specific work by a Spanish-Chinese girl talking about her reality growing up in a little restaurant in rural Spain, could have the potential to connect with readers abroad, but I am happy to know that maybe it has.

JC: Many of your poems from Invocación center on speech and communication, fluency, disfluency, and the function of language. “Pero habla,” for example, repeats the visually interrupted line “pala/bras part/idas que hi/eren.” Your work also has powerful oral and rhythmic qualities to it. How do you see the relationship between the themes of your work and your poetry’s orality and visual form on the page?

PC: I guess that for a writer and a poet, reflecting about language itself is quite common. In my specific case, reflecting about identity inevitably leads me to reflect about language, as identities, languages, and cultures are so closely interrelated. Also, I do not think poetic language is that different from the quotidian tool we use to communicate daily. Our every-day interactions are full of poetry. The fact that in my normal life I am used to thinking about communication, fluency, and disfluency doubtless permeates my writing. I have always struggled to communicate, to express myself in the way that society demands me to. I studied journalism at university because I was truly worried about it back then. Some people think of me as being quite shy sometimes but, in a huge contrast, quite expressive in my poetry. For me, writing poetry is establishing a conversation with another true self, a self empowered by voice, body, presence, rhythm, a self that is connected with the environment and less in its own head. Because I value orality, I like to experiment also with the visual form of the verses in the page, so the reader can also have some visual clues of tones, silences, vibrations, etc.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Baby Shower” by Isaura Contreras

August 6, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Janet M. Izzo

They were surprised when just four months later, Mat and Sara told them the news that they would be living together, for a very special reason.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an understated comedy of modern manners from the pen of Isaura Contreras, translated from the Spanish by Janet M. Izzo. As the on-again, off-again relationship between Mat and Sara blooms into anticipated parenthood, their coworkers Pablo and Lidia watch first with amusement, then anxiety. Their own relationship, so secure in comparison to Mat and Sara’s initial misfortunes, begins to seem stagnant and decayed in the face of the other couple’s renewed affections, and the prospect of new life. Will they reconcile themselves to their differences, or end up like the formerly-single Mat, whom they once so smugly counseled? If nothing else, the story is guaranteed to amuse anyone who has been forced to endure the antics of baby-crazed friends—read on!

Pablo and Lidia had started seeing each other the year before they saw Mat arm in arm with Sara, who had arrived at the office just three months earlier. They were both glad that Mat was dating someone after the tumultuous breakup with his fiancée. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but wonder what Sara saw in him, even though they considered Mat a dear friend. Sara was clearly kind and attractive, candid and sweet, compared to a resentful and hostile guy, who took advantage of any opportunity to bring to light others’ misfortunes. Pablo and Lidia disregarded these embittered episodes, keeping in mind the four years they’d known him, especially the compassion that suddenly surfaced after the wedding was canceled. Mat, once recovered from the shock, described in a surge of sincerity, the painful weeks he searched for her without success. Pablo and Lidia rehearsed their best lines and witnessed how he recovered his arrogant walk. They discussed the huge favor they could do for him if they only dared, as good friends, to give him advice. Pablo would tell him how girls should be treated, with signs of affection and attention to small details, with compliments every morning, noticing their different hairstyles and the color of their eye makeup. All activities that, punctually and purposefully, he had managed to accomplish in his own relationship. Lidia would also tell him that it is important to put arrogance aside, to stop being explosive and antagonistic, authoritarian and worried about appearing sensitive. She would tell him that relationships are like plants that need to be watered, day by day, with care and devotion.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 2, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the foremost developments from their respective regions. In North Macedonia, a new collection from a renowned poet and director finds solace and profundity in the complex nexus between human life and its context. In the Philippines and Bulgaria, readers bid farewell to two titans of writing and translation. 

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia, reporting from North Macedonia

Prostori (Spaces), the third poetry collection by renowned Macedonian film director and poet Antonio Mitrikjeski, was recently published by Dijalog Press. With a track record of two well-received collections and several films playing at festivals across the world, Mitrikjeski is equally ‘intellectually rich and emotionally lush’ in his visual language as he is in literature, per writer Dimitar Bashevski’s review of Prostori.

The collection is fittingly cinematic; weaving together a mystical sublime, oracular dreamscapes, and a loving mimesis of familiar places, Mitrikjeski’s robust poetic voice blends inner and outer worlds, delving deep into the human psyche as he wanders into distant regions—mountain peaks, the ocean’s floor, the night sky. Frequently apostrophic, he foregrounds the deep entanglement between his human subjects and their environments, their ideas, and the people around them. In ‘Saraj,’ a poem about his childhood home, Mitrikjeski celebrates the ‘fraternity of children’ and ‘the mystique and simplicity of all the silhouettes who confessed their feelings’ in the ‘house bearing the roots of beginnings,’ where he still discovers the ‘eternal. . . fraternity of those present.’ Opening the collection and dedicated to his parents, ‘Saraj’ is programmatic. Throughout Prostori, the speaker is preoccupied with finding connection amidst distance, and this search is mediated via both real and oneiric spaces, as well as the relationships they make possible: ‘The lake’s water connects us all. / The fog is lifted,’ writes Mitrikjeski in ‘The Word’. The word itself, the material of poetry—’invisible, written upon the ruins’—will remain eternally within the lake, that is, within the space of human connections, among ‘familiar names’. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Luciana Jazmín Coronado

July 30, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Allison A. deFreese

We like to walk in the cobwebs of the creator’s finger, to die of laughter and ponder things that swing in the light.

The heartbeat of the poems of Luciana Jazmín Coronado (tr. Allison A. deFreese) comes from the push-pull of beginning- and end-times. “The Beginnning” is a genesis myth refigured for our critical moment. The Christian version has it that the world sprang from God’s command; Coronado imagines a gentler awakening, in which drowsy, new-born man stumbles not only upon apples but coal—twin sins, the seeds of Anthropocene destruction. “Imperfect Children” is suffused with the same ambivalence, a gentle petition to a lowercase god to heal the open wound of existence; “Creation” imagines in the same breath god’s “perfect green lawn” whose plants gird themselves for its coming destruction.

The Beginnning

I.
I was born.

I’ll follow some path,
ask why I bear such sorrow

I ask the sun to step aside because he’s old
and watches everything without remembering.

I love myself with one hand
and explore northward with the other.
I might be inside a flower
or anywhere else. READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

July 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Hilary Ilkay, Julia Maria, Marguerite Alley, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sofija Popovska

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 26, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest literary news from Mexico and Canada!

This month, our editors-at-large takes us to Mexico, where competing views of children’s literature vie for attention, and to Canada, where writers and experts came together for a conference on literature in multimedia contexts. Read on to find out more!

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

Just a couple of months ago, I shared with you the homage that Librerías Gandhi, one of the biggest bookstores in Mexico, paid to Norma Muñoz Ledo, a Mexican novelist specializing in children’s literature. Last week, the results of the “Juan de la Cabada” Prize for Children’s Story were announced, and they were baffling. The jury, which included writers Elizabeth Hernández, Gabriela Peyrón, and Gabriela Bustos, determined that there was not a single participant with work of sufficient quality to claim the prize of $250,000 MXN (around $13,800 USD).

Worried about the state of children’s literature in Mexico, the jury suggested to the Culture Office and the National Institute of Fine Arts that the money be used instead to create workshops for writers interested in creating children’s stories. “We hope that this decision can be made to favor the quality of works presented in future editions of the prize,” the official statement declared. In fact, the National Coordination of Literature, which is part of the Culture Office, took the suggestion into account and is set to organize activities focused on children’s literature, to stimulate the production of books, and to improve the circulation of quality works for children. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’”

July 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Honora Spicer

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!

7

Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”

From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2024

July 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our Summer 2024 issue!

With so many wonderful pieces in the Summer 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

We loved Eduardo Galeano when he spoke of “the infinite and invisible altars of our Latin America”, but perhaps we paid not enough attention when he called reality “. . . life that sings with multiple voices”. Despite the efforts of many historians and writers in establishing the distinctions and singular complexities of Latin American countries, outsiders tend to cohere the regions in a syncretic whole, held by the commonalities of language, Iberian colonialism, and modals of development. The term “Latin America” originated with the Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, who sought to contrast Europe and the Americas as past and future, instating a rhetoric in which the archaisms of the former could be overturned by the luminous visions of the latter: “. . . reason against religion, hope against tradition, union against isolation. . . the logic of sovereignty against oligarchic constitutions”. This summation of continents may have served him when the routes of imperialism carved the globe up into the Old World and the New World, but we’ve no use for such simplistic declarations today.

In “neozone”, the Chilean writer Juan Carreño is on the road. In a diaristic frenzy, this excerpt translated by Maya Feile Tomes moves from Mexico’s San Cristóbal to the city of Comitán, then past the Guatemala border with a stop at the capital, before urging its way towards the Nicaraguan capital of Managua (“crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific”). All the while the writer’s mind is running faster than the speed of any car or bus, threading in memories and markers across this immensely varied continent in the electric instantaneity of mobility, when every new encounter sends itself hurtling across the mind, awakening memories, desires, references, the middles of anecdotes, connecting itself to the great shifting web of a body amongst. Yet, even as the sights, the people, the landscape are playing their own pinball game within the ratting corridors of Carreño’s journals, the stark insider-outsider paradigm finds plenty of iterations in movements and border-crossings, illumed within the subtle details of social code—“I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion”—that characterises the Chilean against the Guatemalan, the Mexican, the Nicaraguan. Regionalisms, habits, and assumptions abound, and the people who offer their company or a splinter of their story are as open as they are fleeting, honest in a way that is only possible without surnames. Holding to the shared language that occasionally sizzles with the separateness of nationalities, they share opinions, invitations, songs, insights. There’s something familiar, profound in this incidental intersection of the passing-through, when finding oneself in a different country and suddenly given the position of ambassador, as if a person is a miniaturised model of a nation. And when you tell them about where you came, you give the truth as only you could, and the country glows a little in response, in that stranger’s mind, and another house is built on the phantasmagorical, long accumulated, imagined atlas of the world—that which makes the maps seem paltry in comparison. READ MORE…

Our Summer 2024 Edition Has Landed!

July 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Georgi Gospodinov, Patrick Autréaux, Ali Wajeeh, and Brigitte Giraud in a Special Feature themed on collectives

What stops a cancer from killing its host? What might have prevented a grandmother from dying in a refugee camp? What allows a Deliveroo rider to keep his dignity through itinerant gig-work? Perhaps it’s care: “the connections we have with others and the everyday actions we engage in for each other” (Micaela Brinsley). Care is a vital #lifesupport—a necessity up there with shelter and air. The problem is that it’s scarce, as attested to by our brand-new Summer edition spanning 35 countries and featuring an exclusive interview with 2023 Booker International Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s debut in English, as well as new translations of Paul Éluard and Hamid Ismailov. In settings that take us from hospital to hospital and even one assisted suicide facility, few find it, while others seek it with increasing desperation. Patrick Autréaux’s exquisite memoir of chemotherapy, for example, describes cancer as a “cold octopus . . . groping at me as though I were some bizarre object . . . embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.” In Inga Iwasiów’s startling novel, on the other hand, the dead moon jellyfish forming a “gelatinous strip between the water and the land” becomes a buffer between the cancer-stricken narrator and intentional death (which in Pooya Monshizadeh’s devastating Red Meadow is canceled without even a refund). Against absolute loss, Honora Spicer, in this issue’s poignant Brave New World Literature entry, opened the very text that she had requested to translate one week after her grandmother died—to the wide field of “se fue.”


The hospital is also the setting for fifty percent of this issue’s Criticism section. While Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom paints a portrait of intimate life at a psychiatric hospital, Vanessa Springora’s Consent begins with a teenager being hospitalized for rheumatism, only to receive not one but two additional diagnoses during her stay. Though it’s the second of these (by a predatory gynecologist) that sets off a nationwide scandal with legal consequences, the first diagnosis very much deserves pause as well: according to the psychologist who sees her, our protagonist is “disengaged from her peers . . . isolated and vulnerable”; she struggles to “join” with others in society. This malaise is directly echoed in the trio of pieces (from Switzerland, Denmark, and South Korea) heading off the entire issue. All three are heart-wrenching portraits of alienation that speak to the current epidemic of loneliness.

If this edition or in fact any issue of this magazine has alleviated your loneliness, I hope you’ll take just three minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member. Subscribing to our Book Club is a great way to take your support for world literature to the next level. If you’re interested in joining our team, good news: In addition to social media managers and marketing managers to join us on the frontlines of a more inclusive world literature, we’re inviting talented illustrators to come onboard as our guest artists—send us a link to your portfolio if you might be interested!

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What’s New in Translation: July 2024

July 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel and Samantha Siefert

New publications from Chile and Iran!

This month, we introduce two extraordinary novels erecting vivid, immersive narratives upon the intricate sociopolitical histories of their respective nations. From Chile, Carlos Labbé builds an intricate match of class warfare and collective action against the backdrop of professional soccer; and from Iran, Ghazi Rabihavi tells the tragic story of two queer lovers as they navigate the repressions and tumults of pre- and post-Revolution Iran.  

the murmuration

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter, 2024

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration begins like a monologue from The Twilight Zone: a robust voice draws you aboard the night train from Temuco to Santiago, and a conspiracy of uncertainty and intrigue quickly follows. Cigarettes smolder, nail polish glistens, and a retired sports commentator’s hot cup of matico tea steams into the noir-film night. Suddenly, you find yourself hurtling through the darkness on Schrödinger’s train, where a director of the Chilean national soccer team may or may not be asleep in her first-class train car—or perhaps she is in the dining car, having a drink with the sports commentator. Furtive eyes dart about, noting every detail, but Labbé’s experimental style calls reality itself into question, letting linguistic artistry lead the way in an investigation of Chilean identity, representation, and collective memory. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest from the Latinx, Greek, and Filipino literary worlds!

This week, our editors direct us towards the profound and plentiful artistic productions emerging from border crossings, diverse encounters, and cross-genre interpretations. From a festival celebrating multicultural writings, novel adaptations of classic canons, and the newly elected fellows to a prestigious international residency, these developments in world literature remind us that within the schematics of difference, shared passions grow and proliferate to create unities.

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States

Between June 21 and 23, Hispanic and U.S. literary enthusiasts gathered in San Francisco for the International Flor y Canto Literary Festival. Originally founded by Latinx poet Alejandro Murguia, acclaimed poet and professor at San Francisco State University, this year’s lineup featured a diverse variety of poetry readings, literary workshops, and movie screenings—all open to the public. Participants included Latinx and Mexican writers, poets, and directors dealing with topics such as identity, multiculturalism, language, and resistance. Most of the events took place at the legendary Medicine for Nightmare bookstore, a unique promoter of Latin American and Latinx literature in San Francisco.

One of the most exciting events was a poetry workshop led by the Mexican poet Minerva Reynosa. Titled “¿Quieres escribir pero te sale espuma?” (Do you want to write a poem but only foam comes out?), the workshop encouraged new writers to try out different techniques to overcome writer’s block. In another event, Reynosa read from her most recent book, Iremos que te pienso entre las filas y el olfato pobre de un paisaje con borrachos o ahorcados. The collection portrays life around the Mexico-U.S. border in the nineties, told from the perspective of a bicultural family dealing with gender violence. The works in the book are long poems of mostly short unrhymed verses, using colloquialisms endemic to the north of Mexico, in a fast paced and highly rhythmic prosody. They also include fragments from songs by the iconic Latinx singer Selena. In her reading, Reynosa usually sings these musical portions, highlighting the sonic elements in the poems and their cultural significance. READ MORE…