Language: Spanish

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 14, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Mexico, the Philippines, and

This week, our editors-at-large take us many places, from one book fair by the sea and one in the neighborhood that was once home to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Read on for news about new bookstore openings, sonic poetry readings, and upcoming chapbook publications!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The International Book Fair of Coyoacán (FILCO) is taking place from June 7 to 16 in the historic Mexico City neighborhood internationally famous for having been the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The event features stands from more than one hundred and fifty Mexican and international publishers, as well as two hundred events ranging from concerts and dance performances to book launches and roundtables. Among this year’s panelists are cultural luminaries such as the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, the descendants of Mexican historical figures like Emiliano Zapata, and the writer and Asymptote contributor Elena Poniatowska.

I visited the book fair on Saturday, June 9 for a presentation of the most recent book by Rocío Cerón, globally acclaimed experimental Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor. Simultáneo sucesivo is a collection that explores the sonic power of language. During her talk, Cerón emphasized how we live surrounded by sound but rarely reflect on its affective qualities. She demonstrated these qualities by reading from her book with her characteristic performance style: repeating words, modulating her volume, pitch and tone, and varying her speed. This performance style has the power to minimize language’s semantic qualities and foreground its sonic properties. She also played tracks of sound art that accompany the collection. These feature Cerón’s voice, but also include drone, ambient, and electronic sounds that induce a trance on listeners. Cerón’s performance, abstract poetry, and sound art liberate both language and sound from their utilitarian and practical everyday purposes, inviting listeners and readers to experience the texture, timbre, and materiality of language beyond its meaning.

Simultáneo sucesivo is the third installment of Cerón’s trilogy challenging the way in which we relate to language. The other two books in the series are Spectio (2019) and Divisible corpóreo (2022), which Cerón has presented in events around the world. READ MORE…

Against Containment, Attracting Meaning: Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine M. Hedeen discuss midnight minutes

June 6, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Pazen

. . . I don’t want any borders in poetry. I want to continue the lines, continue the poems, continue this flow. It’s a current of meaning.

In the roughly two decades since Víctor Rodríguez Núñez began writing the antinationalist salvo actas de medianoche and Katherine M. Hedeen began its translation, both have published numerous award-winning works and gained international recognition for their poetry and translations. But despite their acclaim and the widespread success of the poem in the Spanish-speaking world through various prizes and publications (Valladolid, Soria, La Habana), traditional English-language publishers resisted considering the poem and its defiance of  preconceived notions of Cuban and Latin American poetry—until this April, when the book-length poem, midnight minutes, was published in full with Action Books. 

Spanning over 2000 lines, midnight minutes challenges the formation of the traditional poem on the page and the formation of borders of all kinds. Rodríguez Núñez reinvents the sonnet as it curves between the rural towns of his life, from Cayama, Cuba, to Gambier, Ohio, where he lives together with Hedeen, embracing the night as homeland in “one long, dark breath.” Hailed as one of his most influential works in the Spanish-speaking world, actas de medianoche marked a new, experimental turn in both Rodríguez Núñez’s poetics and Latin American poetry overall, now extending into the English for the first time in full with midnight minutes. 

I interviewed Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez about the significance of the translation’s publication today, the contemporary long poem and sonnet in Spanish and in English, their influences from Cesár Vallejo to Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan, and how Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez transform the poetic subject and the object of desire. 

The following dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Pazen (SP): You both have spoken about how, despite the impact of actas de medianoche in the Spanish-speaking world since its initial publication, presses in the United States were overwhelmingly resistant to publishing the English translation, midnight minutes. This was often because of how it defies preconceived ideas of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, poetry. Why do you think right now is finally when these translations are being published? 

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (VRN): Let’s talk a bit about why there was resistance. There is a problem with long poems. Many magazines don’t publish them. Each canto in midnight minutes has fourteen stanzas. The book has more than two thousand lines. And it’s not a book about any explicit Cuban-related theme. It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about. 

Borges, for instance, didn’t like Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. He didn’t like Federico García Lorca’s poetry. I am not in agreement with him in either case, but the reason why is compelling to me. He said that Gabriela Mistral was a professional Chilean. And he didn’t like Garcia Lorca’s poetry because he said that he was a professional Andalusian. “El andalus profesional, la chilena profesional.” I am not a professional Cuban. 

READ MORE…

“To listen to new, unknown sounds”: The Crónicas of Hebe Uhart in A Question of Belonging

June 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Michael Collins

Uhart's . . . conception of truth-telling clearly holds an imperative to bare the process of the telling itself.

A Question of Belonging by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, Archipelago Books, 2024

A Question of Belonging, the recently released collection of crónicas by the late, acclaimed Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, offers a unique alchemy of attentive reportage, sociological and psychological insight, and incisive wit. Drawing readers in with her ability to enjoy the unexpected without judgment, Uhart continually combines humor and erudition to recreate her encounters with camaraderie and guidance, and the care she extends to vulnerable strangers is all the more self-evident when contrasted with her willingness to eviscerate pernicious cultural narratives, particularly those that serve to harm and diminish. The translation by Anna Vilner captures the tonal nuances between these modes, as well as Uhart’s authentic political sympathies—most notably with marginalized and indigenous peoples, from whom she continually attempts to learn.

Crónicas on trips ranging in destination from Río de Janeiro to the Peruvian jungle are supplemented by visits to various therapists, a “North American Professor,” and a hospital stay. Uhart’s integrated practices of reading—which include the interpretation of not only books, but people, relationships, and the self—intertwine in these textual sojourns, often revisiting the ego’s haunts, assumptions, and habits in correspondence with the journeys they narrate. Such practices deepen interactions with differing views, histories, and community structures, truly exemplifying an openness to challenge and newness. The results mirror the process itself: shifting, dynamic essays that act as flexible containers for both journey and reflection, while leaving ample space for the reader’s own impressions and discoveries.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 31, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and René Esaú Sánchez

Updates from Mexico and Palestine solidarity around the literary world.

This week, our editors share news of solidarity, legacy, and cross-cultural connection. Around the world, the literary world is showing up to express support for Palestine, with the Palestine Festival of Literature continuing their crucial work of uplifting work that urges us towards compassion, the Palestinian struggle, and a condemnation of violence. In Mexico, some of the greatest writers in Latin-American history are celebrated for their efforts in connecting their nation to a greater, global heritage of letters. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In a historic demonstration of solidarity, the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), Writers Against the War on Gaza, and Amplify Palestine have come together to organize the event “Freedom to Write for Palestine,” held on May 7 at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. This significant gathering brought together writers who had withdrawn from PEN America’s World Voices Festival and the PEN America Literary Awards, condemning the organization’s failure to support Palestinian writers facing violence and displacement in Gaza. The unprecedented withdrawal of dozens of authors led to the cancellation of both PEN America events just weeks before their scheduled dates.

The program featured opening remarks by Nancy Kricorian and an introduction by Derecka Purnell, and included powerful readings and stories from Michelle Alexander, who read the work of Haya Abu Nasser, and Mohamed Arafat, who shared his family’s harrowing experiences. Evie Shockley read pieces by Fady Joudah, while Nicholas Glastonbury presented an insightful commentary on the Palestinian struggle. The event can be watched in full here. READ MORE…

Translating the Demons on the Page: Maureen Shaughnessy on Belén López Peiró’s Why Did You Come Back Every Summer

May 27, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Rebecca Wilson

I feel like it's a gift that she opened herself up and shared such a raw part of herself with us.

After nine years and a criminal complaint. Affidavits, expert witness reports, trips back and forth to police stations, district attorneys, national courts. A five-hundred page case record. Two lawyers. One prosecutor. A justice commission. Fifteen years of therapy. Half my life! My entire family split in two. A whole town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published. Finally. Finally. . . Now I can say out loud all the names I once could not.

Argentine writer Belén López Peiró eventually wrote these words last year, following nearly a decade of denouncing her abuser.

Belén’s first novel, Por qué volvías cada verano (Why Did You Come Back Every Summer), published five years prior to the sentencing, is an account of the abuse Belén suffered as a child and the breakdown of her family after she spoke out. It covers a number of years between the apartments and lawyers’ offices of Buenos Aires and the small town in this province where Belén spent summers with her cousins, her aunt, and her abuser—her aunt’s husband. Using mixed media, the book gossips and growls in a cacophony of voices, legal and colloquial, who question, opine, pity, doubt, support, and blame her. 

This April, Charco Press published the English translation of Belén’s novel by Maureen Shaughnessy. I caught up with the translator, who’s based in Southern Argentina, over Zoom to discuss the book. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Wilson (RW): What were your first impressions of the book and how did you feel when Charco Press asked you to translate it?

Maureen Shaughnessy (MS): In Argentina it had its moment of hype, which is how I came across it in the first place, even though it was published with a small press. It came out here during a time when the #NiUnaMenos movement was really taking off, in that context of purple and green marches with women filling the streets.

When I started reading it, it was too intense for me. Right away, in the second or third entry, she tells this really intense story, the most abusive moment in the book, the most raw. Plus there’s all these dense legal documents—there are these two extremes together.

I had read it and found it too intense to think about pitching it to editors. It was too much for me to even consider, so it was a hard place to go to, to work for so long on the book.

RW: Any translation is a huge responsibility. But given this novel is so personal, and a true account, what did you feel was your relationship to the text?

MS: During the last few drafts, I got to a point where it was already typeset and we were supposed to go to print and I read it again. I had to say, ‘No, wait, not yet. Sorry, we have to keep editing it’, because I did feel responsible for trying to translate all those voices that were swimming around in her head, all those demons she brought out onto the page. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: From “Cardboard Lovers” by Víctor Hugo Ortega

May 14, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Georgina Fooks

Falling out of love / is meeting each other six years later / in a lift / and we’re just strangers.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by the Chilean writer Víctor Hugo Ortega C. Rendered here in plain but powerful English by Georgina Fooks, the poems are striking in their restraint; the first is blunt, almost disinterested, and the second is so sparing in its references to emotion that what little appears—a look of surprise recalled on a lover’s face, a mocking word spoken long ago—is almost unbearable. The collection from which these poems are taken is in fact named for a line in the second poem: the Amantes de cartón, or Cardboard Lovers, of the final stanza—an image suggesting not only the futility of the lovers to understand each other, but of literature to capture the narrator’s loss.

The eye of Santiago

The eye of Santiago
gazes with polluted indifference
at the romance of lovers polluted
by high rates
of heartbreak.

Two thousand one hundred and ninety

I’ll see you and you won’t see me
I’ll speak to you and you won’t hear me
we’ll breathe in the same enclosed space
and maybe you won’t realise,
look where we happened to meet
you’re going to the 49th floor
me to the 45th,
50 seconds—is this how long this journey will last?
It’ll depend on if someone gets in,
although I don’t think so,
we always used to get lucky.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2024

May 13, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Danielle Pieratti and Sarah Gear

New titles from Italy and Colombia!

In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia. 

Late Montale – New York Review Books

Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor

“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,

But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.

If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.

Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:

That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.

READ MORE…

Room of Mirrors: On Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna

May 9, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Spector

It is a testament to this collection’s dizzying, wandering nature that the reader is left to consider: what if this story is true?

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman, Transit Books, 2024

Ángel Bonomini is one of those extraordinary literary figures who—despite having been lauded for his singular, masterful inventions—has somehow fallen into oblivion. In addition to being a cultural critic and prolific translator, the poems and stories published throughout Argentina in his lifetime represented a vital contribution to the nation’s phenomenon of fantastic narrative. While he remained largely unknown to international readers in his lifetime, such work earned him multiple distinguished accomplishments in his home country—including two Premio Konex awards and personal accolades from Jorge Luis Borges. In 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Bonomini passed away, and sadly, his writing seemed to disappear with him.

Now, in The Novices of Lerna, Jordan Landsman has captured the author’s wistful and pensive voice in a stirring collection of sixteen previously untranslated stories, spreading the magic to a new generation of readers. With candles melted “as if light had been slit from their veins,” theories “woven like black thread in the dead of night,” and people “like books with transparent pages where the lines don’t match up,” Bonomini glides vividly and lyrically into worlds where time warps, people live and die and live again, doppelgängers are plentiful, sentences disappear into amorphous paragraphs, and Buenos Aires isn’t quite the same urban sprawl that one might see in Argentina. While the pieces in this collection have no crossover in plot or character, some subterranean power connects them, with favored symbols and images appearing and reappearing—figs, trees, fires, death, and the landscape of the city.  READ MORE…

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 3, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large celebrate writers of children’s literature, experimental postmodern novels, and memoirs of oppression. From a celebration of a beloved poet in Mexico to a new novel by a novelist and comics scholar in North Macedonia, to a recently republished chronicle of Greece’s years under dictatorship, read on to learn more!

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

“Forgetting is a modern phenomenon that goes beyond the usual individual, medical frameworks,… because it is already an instrument for political and wide(r) scale manipulation, embedded in… almost the whole society”, writes literary critic Gligor Stojkovski in the preface to the latest novel by the author Tomislav Osmanli. Known for diving deep into the problems of history and modernity, Osmanli zeroes in on collective forgetting as a pathological social force in Zaborav (Forgetting), his fifth novel.

Osmanli (b.1956 in Bitola) is a media critic, poet, screenplay writer, dramatist, and author of multiple prose works. His first novel won the Best Macedonian Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Balkanica Literary Prize and his scholarly work, Comics: Scripture of the Human Image, was the first example of comics studies published in Yugoslavia. With a father of Macedonian and a mother of Greek descent, Osmanli grew up trilingual—speaking Macedonian and Greek, and having been taught Aromanian by his paternal uncle. His work as an independent editor and member of the editing board of his nation’s oldest daily newspaper, Nova Makedonija, from 1991 to 1998, as well as his theoretical studies in political cinema, are visible in the themes of his fiction. His scholarly interests blend with his mixed cultural heritage and find expression in Zaborav, a postmodern tapestry of lives and languages.

Told almost entirely in present tense to illustrate the loss of connection between past and present, Zaborav renders a bleak social landscape where values and freedoms previously achieved are being obscured by false spectacle and slipping into oblivion. The novel’s characters, increasingly egotistical and politically repressed, are unable to resist hypercapitalism. To capture both the fragmentation and diversity of modern society, Osmanli weaves his text from documentary citations, fictional scientific language, multilingual speech, dialects, web-addresses, footnotes, and QR codes leading to musical pieces which complete the atmosphere of the passages where they are found. The philosopher Ferid Muhić, speaking at the novel’s launch, notes that Osmanli’s “suggestive, …original…, and deeply humanistic” novel creates awareness which acts as an antidote against the “pandemic” of “collective forgetting.”

READ MORE…

Translating Humberto Ak’abal: An Interview with Michael Bazzett

May 2, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

[Humberto Ak’abal’s] poetry lives in the silences around the work, in the emptiness of the page, like the hollow of a bell.

In January 2019, Maya K’iche’ poet Humberto Ak’abal passed away, thus transcending into the eternal silence—perhaps the same silence inhabited by his seismic poems. He was sixty-six.

In life, Humberto published more than thirty books, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages—including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Arabic. He remains a towering figure for indigenous and Maya literature, as well as one of Latin America’s most beloved and inventive poets. Humberto wrote extensively about family, time, colonialism, men’s relationship with animals and nature, indigeneity, the plight of the indigenous people in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan genocide. He used onomatopoeia and cacophony to describe his surroundings, and his poems are imbued with devastating political commentary and subtle humor. Carlos Montemayor and Antonio Gamoneda admitted to being fans of Humberto’s poetry, and in 2006, he became a Guggenheim fellow.

One cannot overstate the importance, quality, originality, and poetic sensibility of Humberto Ak’abal. Though his work has been previously translated into English, a new translation shines a new light on Humberto’s devastating poems. This June, Milkweed Editions will publish If Today Were Tomorrow, a book of poems written by Humberto Ak’abal and translated by Michael Bazzett, the author of The Echo Chamber. If Today Were Tomorrow is a beautifully crafted, comprehensive, and faithful approximation and representation of Humberto’s work. I had the opportunity to interview Michael Bazzett on Humberto’s legacy, the experience working between K’iche’, Spanish, and English, and the translation of silence.

José García Escobar (JGE): In 2018, you famously put out your translation of the Maya’s creation myth, The Popol Vuh. Naturally, we find many references and similarities between The Popol Vuh and the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal. Can you describe how translating The Popol Vuh prepared you or helped you translate Humberto’s poetry? Or maybe it was the other way around. I know you’ve worked on If Today Were Tomorrow for many years.

Michael Bazzett (MB): In the opening of The Popol Vuh, when it came time for the gods to create the world, “it only took a word. / To make earth they said, ‘Earth’ / and there it was: sudden / as a cloud or mist unfolds / from the face of a mountain, / so earth was there.”

I’ve always sensed an entire theory of language swirling inside this moment—one that continues, of course, throughout the entirety of the myth—where words are energy, tethered intrinsically to what they call forth. As such, they are not imposed by humans upon the landscape, like labels or sticky notes, but instead uncovered through careful listening and observation of the world around us. If Humberto’s work is built on anything, it is careful listening and observation. One learns very quickly by reading his poems. For instance, in K’iche’, the call of a bird is synonymous with its name, including the little orange & brown plumed bird, “Ch’ik,” who hops “happily / among the fresh shoots”:

Ch’ik is her song,
Ch’ik is her name.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 26, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Kathryn Raver, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary updates from Kenya, France, and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for book launches, book fairs, and literary prizes! From a former Police Commandant’s memoir in Kenya, to a “harrowing” new release in France, to a mobile poetry reading in New York City, read on to learn more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Kenya

On Saturday, April 6, Qwani launched Qwani 02 at Alliance Française Nairobi. Qwani, founded by Keith Ang’ana, is a youth initiative meant to promote literature among young writers and readers, and whose main annual event is the book launch. The launch also featured music performances and selected readings from the works that made the second project. The one-of-a-kind anthology is multilingual and features 72 stories from some 60 enthusiastic Kenyan young writers. Ranging from short stories to essays to poetry, the included pieces demonstrated some innovative skills in storytelling and writing. The event culminated in book signings, a cake cutting, and a speech cameo by Lexa Lubanga who highlighted the recent kickoff to the fifth edition of the Kenyan Readathon.

In other news, Omar Abdi Shurie, former Commandant of Administration Police Training College in Kenya, launched his memoir Beyond the Call of Duty at the Embakasi AP Training Centre on Thursday, April 18. His book continues a Kenyan tradition of men in uniform documenting their lives and bequeathing literary history with an archive of service in the disciplined forces. With a 45-year stint in Kenya’s law enforcement, Shurie offers a rare view into matters of security for a police unit that is—to the public mind—known for its corruption and brutality. The former Commandant documents a life that exemplifies the Kenyan dream; hailing from Mandera in marginal North Eastern Kenya, Shurie ultimately rose to head the police service, working to maintain law and order by providing leadership for law enforcement. This is what Shurie’s life story personified, and what his book represents—a Kenya that is still becoming.

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

Two weeks ago, over 100,000 people flocked to Paris for the third annual Festival du Livre de Paris. The festival hosted these crowds alongside hundreds of authors from around the world for three days of industry discussion and literary celebration. In the spirit of the upcoming Summer Olympics, there was even a “Grande Dictée des Jeux,” where over 2700 “spelling athletes” competed to transcribe a series of spoken texts in exchange for a medal and free entry to the festival. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 19, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad and José García Escobar

News from India and Central America!

The future is in translation! Catch up on global literary news as our editors report on major international award winners, breakthrough publications, and exhibitions fusing poetry with visual art.

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

On April 9, Madhu Sriwastav was announced as the winner of the 2023 Muse India’s GSP Rao Translation Award for her work on Post Box 203 Nala Sopara by Chitra Mudgal, translated from the Hindi. Three other translators on the shortlist also received the jury’s commendation: Priyamvada R for her translation of Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True from the Tamil; Sridhar M and Alladi Uma for their translation of Telugu: The Best Stories of Our Times, edited by Volga; as well as Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay for his translation of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s The Puppet’s Tale from the Bengali.

In other book prize news, the jury of the 2024 JCB Prize for Indian Literature was recently announced. Chaired by writer and translator Jerry Pinto, the other members include art historian and curator Deepthi Sasidharan; filmmaker and writer Shaunak Sen; scholar and translator Tridip Suhrud; and the artist Aqui Thami. The prize is currently open for entries, with the shortlist, the longlist, and the winner announced in September, October, and November respectively. Since the prize began in 2018, five out of six winners have been books in translation, with three out of those five being originally written in Malayalam. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2024 Edition Is Here!

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

Featuring Andrey Kurkov, Michela Murgia, Katie Holten, and a spotlight on literature from the Faroe Islands

When we fall asleep, where do we go? Why, of course, to a #midnightgarden‚ filled with exciting discoveries from 32 countries, including interviews with Andrey Kurkov and Diamela Eltit, fiction by Michela Murgia and Khrystia Vengryniuk, apocalyptic drama from Honduras, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Ludovico Ariosto—specifically, of his Orlando Furioso, the bestselling book of the sixteenth century—as well as a Special Feature on Literature from the Faroe Islands, sponsored by FarLit and headlined by Kim Simonsen and Rannvá Holm Mortensen. Ahead of the 60th Venice Biennale opening this weekend, we are proud to unveil our own international showcase—illustrated with elan by Korean guest artist Joon Yoon—still the most ambitious of any literary periodical.

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Among the highlights in this edition is visual artist Katie Holten—herself a veteran of the Venice Biennale—who returns to our pages to discuss her rustling, arresting Language of Trees, a response to ecological catastrophe. Michelle Chan Schmidt reviews a similar attempt to capture new language, crisis language, when extremes brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called for A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War. Interviewing young Somali refugees for a dictionary entry, “Partire” or leave, Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah discovers how disasters—in this case, civil war and genocide—“reveal the limit of language.” In Fiction, a “great flood” forms the backdrop of Khrystia Vengryniuk’s mordantly funny but ultimately heartbreaking story about two star-crossed lovers. By contrast, LGBTQ+ rights activist Michela Murgia’s relatively uneventful piece centers a soon-to-be empty nester and the solution to her ennui that she tucks away in her wardrobe: a life-sized cutout of BTS boyband member Park Jimin.

Just this past week, the Financial Times reported that “rising nationalism and falling funding is reshaping the Venice Biennale;” at Asymptote, we find ourselves running up against the same constraints that keep the art world from fully realizing its potential (as a matter of fact, just carrying on remains a challenge because we are incorporated outside of the US and Europe, where most of literary arts funding lies). If you have benefitted from our work these past thirteen years, consider helping us grow this #midnightgarden as a sustaining or masthead member. Together, we can keep it alive.

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