News

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #5 The Hundred-Faced Actor by Edogawa Ranpo

December 26, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it . . . Was I hallucinating?

Is Edogawa Ranpo Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe or is Edgar Allan Poe America’s Edogawa Ranpo? Securing the fifth spot in our countdown of ten most-read articles in Asymptote’s pages from 2022, “The Hundred-Faced Actor” makes good on the reputation of Edogawa Ranpo–as a masterful spinner of horror stories and the father of Japanese mystery. 

If you haven’t yet read “The Hundred-Faced Actor,” translated brilliantly into the English for the first time by Lin King for our Spring 2022 issue, we invite you to step into another person’s skin in this psychological thriller, which José Garcia Escobar, Editor-at-Large for Central America, praised as “bizarre, unique, and fascinating.” Told by an older narrator to a younger audience, this discomforting tale takes us on an excursion to a banned theater featuring the titular actor of hundred likenesses—and the revelation thereafter that emerges amidst old newspapers that is tied to a slate of grave robberies. We can’t bear to give away the twists and turns, but suffice it to say that Ranpo leaves his reader intrigued and a bit queasy. Helping to peel back the layers of mystery is translator Lin King, who shared in her translator’s note: “ The ease with which Ranpo’s work can be translated across both languages and time is, I believe, a testament to the timelessness of his themes: people’s capacity for harming each other, as well as our tendency to dismiss said harm as “impossible” and “faked” when we witness it. In this sense, Ranpo’s work is perhaps more relevant today than ever.”

Here is an excerpt of the fiction:

I’d told R ahead of time that I preferred to watch from the back of the room, but for some reason he sat down in the very front row instead. When the actors came close to the edge of the stage, their faces were only about one ken apart from ours, and we could see every minute detail. But even as close as we were, we still couldn’t make out the smallest flaw in the Hundred-Faced Actor’s disguises. If he was playing a woman, he was a woman; if he was playing an old man, he was an old man—the transformation was absolute. For instance, the wrinkles: an average actor would use makeup to draw on the wrinkles; if you were to look from the side, you’d see through the illusion straight away. The sight of black ink smeared haphazardly on soft, plump cheeks is enough to make anyone chuckle. But the Hundred-Faced Actor—how did he do it?—had actual wrinkles etched into his flesh. And that wasn’t all. Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it: depending on the situation, his face would become round or long, his eyes and mouth would grow big or small, and the very shape of his nose and ears would change dramatically. Was I hallucinating? Was there some sort of secret technique that made something like this possible? To this day, my questions remain unanswered.

In all its shapes, and across myriad cultures, literature extends our notions of what’s possible and helps us conceive a better world—in short, it is a benevolent force of good in this age of divisiveness. If you are feeling generous this gift-giving season, why not support our mission to seek out and publish the very best in world literature? It only takes three minutes to sign up to become a sustaining member or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month!

READ OUR FIFTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, As Chosen by You: #6 An interview with Maureen Freely

December 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

To translate [Pamuk] was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break.

2022 was a bumper year for fascinating interviews, and one of the best of the bunch, in this humble editor’s opinion, is also our sixth most read article of the year. For our Summer issue, Assistant Interview Editor Rose Bialer sat down with acclaimed translator Maureen Freely to discuss her upbringing in Istanbul, the craft of translation, and the state of literature in Turkey today.

It takes two to make an interview really work: Bialer has a knack for perceptive questions, and Freely is lyrically articulate about her unusual upbringing. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is full of gems, such as when she talks about working with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk as the English translator of his novels. Their relationship is complex, delicate, respectful, and as Pamuk’s star rises, it grows increasingly strained. The two are “exact contemporaries” and grew up in similar parts of Istanbul, and when he writes about his childhood in the city, his memories, so different from her own, start to crowd out hers:

I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space.

If you’re curious about some of Freely’s output, read Irmak Ertuna Howison’s review of her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn from the Asymptote Blog.

And if her interview piques your interest in Turkish literature, don’t forget that our twelve-year digital archive is a veritable treasure trove of gems waiting to be discovered.

DISCOVER OUR SIXTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022 READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #7 An Interview with Emma Ramadan

December 23, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

What I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion.

We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.

For longtime followers of Asymptote, it will come as no surprise that our seventh most popular article of 2022 was Claire Mullen’s interview with Emma Ramadan from the Fall 2022 issue. An established, sensitive and sought-after translator from the French who not only interned with us way back in 2012, but also appeared in our pages throughout the years thereafter, Ramadan is the recipient of a Fulbright, NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize, and the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.

In this interview, which easily topped our internal survey of favorite articles from the issue, Ramadan shines a spotlight on the lesser known role of the translator—that of the archive researcher, as demonstrated by her work on Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

For example, she describes following a “little tingle” into the Providence Public Library where she finally discovered the elusive French manuscript of Panics that she had been looking for, to no avail, in France—no less.

This illuminating interview surely sets her apart as a translator whose practice goes beyond mere questions of language.

After reading what she has to say in our current issue, we invite you to revisit her other appearances throughout the years as well. For just a taste:

Former Blog Editor Allison Braden interviewed Emma Ramadan in October 2020 on her translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, in which Ramadan reveals “something that I do with every book, actually—is that I read out loud as I translate.”

In her September 2018 conversation with former intern Mallory Truckenmiller, Ramadan discusses her dual role as character and translator in Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, and the embodiment of the act of “Translation as erotic.” ”Getting inside the author’s psyche, recreating their words,” she says, is “incredibly intimate . . . intellectually stimulating . . . sexy.” 

If you find yourself itching for more insights into translation direct from the horse’s mouth—including the opportunity to pose direct questions to translators during the live Q&A session with the author and/or the translator of the title that we conduct each month—we invite you to join the Asymptote Book Club, for which past members have read Ramadan’s translations of Alaouai and Matthieussent alongside other cutting-edge works of world literature!

REVISIT OUR SEVENTH MOST-READ ARTICLE OF 2022

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Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #8 My Dear You by Jasna Jasna Žmak

December 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Then we both mulled over the misfortune of words and the misfortune of the Croatian language . . .

Coming in at number 8 is Samantha Farmer’s translation of Croatian writer Jasna Jasna Žmak’s My Dear You from our Winter 2022 issue. Inspired by a possibly apocryphal vignette the narrator reads in a Barthes essay, about a tribe that removes a word from its language each time a member dies, Žmak’s pair of lovers wonder what would happen if the same rule were applied to Croatian. They dive into the thought experiment with a winning balance of whimsy and seriousness, partner briskly correcting narrator’s occasional lapses of logic, until they reach a sobering conclusion: Croatian would not be long for this world, even accounting for dialects and Serbo-Croatian, even if you included slangs and nicknames and toponyms, even if you made a new word every time a baby is born. It’s a tale as old as time, an idle what if? spiraling into an anxious oh no. But such thoughts can be bracing, and so they prove here, as they prompt a very sweet reflection on the preciousness of words:

At that moment, I realized that the idea wasn’t very romantic. I realized that I wouldn’t want even a single word to disappear from the world, not even from the list of words I hate, not even superlatives.

My Dear You, in the words of Farmer, is a “breezy romance”—a happy novel about a gay couple in the Balkans. Its happiness is precious, and softly subversive, with the knotty issues that trouble queer and Balkan fiction placed in the subtext for a change. Maybe it’s more than breezy: there’s a heft to the feelings and ideas that blurs the distinction we tend to make between weighty stories and happy ones. Follow Farmer’s recommendation and read this story aloud, preferably to your own “dear you.”

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Enjoy this story? With Christmas on the way, consider a gift to world literature: become a sustaining member, and with a small monthly donation help us to seek out and publish more stories like these from around the globe! READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #9 Two Stories from Hervé Guibert

December 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In deft strokes, these brilliant short stories illuminate the tortured inner lives of an art critic and an editor

He lived off the economy of his body. After putting it deliberately to bed, he would annihilate it, as it were, when he forced himself to wake up early to write an article. And this was what displeased him: to be—just like a laborer—a producing machine, with even his body brought to heel, his sleep transformed into a positive, mechanical phase of work, a sort of battery, a rejection of sensual pleasure.

What happens when the bodily economy of writing meets the market economy of publishing? From the Summer issue, coming in at number 9, The Photography Critic and The Editor by cult author Hervé Guibert (tr. Daniel Lupo) captured the universal anguish of sacrificing your very self to fulfill the base needs of subsistence. Written in the 1980s, Guibert’s writing feels eerily timely, bringing into focus the relentless droll of capitalism, whose insidious reach extends even to such “artistic” fields as publishing. For those of us who fancy ourselves creatives, the market economy’s suppression of artistic impulses is particularly chilling, compelling the art critic of the story to write for money as opposed to for his own satisfaction.

Guibert, who was also a filmmaker, photographer, and critic, wrote prolifically in his last year, before dying at the age of thirty six from complications of AIDS. It is not surprising then that his writing is “close to the body,” as translator Daniel Lupo points out in his interview with Meghan Racklin, our Assistant Editor for Fiction, who wrote elsewhere that she is  “a fan of Hervé Guibert’s writing generally, but hadn’t encountered him in quite this mode before; the sentences are shorter, the stories more barbed and direct. It was a pleasure to see this different gradation of his work and his commentary on artistic production, the labor of writing, and the market realities that surround the creation of art seem enormously relevant to the work of writing today.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #10 The Loden Cape by Thomas Bernhard

December 19, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Sordid familial backstabbing from a modern master

As this year draws to a close, Asymptote invites you to look back at the most-read articles of the year. These are the ten pieces that resonated most with our far-flung readership, the texts you read, shared and returned to in the greatest numbers. 2022 was a year of sudden jolts, strange twists and great upheaval—qualities that each of these pieces speak to in their own ways. Superb translations and insightful interviews await!

Kicking off the list is Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loden Cape” excerpted and translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. In it, an old man tells his lawyer of a plot to defraud him of his business. The conspirators? His own son and daughter-in-law, who have taken over the running of the business and have forced him to move into the rooms above the shop floor, where he cannot interfere with their plans. The conspiracy is murky and the details emerge with difficulty, not least because Humer is a haphazard raconteur. Isolation and grievance have left him erratic, prone to wandering digressions and sudden bursts of invective. Humer’s words have been recorded with near stenographic fidelity by his lawyer, Herr Enderer—whose private, scathing impressions have themselves been inserted into the story by our unnamed narrator. A delightfully torturous mise en abime results, with Humer’s rants and Enderer’s marginalia crammed together into a mess of perspectives and voices. Sentences like the following are typical:

“Suddenly, says Humer, writes Enderer, I said: no, not onto the third floor, not onto the third. That’s final! Not into those inhuman quarters! I said, Humer says, writes Enderer, not into that dismal crawlspace.”

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The bile fairly sloshes; this is all vintage Bernhard. In his translator’s note, Charlie H. Zaharoff mentions the author’s fondness of the “nested sentence”—a pretty term that draws attention to the intricate structural joists that keep the chaos in its frames. That it all fits together is a testament to the quality of Zaharoff’s translation and it’s a pleasure to unpick the strands. Unsurprisingly, the text was a favorite among Asymptote staff as well, making a series of best-of lists for our Summer issue. Our copy-editors took particular pleasure in its knottiness. Says Liam Sprod:

“[…] his nested sentences spiral out into evermore convoluted logics and precise obsessions, until the clauses build and build to an almost unsustainable mass. It is equally alienating and difficult, but that is where there is the perversity of enjoyment.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 16, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

The latest from Bulgaria, India, and the United States!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large bring us news on literary festivals, award-winning works, and poetry open-mics in Bulgaria, India, and the United States! From discussions of disinformation and machine translation at the Sofia International Literary Festival, to a poem performed in the Metaverse, to double-Booker wins in South Asia, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Writers are powerful creatures. They think up imaginary worlds that sometimes appear more tangible than the mundane reality most of us face on a daily basis. What happens, however, when malicious groups deliberately blur the line between illusion and fact in an attempt to sway public opinion in a specific direction? How does one fight disinformation, and can literature teach us to differentiate between the plausible and the ridiculous? These are only some of the questions the 2022 edition of the Sofia International Literary Festival, held December 6–11 during the Sofia International Book Fair, endeavored to answer.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Kristina Tatarian, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

This week, our editors on the ground are watching out for multilingual poetry events, emerging Armenian writers, solidarity in language and literature, the favourite texts of Filipino readers, translation in Southeast Asia, dialogues between authors in Nairobi, and PEN/HEIM Translation Grants winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia

The beautiful auditorium of the Carfesjian Center for the Arts, located at the Cascade Complex in Yerevan, is a frequent stage for literary readings. On the night of October 8, the center hosted a performance as part of antiBabylon, a multilingual poetry event that brought together literary communities from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Germany. Organised by PANDA Platforma, an NGO from Berlin, the event took place in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as poets visited each other’s countries for joint workshops and performances to create, translate, and perform. The Project’s aim is to create a “free multilingual poetic space,” and test if poetry can answer the most burning existential questions of today’s troubled world.

On the same day, IALA’s Emerging Writers Showcase took place online. This showcase featured readings from Armenian authors championed by the organisation as mentees or winners of the Young Armenian Poet Award. By supporting emerging literary talent, the organisation adds to the global effort of Armenian artists to accelerate cultural revival in the country.

The Armenian diaspora around the world plays a crucial part of setting the cultural agenda for Armenian literature, and now, the groundbreaking collection We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, edited by Aram Mjorian, is available from University of Texas Press. The collection will feature essays from writers and poets of Armenian origin, shedding light on diverse experiences of “Armenianness” and personal perspectives on ethnicity, identity, and the sense of home. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 2, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Palestine, Sweden, and Macedonia!

In this batch of literary dispatches from around the world at Asymptote, we cover literary conferences, recent publications, and rankings of writers in translation! From a gathering dedicated to the late iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, a new Disney+ series revolving around the life of a boy in Scandinavia, and a collection of contemporary women’s poetry in Macedonia, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Last weekend, the A. M. Qattan Foundation and its partners revived the memory of the late iconic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish with more fervor than anyone has done since his death and burial in 2008. In collaboration with Chaire Mahmoud Darwich, Bozar, and Mahmoud Darwish Foundation, a three-day conference titled “Mahmoud Darwish: The Narrative of the Past and the Present,” was held in Ramallah and on Zoom, with twenty speakers discussing nearly as many topics related to the poet’s works and life. 

It was indeed a very interactive conference, as many of the speakers and a majority of the audience knew Darwish personally. With lots of biographical anecdotes shared by panellists and attendants alike, Darwish’s designation as iconic was undoubtedly attested. It felt as if every single person knew every single detail of Darwish’s works and life. I wondered how long Darwish’s ‘response’ would have been if he were to attend the conference! He probably would have needed another three days to dot the i’s and cross the t’s! But, that wouldn’t have been too troublesome for Darwish; the relationship between him and his audience had always been one of tension. People loved him, his poems, and particularly his orations and readings. But it was such an overwhelming and imposing love that he himself had to write in 1969, “Save Us from this Cruel Love!”

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Help us toward our big 5-0 this #GivingTuesday

November 29, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

A special message from our editor-in-chief

Dear reader,

Time flies. It’s almost the year-end. How was 2022 for you?

Amid new work from a staggering 75 countries across four quarterly issues, we were very proud to have shone a spotlight on Ukrainian voices this year, voices like Zenia Tompkins, Andrii Krasnyashchikh, Yaryna Chornohuz, Galina Itskovich and Sergey Katran (outraged by what we saw on the news, we also announced a #WeStandwithUkraine column on February 25, one day after the Russian invasion began). When Roe was overturned in June, we worked hard behind the scenes to center women’s experiences in the recent Fall issue.

But this year was also marked by great uncertainty. For one, inflation everywhere meant that some team members were no longer able to continue in their roles—this meant that many of us took on extra work to maintain our quality and output; we didn’t want to let our readers down.

We also had to brace ourselves for cancellations in Book Club membership when we announced our first increase in subscription fee after five years, no longer able to absorb the increases in costs (of postage, and of the titles) ourselves. And, on a more personal front—as contributors to the postponed Summer edition knew—I came down with COVID this July, with symptoms that have lingered till now. Though my health is in a better place today than, say, one month ago, nothing is assured about our future: We still don’t qualify for the generous funding that many like organizations from the US or the UK receive.

So, on #GivingTuesday, I have to ask on behalf of my entire team: If our work this past year has meant anything to you, will you take just three minutes and pledge five dollars a month to our mission?

Because we can do even more for world literature with your help. Even better, sign up as a patron or masthead member. To show our gratitude, I’ll even personally put together a care package for you.

Around the corner, our big 5-0 (in issues, not years!) looms. Help us stick around until then. Our 50th edition will be all the more magnificent for it.

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Gratefully,

Lee Yew Leong, editor-in-chief

Announcing Our Black Friday Sale!

November 25, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Calling all world lit lovers, here’s the #BlackFriday sale you’ve been waiting for!

For three days only, we’re taking 10% off Book Club subscriptions (including the one-year membership). Click here for our special coupon applied pricing and remember: A book club subscription also makes the perfect gift for the reader in your life. Offer expires after 2359 hrs, this Sunday, so hurry!

SIGN UP FOR OUR BOOK CLUB TODAY

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and MARGENTO

The latest from Romania and the Philippines!

In this week’s literary round-up, we’re bringing coverage from the myriad intrigues of world literature, from storybooks highlighting Indigenous narratives to diasporic Romanian writers, romance writing to exiled heroes. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania 

As the Romanian literary scene is gearing up for the twenty-ninth edition of Gaudeamus book fair, organized by Radio Romania in Bucharest from December 7 through the 11, the literary diaspora is both very active and a hot topic in and of itself. A one-day seminar, entitled “European Cultural Representations of Romanian Migration and Exiles” took place at the Romanian Centre, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) last week. Presentations and roundtables on highlights from the Romanian diaspora across the Western world—such as religious studies international icon and fiction writer Mircea Eliade, Romanian-Spanish comparative literature pioneer Alexandre [Alejandro] Cioranescu, and former Asymptote contributor Matéi Visniec—were complemented by excursuses into the work and lives of personalities relevant to both Romanian and Spanish literatures. Former Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, Director of the Romanian Centre and Romanian Language and Literature Lecturer, gave a talk about Alexandru Busuioceanu: a poet, art historian, and essayist credited for establishing Romanian as an academic subject at UCM back in the mid-twentieth century, after founding the UCM Romanian Centre in 1943.

Another major name of the diaspora is Paul Goma, renowned opponent of Ceaușescu’s regime and dissident fiction writer forced into exile (to Paris, France) in the late 1970s, after having survived numerous attempts on his life staged by the Romanian communist secret police or their accessories—only to die from COVID in 2020. A hot-off-the-press book dedicated to the dissident hero by historian, poet, essayist, and Goma scholar Flori Balanescu, Paul Goma: Conștiință istorică și conștiință literară [Historical Conscience, Literary Conscience], is to be launched at Gaudeamus in a week’s time, and it has already grabbed considerable attention on social media. Awarded poet and fiction writer O. Nimigean, himself a Parisian exile, commented on the text as a breakthrough release and expressed his impatience to read the sequel—an already planned book he indirectly disclosed as having insider knowledge on. Such updates can only further stir interest—if not inevitable kerfuffle—since the (albeit rare) publications about Goma expose, just as the author’s own novels did, the collaborationism under communism of certain established literati or public figures: an implication to which the latter usually retort with accusations of anti-semitism. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Cristina Pérez Díaz, and Julia Sherwood

The latest in literature from Poland, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico!

This week on Asymptote, we’re your eyes and ears for updates on award seasons, special national literature features, and postcolonial discourse and strategy. Polish literature is soaring at a high after celebrated adaptations and translations are introducing new readers to long-loved works. From Hong Kong, the national security law once again catalyses questions in its suppression of writing, even as local writers are seeing much love abroad. in Puerto Rico, writers are questioning US-backed funding and its entrapments. Read on to find out more.

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

Autumn is Poland’s award season, and this year saw the prizes go to a variety of genres. For the first time since 2009, NIKE, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, went to a book of poetry: Jerzy Jarniewicz’s “erotically daring” collection Mondo Cane. Edward Pasewicz, whose novel Pulverkopf was also shortlisted, took home the coveted Angelus Prize for literature from Central Europe—only the second Polish book to win the accolade in the award’s twelve-year history. The Readers’ Angelus Prize went to Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš for his novel Winterbergs letzte Reise, written in German and translated into Polish by Małgorzata Gralińska, and his publisher Książkowe klimaty scored another success with Bartosz Sadulski’s “literary fable and anti-historical reportage” Rzeszot, garnering the Kościelskich Prize.

Polish literature has enjoyed something of a boom in English, placing second in a recent survey conducted by The Bookseller, which is based on Nielsen BookScan data for the fifty-two weeks since April 16, 2022. The results show that in this period, translated fiction accounted for 11.4% of total fiction revenue, proving that we have moved even further from the proverbial 3%. Broken down into languages, 60% of the translations were from Japanese—unsurprising given that 99.7% of the total revenue was generated by manga. The next language, French, trailed at 6.1%, and Polish came in at third with 4.6%, beating translations from Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Norwegian. Much of this success appears to be linked to Andrzej Sapkowski’s blockbuster fantasy The Witcher, which has filled the Game of Thrones-shaped hole on Netflix; the first two volumes of the eight-part saga were translated by Danusia Stok and the remainder by David French, who went on to translate his Hussite Trilogy. Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize has also contributed to this success, as has the fact that Polish literature was the market focus at the 2017 London Book Fair.

Here’s hoping that this interest will extend to a slew of recent translations from the Polish. According to Her, “a book-length interview with the Mother of God” by Maciej Hen (recently interviewed on the Asymptote blog by fellow writer Wioletta Greg), was published by Holland House in Anna Blasiak’s translation on November 3. On the same day, Penguin Books released Anna Zaranko’s long-awaited translation of The Peasants, one of Poland’s most famous twentieth-century epics by the 1924 Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont. In What We Leave Behind: A Birdwatcher’s Dispatches from the Waste Catastrophe, translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and published by MacLehose Press on October 13, ornithologist and writer Stanisław Łubieński shows how consumer society has spun out of control, leading to the point of environmental catastrophe. Finally, Vine Editions, a new non-profit publisher based in Detroit with a focus on world literature, is about to bring out its first title, Piotr Paziński’s Bird Streets (Ptasie ulice) translated by Ursula Phillips. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2022)

November 17, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff have been busy with publications this past quarter!

Philippine Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s lyric collage is included in Our Stories To Tell (Texas: Folkways Press, 2022), an anthology of essays on mental health, out now.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, has recently contributed, jointly with Raluca Tanasescu, a chapter on “Literary Translation in Electronic Literature and Digital Humanities” to the Bloomsbury anthology Translation Beyond Translation Studies and an article on “#GraphPoem: Holisme analytique-créatif, le genre D(H) et la performance informatique subversive” to the special issue on transmediality and convergence in literature of the journal Recherches & Travaux.

An essay, “Humor in the Dark,” by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor, was published in the journal Translation Review. It explored some of the strategies Elias-Bursac used when translating Dubravka Ugresic’s counterpoint of humor and trauma in her book of essays The Age of Skin.

Incoming Visual Editor Heather Green moderated a panel on “Word + Image,” featuring translator Alta L. Price and artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Abdulrahman Naanseh at the Center for the Art of Translation’s Day of Translation conference. She also recently reviewed poetry titles by Iman Mersal (tr. Robyn Cresswell), Shuri Kido (tr. Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander), and frequent contributor Eugene Ostashevsky for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor, took part in a two-way interview with writer Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for Punctured Lines, a blog on Post-Soviet literature. The two writers discussed their respective novels, Two Big Differences and The Orchard.

In September, José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large for the Central American region, published his translation of Solito, a memoir by Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora, with Penguin En Español. READ MORE…