Catch up with the latest from our very international staff!
Curious about what our team has been up to in 2019? Read about our staff’s many achievements in the new year, including publications, art exhibitions, and reviews.
Writers on Writers Editor Ah-reum Han received a distinguished mention in The Best American Short Stories 2018 for a story of hers originally published in StoryQuarterly.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow’s latest book, Appetites, was reviewed on The Blunt Post by Linda Rijel.
The Christmas season can be oppressive in everything from familial expectation to brow-beating advertising to relentless good cheer.
For many of us, Christmas is a time for gathering with family, giving gifts, and singing carols. For others, however, the holiday isn’t a snowy Love Actually postcard scene; in some parts of the world, it features tropical weather and end-of-year department store sales, while in others, it’s a just a regular day. You’ve read the blog’s Summer Ennui reading recommendations, and now we’re back with a list of our favorite Christmastime reads from Assistant Managing Editor Rachael Pennington, Communications Manager Alexander Dickow, and Editors-at-Large Alice Inggs and Barbara Halla.
Alice Inggs, Editor-at-Large for South Africa
Picture this: it’s December 25 in South Africa and there is drought somewhere in the country. Farmers pray for rain, sink boreholes, shoot dying sheep. The acacia in the bushveld to the north is bone-white and the grass invites fire. The heat is a white heat and cattle bones glare in the sun. The paint on Father Christmas statues outside shopping centres begins to melt and pine cuttings out of water droop. Tempers crackle and flare. The roads are too busy and the accident death toll climbs. White-robed umnazaretha worshipping in the open veld stand out against the brown-grey earth. It is hot and bleak and houses are full because all the family came to visit.
“It is a dry, white season” begins South African Black Consciousness writer Mongane Wally Serote’s poem “For Don M. — Banned.” It was written in the early 1970s for Don Mattera, a Xhosa-Italian poet and friend of Serote’s who had been banned by the apartheid government. The first line of Serote’s poem was later borrowed by Afrikaner André Brink for his 1979 novel ’n Droë Wit Seisoen (A Dry White Season). The book was banned too, as well as a subsequent film adaptation starring Zakes Mokae and Donald Sutherland. It’s been two and a half decades since those laws were repealed and the cultural whitewash acknowledged, but that line—“It is a dry, white season”—still echoes through summer in South Africa, the season in which Christmas falls; a reminder of the oppressive atmosphere that back then was not limited to the months when the temperature climbed.
See how the unstoppable Asymptote crew is finishing up 2018!
As the year draws to a close, Asymptote staff members have been as busy as ever. Here is a selection of what our colleagues have been up to, from reviews written, to panels spoken on, and new blogs too.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow contributed a review, “Mystery and Surprise: Two Chinese Poets,” and translations of Swiss poet and photographer Gustave Roud, to the 88th edition of Plume.
Senior Editor (Chinese) Chenxin Jiang discussed the political power of literary translation as part of a conference at the Centre d’études de la traduction at Paris VII.
Romania & Moldova Editor-at-Large Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO jointly (along with Raluca Tanasescu) contributed a book chapter entitled “Translator networks of networks in digital space: The case of Asymptote Journal” to the hot-off-the-press Complexity Thinking in Translation Studies from Routledge (eds. Kobus Marais & Reine Meylaerts).
Delve into the latest literary news from our ever-industrious Asymptote crew!
Apart from working hard on the Fall 2018 Issue, Asymptote staff have also been busy making waves in the literary world. Join us in celebrating their achievements!
Poetry Editor Aditi Machado published a chapbook, Prologue Emporium, with Garden-Door Press. She also discussed her editorial work at Asymptote and her translation of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia with the Wash U Translators Collective.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow reviewed From the Files of the Immanent Foundation by Norman Finkelstein for Rain Taxi.
Happy International Translation Day—Enter Our Raffle To Win $200 In Prizes!
This September, we interrupted our usual blog programming to celebrate Asymptote’s 30 issues since our debut in January 2011 and draw awareness to National Translation Month while we are at it! Whether you discovered Asymptote early on or just recently, we invite you to join us as we retrace the steps that brought us here. Beginning with the inaugural Winter 2011 issue, we will work our way chronologically through the archive, weighing in both as editors, shedding new light on how our editions are assembled, and as readers, drawing connections within each issue. Finally, don’t forget that you too can play a part in catalysing the transmission of world literature: share this #30issues30days showcase (and the actual issues themselves) far and wide!
—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief
Revisit every issue before reading about our 30th issue below:
That viewer is me, is you, is us: readers of Asymptote, a journal offering the freedom of infinite interpretations.
Thanks to the hard work of Duncan Lewis, Jacob Silkstone, József Szabo, Marina Sofia, Emma Page, Kyrstin Rodriguez, Giorgos Kassiteridis, Tiffany Tsao, Alexander Dickow, and myself, November 2017 sees the launch of the Asymptote Book Club, a sustainability initiative meant to support independent publishers of world literature while also helping Asymptote stay afloat. By January 2018, after an intensive marketing campaign (e.g., I answer some questions about the Book Club here), we succeed in attracting more than 120 subscribers. In addition, our seventh anniversary is greeted by two important milestones, both to do with the number 100: We cross the 100 mark for number of team members on our masthead, and, with the addition of Amharic and Montenegrin in the Winter 2018 edition, we have gathered work from exactly 100 languages in our archive of world literature! In his interview with Asymptote that we ran in this issue, Lithuanian editor Marius Burokas laments that, as with many peripheral literatures, Lithuanian writing “can only speak of a one-way influence” from English at the moment; that said, Lithuanian literature is by no means a “small [one].” “There are only writers who are not good enough,” he observes wryly, “or writers who are not publicized enough.” This speaks to the very heart of Asymptote’s mission, which is why we have whole teams (from social media to graphic design) set up for the purpose of marketing the work that we’ve been entrusted with, as detailed in an earlier post where I released this publicity report. Where we direct our efforts applies to where we direct our funds as well: For instance, by January 2018, the money we’ve cumulatively thrown at Facebook promotion alone has exceeded $10,000 USD. It’s not only money that I’ve staked personally; in our eight years, I’ve supported almost every single Facebook post in order to encourage other team members as well as our own readers to engage with Asymptote’s feed, all so that we can be a more powerful advocate for so-called “small literatures.” Cruelly, then, around this time, because of the backlash from Russian interference of the 2016 US elections, Facebook deprioritizes social media pages like ours, hurting our ability to connect authors with new readers. I know because I was still supervising the new English Social Media Managers (as well as the Assistant Director of Outreach—whose day job was in social media analytics—I was hoping to install as a permanent team member) from the hospital ward where I was quarantined after radioactive treatment, anxious as much about our falling social media engagement as my own Geiger counter reading (which on the other hand refused to fall as quickly as the doctor and I had hoped, thereby prolonging my hospitalization and resulting in a larger medical bill). Here to introduce the Winter 2018 issue is Brazil editor-at-large Lara Norgaard.
Two parallel snapshots of everyday scenes spliced by double-circle frames form the cover image of Asymptote’s Winter 2018 issue. A woman calmly pushes a stroller on the left, mirroring a different woman on the right who wears dark sunglasses and stares directly into the camera, allowing us to only guess at her penetrating gaze. In these cover photographs, the edition’s guest artist, Elephnt, captures one of its central components: the way each contribution takes a powerful approach to perspective. The authors in this issue all write with a particular and intense gaze that confronts or perhaps commiserates with the reader.
I decided to look back at the woman on the right as I prepared to write this reflection. It is not just her staring back at me that catches my eye; she seems to recognize the camera, to acknowledge how the image representing her was created. The Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote was my first as part of the magazine’s team. I witnessed—and participated in—the compilation of so many voices into one unified whole. READ MORE…
Living now under the shadow of Trump, the contents of the issue seem even more desperately near to us.
It takes a while for the blog to hit its stride. Editing to a quarterly schedule is different than editing to a daily one, we quickly discover. It does not help that both ‘founding’ blog editors jump ship within three months (Nick’s elegiac last post goes up on 30 October; Zack’s 31 December). Fortunately, the rest rally and get us through. (One bright spot from that time is Patty Nash’s breezy roundups—a breath of fresh air.) Five weeks after it inaugurates, Aditi Machado’s post on the blog gets picked up by Poetry’s Harriet Blog, joining mentions in BBC Culture and The Guardian. The Guardian article gives a nod to Asymptote’s first-ever London event in January 2014, also the first of many multi-continental events in honor of our 3rd anniversary. These go on to include panels and readings in New York, Zagreb, Boston, Philadelphia, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sydney over the next three months. A point of pride: determined to organize an event in Asia, I somehow manage to pull off a reading without a single team member on the ground, thanks to NYU Shanghai, contributors Eleanor Goodman and Eun Joo Kim, and a friend who happens to pass through. In New York, under real threat of snowpocalypse, Asymptote supporters Eliot Weinberger, Robyn Creswell, Idra Novey, Jeffrey Yang, and Daniella Gitlin all show up to our anniversary event at Housing Works emceed by then Assistant Managing Editor, Eric M. B. Becker, to read alongside Cory Tamler, first prize-winner of our inaugural Close Approximations translation contest (as written up in WWB Daily’s dispatch here). Here to get you excited for the Winter 2014 issue (featuring, among others, a translator’s note that I got J. M. Coetzee to write) is Alexander Dickow, runner-up to that very contest and Asymptote Communications Manager since April 2017. But, first, check out Winter 2014’s issue trailer—probably our best ever—by then Video Producer Sarah Chan.
I knew of Asymptote since its inception in 2011, but it was only in January 2014 that I was named runner-up in the first edition of Asymptote’s Close Approximations translation contest. That contest has had a lasting impact on my work: I later won a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant to finish translating Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, which was first showcased in Asymptote and is now under consideration by a major publisher. Evoking the Winter 2014 issue of Asymptote, then, cannot not be a little about my own relationship to Asymptote, even though I was an eager young rookie among the issue’s giants— J. M. Coetzee, Jana Beňová, and Michael Hofmann, to name a few. READ MORE…
Keep up with our staff's impressive literary news as the summer comes to a close!
As we celebrate Asymptote‘s 30 issues in September, join us in congratulating our team members who also kept themselves busy with spreading our love of translation and literature. Take a look at this list and see where else we are bringing you the latest and the best of the literary world.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow has released a new collection of poetry, Appetites, with MadHat Press.
Drama Editor Caridad Svich received the 2018 Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from ATHE (Association of Theatre in Higher Education), and she has also been awarded a Tanne Foundation Award.
Assistant Interviews Editor Claire Jacobson had her translation of a short story by Mortada Gzar published by Words Without Borders.
Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac will participate in the Boston Translators Group’s (aka Dolet’s) International Translation Day/Month on 27 September at Cambridge Public Library.
Fresh from working on the fabulous Summer 2018 issue of Asymptote, our team members have been busy with their own creative endeavors. Read on to find out what we have been writing, doing, and learning!
Contributing Editor Aamer Hussein recently judged the McKitterick Prize. The prize, which honors the first novel by a writer over the age of forty, went to Nigerian writer Anietie Isong for his debut novel, Radio Sunrise.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow has had quite a summer: other than publishing poetry in Place de La Sorbonne, he also recently wrote for Paragraph and Plume (which also ran his translations of Max Jacob’s poetry). His work also appeared in La Revue des Sciences Humaines, Littérature, and larevue*.
Touch base with our industrious team's literary achievements as we approach the halfway mark of 2018!
We have such an amazing group of creative people over here at Asymptote. Check out some of our recent news and stay tuned for more of the international literature you love!
Poetry Editor Aditi Machado’s book of poetry, Some Beheadings, has been awarded The Believer Poetry Award.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow has published an article in French on the creative imagination in Apollinaire’s Méditations esthétiques in Littérature’s 190th edition.
Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO delivered a computational poetry paper at a major Artificial Intelligence conference, presented a Digital Humanities paper at Congress2018, and has flown to Europe to launch a computationally assembled poetry anthology.
Stay up-to-date with the literary accomplishments of the wonderful Asymptote team!
Contributing Editor Aamer Hussein participated in the Sixth Annual Lahore Literary Festival on 24 February, 2018 at the Alhamra Arts Center.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow won a PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos.
Drama Editor Caridad Svich published an article entitled Six Hundred and Ninety-Two Million: On Art, Ethics, and Activism on HowlRound. Her play, An Acorn, recently opened at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island.
Poetry Editor Aditi Machado has created a teaching guide for her recent book of poetry, Some Beheadings (Nightboat Books, 2017). She was also interviewed by Chicago Review of Books about the translatability of poetry.
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow released a short monograph in French on Max Jacob called Jacob et le cinéma (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Jean-Michel Place, 2017).
Guest Artist Liaison Berny Tan’s first solo exhibition, ‘Thought Lines’, opened last month. She also currently has work displayed in an exhibition called ‘Journeys with “The Waste Land”’ at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK.
A behind-the-scenes scoop on what our team members have been up to!
Communications Manager Alexander Dickow translated Guillaume Apollinaire’s celebrated “Song of the Unrequited Lover” for the Spring 2017 issue of Metamorphoses.
Assistant Blog Editor Aurvi Sharma was awarded the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Nonfiction Literature.
Drama Editor Caridad Svich’s play Iphigenia Crash Land Falls On the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart was performed on 30 July at Bread and Roses Theatre in South London and by London-based company Clumsy Bodies from 4 to 12 August at theSpace on Niddry Street in conjunction with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Her essay, “Riding Uphill on a Red Bike,” based on her play Red Bike, is featured as the closing reflection on the making of the Stages of Resistance series.
Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova MARGENTO a.k.a. Chris Tanasescu will be presenting with his team a paper titled “Access(ed) Poetry. The Graph Poem Project and the Place of Poetry in Digital Humanities” at the 2017 Digital Humanities Conference in Montreal. Chris also recently presented a paper on automated metaphor detection in poetry at the Association for Computational Linguistic Conference in Vancouver.
Criticism Editor Ellen Jones was awarded one of the 2017 ALTA Travel Fellowships to attend this year’s conference in Minneapolis. She, like Social Media Manager Thea Hawlin, has written an essay for the upcoming anthology “The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online,” published by OR Books.
Contributing Editor Howard Goldblatt has published an essay in Korean Literature Now discussing the issue of translating fiction and creating fiction as two distinct literary genres.
Editor-at-Large for Indonesia Norman Erikson Pasaribu is showcased as an emerging Indonesian writer in Kill Your Darlings, a cultural magazine based in Melbourne, in partnership with the upcoming Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) in Bali.
Social Media Manager Thea Hawlin wrote about the rise of female literary magazines for LitHub and reviewed a response to George Eliot’s ‘Silly Women Novelists’ for the Times Literary Supplement. She also published essays on Italian director Antonioni’s first color film and the designer Salvatore Ferragamo in AnOther magazine. It’s also her birthday today so please joining us in wishing her a very happy birthday!
Editors-at-Large for Singapore Theophilus Kwek and Tse Hao Guang have launched UnFree Verse, an anthology of formal verse from Singapore, co-edited with poet Joshua Ip. Theophilus was also featured last week in an episode of the new BBC4 series ‘Mother Tongue’, which focuses on poetry in translation.
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Read more dispatches from around the world:
Translating neologism resembles a tiny model of the whole process of translation
The Horde of Counterwind, written by the French writer Alain Damasio, takes place in a world of violent winds where a band of hardened, élite travelers make their arduous way toward the Upper Reaches, from where the winds are said to originate. Translating the thickly packed, virtuosic prose of this singular Science Fiction/Fantasy epic is a bit like having to join the Horde to battle against the winds. Skeptical readers have declared the Horde untranslatable, filled to the brim as it is with wordplay and even a long jeu-parti, or poetic duel, between the improvising troubadour Caracole and his ultraformalist counterpart, Seleme the Stylite. The poetic duel involves palindromes, among other enormous challenges to the translator. Translation, through the Horde of Counterwind, becomes a test of vigor and endurance for both writer and translator, who must faire bloc—become a single vital force—before the shattering gale of language.
Yet the Horde’s translator ultimately spends a great deal more time working on single words than on entire passages. The most difficult task facing the translator of the Horde, and indeed of many works of so-called speculative fiction, lies in the proper rendering of the novel’s innumerable neologisms. Within the first page, the Horde’s translator is called upon to translate the word furvent, a term denoting one of the most violent forms of the wind. After several hours of live discussion by Skype, and after brainstorming literally dozens of possible alternatives, Damasio and I settled on the term threshgale. Furvent derives in large part from the word furieux (furious), and the French word for wind (vent), whereas the neologism retains neither component, preferring winnowing and thrashing to fury, and the storm or gale in place of the mere wind.