Translation Tuesday: Six Poems by Liesl Ujvary

September 16, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie

Yes, it’s true that we are free people. We are free people because we know that we are free people.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a trenchant sequence of six poems by Austrian poet Liesl Ujvary, translated from the German by Ann Cotten and Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie. In our current information-saturated age, the very nature of truth has become the central battleground, and Ujvary’s poems lucidly illustrate this. Each poem uses the deceptively plain language of logical exercises to dissect the mechanisms of modern discourse—where topics such as art, human relationships, and science are often filtered through the lenses of capitalism and politics. They expose how a passionately held conviction can be systematically inverted, and how the dialectical process is routinely weaponized into pure propaganda. The result is an ominous portrait of “doublethink,” where contradictory narratives coexist and simplicity masks manipulation. Entertaining yet chilling, this collection of poems distills the essence of the “fake news” era.

this is better

democracy is better than dictatorship
butter is better than margarine
schools are better than military training camps
sex is better than booze
humans are better than computers
houses are better than barracks
poems are better than advertisements
students are better than cops
truth is better than lies

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What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 12, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Carol Khoury

The latest in literary news from Nigeria and Palestine!

This week, our editors report on the literature that testifies to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, new initiatives to promote writing from the Global Majority, and exciting technological initiatives to preserve heritage and indigenous languages across Africa.

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

PEN’s spotlight on Palestinian literature is more vibrant than ever. In a recent dispatch, we featured Children of the Dew by Palestinian writer Mohammed Al-As‘ad, soon arriving in English thanks to translators maia tabet and Anaheed Al-Hardan, and the upcoming anthology Palestine – 1 (Comma Press, October 2025), which reimagines the 1948 Nakba through speculative fiction. Now, English PEN and the Booker Prize Foundation have announced the six winners of the brand-new “PEN Presents x International Booker Prize,” designed to support translators from the Global Majority. Among the winners are two Arabic-language books: the Sudanese title Ireme by Stella Gaitano, translated by Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom, and the Palestinian title Playing with Soldiers by Tariq Asrawi, translated by Anam Zafar. As both Sudan and Palestine are sites of enduring crimes against humanity (to say the least), this announcement reminds us that literature is a profound test of our shared humanity. Both works have world English rights available, promising more stories—not only devastating news—for global audiences.

While Gaza City may be facing unimaginable challenges as we read and write these lines, the people of Gaza are definitely not off the map; they’re not “there,” they’re very much “here.” They’re making their voices heard loud and clear through literature that bursts with resilience and hope. Further evidence of this exists in We Are Still Here: An Anthology of Resilience, Grief, and Unshattered Hope from Gaza’s University Students, which gathers raw, courageous stories, poems, essays, and testimonies from students now living through unimaginable trauma. Edited by Jacob Norris and Zahid Pranjol, these pieces are like snapshots of real-time courage, proving that words can be a powerful act of survival and hope. READ MORE…

Grief and Knowledge in a Dying World: A Review of Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini

September 11, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Stability and instability. Throughout Inn of the Survivors, the theme of balance comes up time and again—literally and metaphorically.

Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini, translated from the Italian by Rose Facchini, Snuggly Books, 2025

Inn of the Survivors is Italian writer Maico Morellini’s debut in the English language, a haunting and eerily familiar work from a sophisticated voice in speculative fiction, arriving in Rose Facchini’s translation. Set in a dystopian future after an unspecified climate disaster, the novella tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl’s arrival at the titular Inn of the Survivors, a haven on the Adriatic coast. Having taken off from her remote home in the mountains overlooking the Po River Valley, and following a three-year trek through Bologna, Forlì, and Cesena, she finally reaches the Inn and encounters others like her: people who have been on the run, trying to survive, living with trauma, grief, or shame. The price of staying? You must tell your story.

Lest you think my use of the second person is casual, it should be said that except for the backstory—which appears in the latter half—the novella is written entirely in the second person. While this narrative device appears often enough in English, it is far less common in Italian, with only two novels coming easily to mind: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino, and the most recent Strega Prize winner Come d’aria by Ada d’Adamo. This is likely due to the Italian third person impersonal (si + verb), which can mean anything from “you,” to the more formal-sounding “one,” to the most passive of voices. As such, choosing to write this tale in the second person was a bold and effective choice on the part of the author, with the new text sounding entirely natural (the ideal result for a work of cli-fi). Yet, thanks to specific geographic locations that are an integral part of the story and the protagonist’s desire to understand her country, it still retains a quality we can call “Italian.” READ MORE…

“Swarms touch the text where thought burns”: An Interview with Aiden Farrell on Translating The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes           

September 10, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

The text is as bodily as the body is textual, their respective functions included.

The Vitals, written by Marie de Quatrebarbes and translated from the French by Aiden Farrell, examines the chasm of loss and desire to “conjugate the moments outside of me, spent so far from you, with this distance that is ‘I see’ and you who are ‘so far from me.’” Written in lyrical, diaristic fragments that take place between July and December, the poems certify de Quatrebarbes as a master of the short prose poetry form, which she imagines as nestled matryoshka dolls. Each poem is titled with the day of the month as the speaker lives her life and thoughts intrude. “Say again, do mourners have a singular?” asks de Quatrebarbes, as she lives and re-lives: “The day of his departure–the eye simply wanted to take stock.”

Farrell’s English translation is a deft reflection of the poet’s angular and defamiliarizing experiments with syntax, discontinuity, and memory; in this interview, I spoke with him on the ongoing process of translational work, its intersections with his personal writing, and the ways in which de Quartrebarbes subverts language.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Aiden Farrell (AF): I like that you’ve framed literary translation as an act, because that’s exactly what it is, and any definition that tries to go beyond the action of translation has to be taken with a grain of salt—which is to say that translation is nothing if not a process, necessarily changing from project to project and from translator to translator.

A writing practice necessitates a reading practice; translation is both at the same time, and also not exactly, because when I’m reading to translate I’m not reading as I otherwise would, and when I’m writing my translation I’m not writing as I otherwise would, but I’m still doing both. To varying degrees, every poem I read asks me to reinvent the way I read poetry, and calls attention to my standards for reading, and then also for writing. The same goes for translating—I have to reinvent, surrender just enough of my instincts that I can be open to receiving what the original poem is giving me, but also hold on just enough that I can respond accordingly. I have to disappear so as to appear, only a second later. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “WC” by Stefan Çapaliku

September 9, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Vlora Konushevci

The chamberlain spoke gently, almost tenderly that he who seeks to enter is Otto—a servant of God, mortal and sinful like all the rest...

In this wry story by acclaimed Albanian writer Stefan Çapaliku, translated by Vlora Konushevci, a journalist arrives in Vienna on an assignment to document the funeral of Otto von Habsburg, the last heir of the storied Habsburg dynasty. But his plans are soon derailed: besieged by a persistent stomach problem, he’s forced to prioritize his bowel movements over frontline reporting. From the confines of a café bathroom, for which he already holds a peculiar affinity, he is reduced to hearing, rather than seeing, the majestic procession pass by. This undignified place winds up being the perfect setting for the narrator to meditate on what makes a life meaningful, and how to measure the worth of our accomplishments when we’re all the same flesh in the end.

1.

Morning. I open my eyes, as I’ve done countless times through the night. From the curtainless window, the view hasn’t changed: a city slowly morphing into a monster, its limbs aggressive, forged from red bricks veined with concrete and rods of iron stretching skyward. Then, almost suddenly, the sun appears, and with it, a sliver of hope seeps into my waking. The view begins to clear, shedding that initial layer of violence.

I step out onto the back balcony of my apartment to gauge the temperature of the day, confirming for what must be the hundredth time that the city is turning into one giant dormitory. It now resembles a sleeping quarter—sprawling and expanding like the hopeless belly of a morbidly obese man. The buildings, once erected in communist times, are now, in our age of liberty, multiplying in the ugliest of ways. Lumps, foolish extensions, architectural carbuncles sprouting from them…

I leave the house, find somewhere to sit, and open my office door. My office is my laptop. The door is its lid. It doesn’t matter where I am, at home, in a café, in the park, or anywhere else. I carry my office with me. I loathe all things conventional. My conventional office is in the city center, very close to home, but I hardly ever go there, even though it’s just 550 steps away.

And sure, 550 steps are nothing, but I’m lucky no one requires me to keep fixed hours. No one demands explanations. My work happens wherever I am. Every place is a suitable workplace for my profession, except the office.

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Magical Taiwan: A Literature Exhibition Bringing Myth, History, and Reimagined Futures to Osaka

September 8, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Mary Hillis

. . . a place where gods, spirits, and spectral beings coexist across layered landscapes and tradition.

From August 10 to 20, Osaka hosted “Magical Taiwan,” an exhibit featuring the breadth and deep lineages of divination, folklore, spiritualism, and the supernatural in Taiwanese literature. From genre mainstays to oral traditions to indigenous influences, the featured works and writers emphasized their unique cultural traditions, while gesturing towards an affinity and commonality with Japan’s own significant mythologies.

In Japan, the time of Obon is when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. In some regions, it is said that one’s ancestors travel between the realms on “spirit horses” fashioned from cucumbers and eggplants. This summer, however, right before the festivities, a different crop of guests crossed the threshold; from Taiwan to Japan, ghosts and gods traveled on the wings of the written word for “Magical Taiwan,” an exhibition of Taiwanese literature. The Special Room of the Osaka City Central Public Hall, with its frescos of Japanese myths and legends, provided an ideal locale for the event, which was curated by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and subtitled “The Enchanted Page: Folktales and Magical Realism in Taiwan Literature.” Time seemed to slow as people of all ages moved through the six themed areas, each a gateway to Taiwan’s literary enchantments, spanning the shimmering realm of magical realism, the chilling darkness of ghost stories, and the enduring influence of folkloric wisdom.

The exhibit began with “Indigenous Taiwan: The Inspiration Behind Myths and Magic,” in which three authors from Taiwan’s various indigenous groups showcased their works: 絕島之咒 (Curse of the Island) by Amis writer Nakao Eki, 巫旅 (Witch Way) by Puyuma author Badai, and 八代灣的神話 (The Myths of Badai Bay) by Tao/Yami writer Syaman Rapongan. Attendees could be seen paging through a copy of the latter, a collection of myths and legends important to the native people of Lanyu (Orchid Island), located to the southeast of Taiwan. Happily enough, the July 2025 issue of Asymptote features an excerpt from Rapongan’s Eyes of the Ocean (with an accompanying lesson plan in the issue’s Educator’s Guide); in it, Rapongan—who has been described as an “ocean writer”—recounts a scene from his travels to Greenland: READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 5, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Linnea Gradin, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary updates from China, Denmark, Sweden, and North Macedonia!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the globe for updates on the world’s literary scenes. From Shanghai’s lively summer book fair and three exciting new titles from the Chinese; to literacy- and readership-boosting campaigns in Sweden and Denmark; the longlist for the best North Macedonian translation prize; and this year’s Struga Poetry Evening Festival, read on to learn more.

Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for China

From August 13–19, the Shanghai Book Fair welcomed over 382,000 readers with citywide events celebrating libraries and independent bookstores. Though I wasn’t in the country, WeChat livestreams—now second nature to Chinese publishers—allowed me to tune in and discover three books I’m eager to pick up.

First, Dong Li’s Chinese translation of Victoria Chang’s poetry collection 记逝录, Obit, was launched by China Normal University Press. “My Father’s Frontal Lobe—died unpeacefully of a stroke…” reads the opening line; Chang said that it foregrounds both disintegration and the possibilities of body and language. A stroke strips the body of movement and speech, pulmonary fibrosis hardens the lung until no air enters, language strains against enormous sorrow; yet Chang writes toward that very inadequacy, seeking new articulations. Li reflected that translation is a liminal language (折中的语言). While writing strives toward the far shore, translation stands midstream, crafting a new language attuned to currents not entirely one’s own.

READ MORE…

Notes on the Erotic: German Intimacies from Cold War to Reunification

September 4, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Moumita Ghosh

[T]here existed an idea of a certain socialist morality which . . . labelled itself as more evolved in the realm of intimacy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall catalysed a monumental case of political integration in the West, heralding a necessary conciliation of disparate politics, economics, psychologies, values, and socialities. Of this time, the grand dialogues and negotiations between international governmental bodies are well-documented and enshrined in textbooks, but the stories of ordinary lives swept up in this extraordinary fusion are still in the middle of being told, processed, and understood. One of the most subtle—yet enduring—issues is the distinct views of sexuality and intimacy in the two Germanies, which reflects the greater ideological differences in both unpredictable and surprising ways. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh takes a look at two contemporary novels that feature romantic relationships under the political influence, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and Ralf Rothmann’s Fire Doesn’t Burn, illustrating how the quakes of national movements send their aftershocks into our most private spheres.

Still, there is one thing they still do that hasn’t changed: when they leave a place together, he holds out her coat, she slips into it frontwise, briefly holds him in her arms, then slips it off and puts it on the right way around. But probably, even these habits, in which they took pleasure and pride, and which confirmed their intimacy, are nothing more than a hollow-bellied Trojan horse.

—Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, winner of the International Booker Prize in 2024, sketches a tumultuous romance between Katharina, a young woman, and Hans, a married man thirty-four years her senior. Translated by Michael Hofmann and set in 80s Germany, the text intertwines the couple’s intimate narrative with national history. Hans, his childhood overcast by the Hitler Youth and his father’s Nazi sympathies, is eventually revealed to be a Stasi informant, having ‘decided in favour of that part of Germany that had Anti-Fascism written on its red banners.’ Katharina, in contrast, was born after the war and is characterised by a certain political apathy despite her youth; rather, she comes across as a citizen of the imminent reunification. When she travels to the West for an internship in Frankfurt and gets romantically involved with a colleague, this fluidity of her character becomes even more apparent. As her interactions with Vadim, her colleague, progresses slowly and spontaneously, her relationship with Hans becomes even more stifling and unnatural—and what comes across as the modern sexual mores of East Germany soon reveal themselves to have sinister tones. Intimacies begin to mirror political realities as Hans becomes more controlling with Katharina—a danger that has subtly existed since the beginning of their acquaintance. Eventually, their relationship becomes a surrogate of East Germany, where sexual liberation sat uncomfortably with repressive surveillance, while their devolving affinity also collaterally communicates the decaying of the present and the transition towards reunification.

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“An End of the World with More Movement and Fewer Screens”: An Interview with Daniel Saldaña París

September 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

[I]f there is meaning and order, it’s not individually accessible—it can only be found in love and friendship.

Daniel Saldaña París’s novel, The Dance and the Fire, recently published in Christina MacSweeney’s translation, is a sophisticated tour-de-force centering the ungovernable forces that nourish, propel, and destroy us. In it, three estranged childhood friends are reunited as wildfires close in on the city of Cuernavaca. Besieged by inexorable change and irretrievable intimacies, the trio narrates a carnivalesque Armageddon woven from dance plagues, religious fanaticism, and natural disaster. París’s cerebral, compassionate prose encompasses a vast range of lived experiences, including the domestic, the uncanny, and the beautifully flawed. 

The Dance and the Fire is a journey through the past and the present, heading into the unspeakable core of being human. As a fan of both his earlier essay collection, Planes Flying Over a Monster (also translated by MacSweeney), and this most recent work, I was thrilled to be able to speak with Saldaña París about his writing, its major themes, and inspirations in this interview.

Sofija Popovska (SP): In Planes Flying Over a Monster, you weave personal memories together with an eclectic mix of historical anecdotes. Natalia, the first narrator in The Dance and the Fire, seems to share your archival bent, and so does the father of the third narrator, Conejo. It looks like they process how they feel about where they are at the moment by engaging with stories from the past. What does this “historian’s compulsion” mean to you?

Daniel Saldaña Paris (DSP): It’s the way I experience places. I’m in New York City right now, for example, and when I walk these streets, I always remember that the first non-native inhabitant of Manhattan was a Black man from Santo Domingo who spoke Spanish and arrived with Dutch merchants. That detail reminds me how deeply my language is interwoven with this city, and it changes how I see the place. Archives are not dead tools; they’re the original augmented reality glasses.

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Guard by Maisku Myllymäki

September 2, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Tabatha Leggett

He doesn’t see himself until he takes his selfie.

What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleeping? 50 hours? 70? What about 200? In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the unnamed protagonist of Maisku Myllymäki‘s novel The Guard has been awake so long they have to write the day of the week on their hand to remember that it’s Sunday. Yet in spite of their insomnia, they remain almost hypnotically attentive: to the pilasters of columns and poorly-named green paint in the atrium of the museum where they work, to the remembered touch of their boyfriend, to the asinine behavior of museum-goers and to the strange effect of social media on personal identity. Translated into deft and subtle prose by Tabatha Leggett, this excerpt is sure to leave you eagerly awaiting a full translation of the novel. Read on!

It’s December 9, the final day of the exhibition. Tomorrow, the people in dark blue and sand grey coloured overalls will pack it all away. They’ll destroy the setting in which Peter and I first met eight months ago. They’ll wrap the artworks in paper and protective plastic sheeting and pack them into bespoke wooden chests. This is meticulous work. The art will be handled with the kind of deep tenderness very few living beings ever truly experience. Sometimes Peter touches me that way.

Once the artworks have been packed into their respective chests, they’ll be carried out of these halls. The heaviest chests will be lowered to the ground by crane. After, they’ll be sent to new halls, new exhibition spaces. They’ll traverse the sea, cross city and country borders. They’ll see things I never will. And soon, new sets of eyes will see them.

I’m sitting on a tall, black stool in the corner—the very stool on which I’ve spent countless hours sitting these past eight months and long before, supervising different artworks, different kinds of exhibition. It’s hard to remember exactly how long I’ve worked here. It’s the kind of job where nothing really gets done, no progress is made during the hours I spend in this hall. For me, a regular work day is one in which nothing extraordinary happens. In that sense, you might compare my job to that of a lifeguard.

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The 2025 Edinburgh International Book Festival: Literature of Repair

September 1, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

[T]he Festival itself . . . is a collective project, reminding us that repair is not, and will never be, a solitary act.

Since its founding in 1983, the Edinburgh International Book Festival has aspired to be more than just a stage for acclaimed writers. It has sought to celebrate and share the transformative power of writing and ideas, welcoming both global icons and new voices. Over the years, the festival has hosted figures as varied as Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Benjamin Zephaniah, alongside an ever-renewing wave of debut authors. This year, the guiding theme was “repair,” a notion that resonates powerfully in our current moment. In this dispatch, Réne Esaú Sánchez, an Editor-at-Large for Asymptote, takes us inside the festival.

Edinburgh in August is not for the faint of heart. The city thrums with competing energies: tourists packed into every corner of the Royal Mile, actors leafleting with desperate smiles, magicians performing in the middle of the crowd, and, this year, the Oasis reunion concerts adding their own heavy dose of nostalgia to the mix. This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, tucked inside the Edinburgh Futures Institute and caught between the Fringe’s relentless performances and the surging crowds, the Festival carved out a rare space for reflection amid the urban cacophony.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 29, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Ibrahim Fawzy, and José García Escobar

The latest from Egypt, Bulgaria, and Central America!

This week, our editors bring news of passed icons, emerging contemporary voices, and ongoing celebrations and commemorations of writers whose works continue to find relevance and vitality. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

With the passing of the maverick Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim on August 13, Arabic literature has lost one of its fiercest voices and most uncompromising innovators. A novelist whose life and art were inseparable, Ibrahim transformed the experience of political imprisonment and disillusionment into a new literary form—a documentary style blurring the line between fiction and archive, testimony and imagination.

With his searing debut, That Smell—a slim novel once censored for its stark account of alienation and defeat—Ibrahim was widely regarded as a writer who heralded the arrival of the so-called “Generation of the Sixties.” From there, he would move into the biting satire of The Committee, the sprawling narratives of Sharaf and Warda, and the layered social chronicles of Zaat, documenting the disappointments and contradictions of modern Egypt with unparalleled clarity. His prose was stripped down, almost forensic, yet behind its austere surface pulsed the fury of a writer determined to expose what power sought to conceal. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost

August 28, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Amidst Safe Corridor’s war, the child has become the historian, recording what adults try to forget.

“Children,” Jan Dost tells us, “grow up quickly in wars.” In his bold and unflinching Safe Corridor, the author demonstrates this brutal reality through the eyes of a young narrator caught within Syria’s civil conflict, resulting in a phantasmagorical, gripping account that not only captures the violent facts, but also the mind’s attempts to accept them. As Dost moves seamlessly between the surreal, the absurd, the tragic, and the enraging, the novel engages with the true consequences and aftermaths of loss: who—or what—one becomes after surviving the unthinkable.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DarArab, 2025

“On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down.” With this devastatingly surreal image, Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor—gracefully translated by Marilyn Booth—immerses its readers in a scene that brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A Syrian-Kurdish writer-translator based in Germany, Dost is one of Syria’s most important living authors with sixteen novels to his name, most of which center the realities and consequences of his home nation’s civil war. Safe Corridor, originally published in Arabic in 2019 as Mamar Āmin, entrusts this testimony of a devastated country to a voice least equipped—and yet most fated—to bear it. Told through a fragile, furious, and often surreal narration, the novel captures how war is not only fought on battlefields but also inscribed upon the bodies and imaginations of children. As the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish puts it in his poem “The War Will End”:

I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.

Roland Gary, in his introduction to Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, states that the Czech writer’s work “belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century . . . because his sense of man’s fate is deeply bound up with the atrocities and nightmares of the age.” Similar atrocities have persisted into our own century, ensuring that Kafka’s worlds remain an enduring source of inspiration for many writers worldwide—especially Arab novelists. They are the worlds of the absurd, marked by estrangement and fear, wherein one is perpetually hounded by unseen forces they cannot name, condemned to live within utter futility. READ MORE…