What’s New in Translation: August 2024

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

New work from Mexico and Martinique!

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

9781646222315

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

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

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

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

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 9, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Greece!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on recent publications and annual book fairs! From a discussion on ‘cancelling’ and its real-world parallels to the genocide of Palestinians, to the passing of a beloved Greek poet, read on to learn more.

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

Has ‘cancelling’ subsided lately? Surely not for the Palestinians. Sadly, these times might even be the worst for them, to the extent that the ICJ is considering whether they are being subjected to genocide, i.e., literally a cancelling, an erasure! But when it comes to literature, this concept of cancelling, of erasing, often serves as a lens to examine social dynamics, power structures, and questions of identity.

This is the case of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem. Originally published in North America by Syracuse University Press some five years ago, a revised and updated English translation (by the original translator Sinan Antoon) is appearing this month by And Other Stories.

Using magical realism to shed light on real-world tensions and human experiences in Israel and Palestine, this book is a thought-provoking novel that explores those complexities through a unique premise. The story imagines a scenario where all Palestinians suddenly vanish overnight. Azem skillfully uses this surreal concept to examine issues of identity, memory, and power dynamics in the region. The narrative alternates between the perspective of Alaa, a young Palestinian man, and the reactions of Israeli society to the mysterious disappearance.

READ MORE…

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

August 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Miranda Mazariegos

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

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

August 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Conner

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

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Baby Shower” by Isaura Contreras

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Discrete Acts of Love and Protest: On Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous

August 5, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

In Roy Chowdhury’s writing, one finds many mysteries and thoughtful riddles.

Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions by Bibhas Roy Chowdhury, translated from Bengali by Kiriti Sengupta, Hawakal Publishers, 2024

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes: “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” According to Bloom’s theory, the authentic poet stands in relation to poets of the past, and this relationship to tradition is a creative force, which Bloom calls “misprision.” In the instance of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous: Reincarnated Expressions, the traditional poet is Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. 

Both Roy Chowdhury and Tagore suffered from the Partition of Bengal by the British; in 1905, Tagore used Raksha Bandhan to unite Hindus and Muslims against the Partition, whereas Roy Chowdhury’s family lost their wealth, and upon the later division of Bangladesh in 1947, became refugees and common laborers. Throughout many of these poems, translated by Kiriti Sengupta, Roy Chowdhury laments this predicament, coalescing the historic developments with his father’s death. “True and False for My Father” reads:

I’ll say
(if I’m honest):
after my father’s demise
I found myself duty-bound
in the crematorium—
not from being his eldest son,
like an event manager, rather.

I didn’t perform his last rites.
I followed no ritual
nor did I take part in the funeral.

Someone remarked:
You are indeed
an ideal communist.

READ MORE…

Building a home for world literature in Lisbon

August 3, 2024  |  in News  |  by Samuel Miller

Lovers of brick-and-mortar bookshops, you’ll want to visit this new home for world literature next time you're in Lisbon!

Regular Asymptote readers will no doubt be familiar with the difficulties involved in sourcing the translated literature we all love. Thanks to small print runs, limited editions, and the vagaries of the publishing industry, it can be all but impossible to find certain books if you don’t live in their country of publication. Since moving to Portugal 6 years ago, I’ve really struggled to get my hands on books in English, and it’s a feeling shared by many who live here. 

Lisbon and Porto have some wonderful bookshops, including Bertrand, the oldest in Europe, and Lello, often called the most beautiful bookstore in the world. But the selection of literature available in English is very small, typically the same few mass-market paperbacks and classics; and after Brexit, it became very difficult to even order English books through the mail.

Over the past few years, Portugal has also become home to a cosmopolitan mix of tourists, expats, immigrants, and refugees, with English becoming a lingua franca. And so, as the need arose, we assembled a like-minded team and got to work.

We designed Good Company to be a true home for curious readers, and our dream bookshop. Every book is chosen by our team to create a selection that represents our interests, tastes, and reading experience. And we are always available to give personal recommendations, or special order anything you can’t find in our regular catalog.

Screenshot 2024-08-03 at 10.07.23 PM

With Good Company, we also wanted to bring the bookstore-as-a-third-space concept to Lisbon, creating a place for everyone to gather and meet, whether they are buying a book or not. Located in the elegant Avenidas Novas neighborhood, we’re building a community space full of beautiful books, comfy seating, great coffee, and event space that’s open for all to use. Every part of the bookstore was considered, and we have worked entirely with local artists and materials in its construction.

Even the design of the website was important. Having a beautiful and well-stocked online bookstore was always a priority for us, as we know how difficult it is to access independent literature and other English books in Europe, and how unpleasant most corporate sites can be.

We’ve tried to bring some of that bookstore magic to your screen. We hope you enjoy the little details, like how each book’s page is color-matched to better display the cover art, or our curated booklists, which range from our team’s personal favorites to recent prize winners, to highlighting the best Lusophone authors in translation. We’ve launched with over 3200 books in our catalog, and are adding more each week. 

Our online bookstore is live and currently shipping across Europe, and our physical store will be opening later this summer. Visit our website, browse our catalog, and if there’s any specific you’d like to order or you need a recommendation, just get in touch; we’d love to hear from you!

This is a sponsored post.

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scratched knees, pickled vegetables, and (un)belonging: A Conversation with Elina Katrin

August 1, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

The most honest way translation has shaped my work as a poet is through incompleteness.

 Published by Newfound in October 2023, Elina Katrin’s debut poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice renders the (un)belonging of immigration, the fluidity of the cross-cultural self, and the sensory core of memories in a vulnerable, mesh-like voice woven from three languages, emojis, and blank spaces. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian mother and a Syrian father, and currently living in Southern California, Katrin is profoundly aware of how living between cultures and languages both enriches and destabilizes the subject: in her work, multilingualism multiplies meaning, yet makes the mother tongue something which can be gradually forgotten, mixed with other languages, or, suddenly, spoken with an accent—somehow less authentically than before. Katrin’s poems—previously featured in Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, and Nimrod, among others—move across Syria, Russia, and the United States, recounting wounds both old and new, the love and pain of familial bonds, and moments of exhilarating rebellion and excruciating self-scrutiny. In this interview, I spoke with Elina about her experiences with immigration, her poetic techniques, food (and, more broadly, the sensory) as a medium for memories, translation, and her “personal English.”  

Sofija Popovska (SP): Congratulations on your debut chapbook! It’s definitely one of those rare books that make reading them for the first time feel like a homecoming. Can you tell me a little about how it came to be?

Elina Katrin (EK): Thank you so much. The chapbook originally started as a full-length book, or rather, my MFA thesis. Though I technically graduated with a complete manuscript, I quickly realized that the full-length needed more work. However, many poems in my thesis felt done and interconnected, so I decided to put them together into a chapbook. When I started treating If My House Has a Voice as its own separate project, I included the title poem into the manuscript—the only one from the chapbook that I wrote before graduate school. As this project was coming together, I was thinking about the curiosities and complexities of language—its beauty, pliability, and failures. Language is what ultimately connects us, it’s the center of any relationship, no matter what shape or lack thereof that language takes. I wanted to explore that in If My House Has a Voice, so I’m delighted to hear this chapbook reads like a homecoming.

SP: One of the first things that struck me was how memory was mediated through the body in your poems: a scratched knee becomes the point where love and hurt, control and rebellion converge, and biting into pickled vegetables suggests bottled-up fears and frustrations. What inspired you to choose touch, smell, and taste as privileged modes of perception/ expression?

EK: It’s no secret that most of our memories are attached to sensory details. Songs remind us of certain people, and scents transport us back to different periods of our lives. When thinking of Syria or Russia, my life in those countries came back to me through scratched knees and pickled vegetables—little fragments of time and space that reminded me what it felt like to occupy the body of a girl or a teenager. I wanted to document, archive those memories on the page exactly as I experienced them. For this reason, many images rooted in touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound work on different levels—the literal one that describes the physical experience, and the emotional one that allows us to look into how the speaker was feeling or what she was thinking about during any sensory experience. This layering of perception hopefully gives readers the opportunity to fully be there with the speaker, experiencing moments in her life they might otherwise have no way of accessing. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada

July 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Xiao Yue Shan

Tawada’s music-prose is a testament to the spirit of collaboration. . .

Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, presents us with the anatomy of a mind consumed by passion for a dead poet’s oeuvre. Ostensibly narrating the tale of a literary scholar mired in pandemic-era depression, the text expands into a reflection on various forms of friendship—and, one might venture, redemption—that might inhere between readers. At the same time, Tawada deftly traverses voice and perspective to meditate on language as pastiche, ventriloquizing another’s words within the space of one’s own consciousness. With this mysterious work, the German-Japanese author furthers her interest in questions of alienation and affinity across interpersonal, cultural, and temporal realms—polyvocal inheritances that are evocatively staged in Susan Bernofsky’s layered translation from the German. To enact and pay tribute to Tawada’s dialogic style through the spirit of collaboration, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan and Assistant Managing Editor Alex Tan decided—for the first time in the Asymptote Book Club’s history—to co-write this following review.

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. 

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions (US) and Dialogue Books (UK), 2024

Paul Celan’s is a poetry riddled with hiatus and dislocation. Words are condensed into weighty German compounds or displaced into shreds, as if in a dream; adverbs are turned into nouns, and pronouns and prefixes are broken off, left stranded on the blank page. In the shadow of the Holocaust, his language concurrently reached for and estranged the singularity of experience, resulting in a body of work that yearns for nothing so much as silence—for that which writing itself would annul: something “absolutely untouched by language,” in philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase. Poetry, as gesture, becomes nothing but the contour of an intention to speak, against which presence is felt only as a silhouette.

For the writer Yoko Tawada, Celan’s poems are less storehouses than “openings,” thresholds onto the inexpressible. What she gravitates toward, in the compact verse, is everything that resists and goes beyond the flatly nationalistic, the “typically German.” In her own literary production, she toggles adroitly between German and Japanese, writing across the two; her earlier novel The Naked Eye, for instance, was originally composed in both languages. Not only does Tawada seek unanticipated constellations of affinity with the foreign, she also refutes the common instinct to read literary texts for ethnographic value, consistently underscoring the mutability of selfhood, its unfixed boundaries.

Her latest novel, the pandemic-inflected Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, draws on the surrealist toolbox to sketch a solipsistic, obsessive mind haunted by Celan’s turns of phrase, floating through the ghostly streets of Berlin. Imprisoned in alienation and “intermission-loneliness,” he is known to us initially as “the patient,” his identity tethered to an unspecified malady. His name Patrik arrives almost as an afterthought several pages in, amid scrambled reflections on the pronouns with which he designates himself in his interior soliloquies. In his vacillations between the first person and third person, he is perhaps heart-sick, struggling to survive and bear with the burden of himself: “Opening hurts. Closing brings comfort.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Luciana Jazmín Coronado

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

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

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

The Beginnning

I.
I was born.

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

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

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

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

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

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

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

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

The Making of Rude Girl

July 27, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Priscilla Layne’s story, Birgit Weyhe’s graphic novel, an unexpected collaboration – and an English translation

Imagine translating a book based on your own life… That’s exactly what Priscilla Layne did with Birgit Weyhe’s German graphic novel Rude Girl, published in English by V&Q Books.

 Faced with accusations of cultural appropriation for her comics depicting Black characters’ stories, Weyhe was looking for a new approach when she met Priscilla Layne. A Chapel Hill professor of German and African Diaspora Studies, Layne grew up in Chicago with Bajan and Jamaican parents and learned German after watching Indiana Jones as a child – that’s what she’d need to fight Nazis, after all. Later, a fascination with Kafka and May Ayim fueled that enthusiasm even more.

 This time around, the author and her subject collaborated closely. First Priscilla told her life story, then Birgit drew a chapter and sent it to her. Priscilla gave feedback – “not using skin color in the drawings implies a ‘post-racial’ society; I prefer it when you combine two colors, like in your earlier comics,” for instance – and Birgit picked that up and adapted the way she worked as she went along. Each chapter is followed by a separate section detailing Priscilla’s comments and explanations.

 The book came out in German in 2022 and was promptly shortlisted for the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize – the first graphic novel ever to be nominated. Berlin-based imprint V&Q Books had previously published Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes, a comic about Mozambican contract workers in the GDR. And publisher Katy Derbyshire not only shares Priscilla Layne’s love of German literature… they’re also both big fans of punk, ska and reggae. In fact, their paths presumably crossed at gigs in Berlin during Priscilla’s time as an exchange student there. It’s the rude girl culture of the title that provided her with a sense of community among anti-racist skinheads, and the book features great stylized drawings of album covers that shaped her life at various stages – something Derbyshire very much related to.

 So it was a no-brainer to publish Rude Girl in English, and it was clear who’d have to translate it. Priscilla Layne had previously worked on writing by Feridun Zaimoglu and Olivia Wenzel, but Rude Girl posed new challenges. As she writes in her translator’s note, “having your life displayed on the page requires a degree of vulnerability.” The graphic novel explores personal and political hurdles she has faced and doesn’t shy away from depictions of difficult experiences, though they’re not always literal; Birgit Weyhe has a special gift for apt metaphors in illustration form.

In the end, the book is a beacon for a great many readers. As Priscilla Layne writes: “If you are a Black nerd, any other nerd of Color, or even just a femme-identifying nerd, you don’t necessarily see any (positive) representation of yourself. I’m glad Rude Girl is helping to contribute to these representations and that it is now available in English.”

Find out more about Rude Girl here.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

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

The latest literary news from Mexico and Canada!

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

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

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

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