Place: Mexico

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from Galápagos by Malva Flores

November 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by J Buentello Benavides

The sea is also a cemetery: that lukewarm hammock we dream of

This Translation Tuesday, sail to the Galápagos with the poetry of the Mexican poet, Malva Flores, winner of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize in 1999. In five elusive and potent fragments, Flores fires up the islands of imagination that make up the tropical locale’s “intoxication”. On this Archipelago, a fascinating intertextuality is weaved throughout as we encounter literary figures from Victor Hugo to Salvador Elizondo. These poems, rendered in J Buentello Benavides’s marvellous translation, shine through with an allusive power that can only be described as “an excess of sun”. 

Terraces 

You must always climb. That is banishment,
a slope, even if it’s in the desert.
María Zambrano 

Lose a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump; stay standing on the terrace. Yes. Like that. Alone on the terrace, among hanging clothes like bloodless bodies and all the old things from which you detach because you don’t want to see what happened, but you save them, you stick them in chests, in boxes, even in plastic bags. You save them. 

What happened became simple. You were wrong. You lost a foot, the floor, the rhythm of a jump and you came to a stop on this island suspended in the whitest blue of a brilliant afternoon: this eternal terrace. 

READ MORE…

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from So to Speak by Ricardo Cázares

October 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Joe Imwalle

I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you excerpts from the award-winning Mexican poet Ricardo Cázares’s 75-page serial poem So to Speak. With a cinematic eye that hones in on the materiality of everyday experience, Cázares’s speaker leaps from image to image with dazzling grace and wonder. And, in replicating this sensation of poetic propulsion, hear from translator Joe Imwalle the process of working with a poet whose work is always already imbricated in the net of translation.

“In addition to his poetry, Cázares has translated Charles Olson and Robert Creeley into Spanish. These poets are clearly an influence on Cázares’ attention to breath and syllable. Olson’s statement in “Projective Verse” that “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” was ringing in my head when I first began this project. Surely, Cázares has carried this statement around too. Reading his poems aloud has a palpable energy with a forward momentum. The poems are open ended and each flows into the next. They enact the poetic moment that boils up from a quotidian event leaving the speaker on the verge of understanding something transcendent.

Translating these poems presented plenty of enjoyable challenges. So often the associative leaps being made are sound-based, pesa slips into pozo. Cázares also plays with ambiguity. I often had to choose one meaning over another when both were intended to resonate.”

—Joe Imwalle

I look at my hands

at the fingers of my hands
        at the yolks cooling down on my skin
and falling to the plate

____________I see the trace
                                        see the sun in a burner
                                        where someone’s boiling a stock

I look at the bread with compassion

                                               once
____________________on that same table
____________we studied the nervous system
____________of a frog

I look at the flames

                            boiling flowers
                                    dry leaves

                in the golden liquid steeps a tea
                for insomnia 

I look at the ceiling
                        a DC-10 lands
                        on the table’s edge

                   I look to the bone the tender thigh almost foam
                  there’s fine weather a breeze
                  scent of diesel and apples 

I see my hands
____________I scan the radar verify the instruments
________and fine tune their touch READ MORE…

The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!

October 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages

Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.

On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.

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No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!

READ THE NEW ISSUE

The World in Transformation, The Poem in Translation

August 11, 2022  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

A guide to translated poetry through our archives!

If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if not—consider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.

We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.

In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”

Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”

So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

July 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature

You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”

The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.

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Reckoning With the Idea of the Canon: An Interview with Robin Myers, Part II

July 7, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

The tradition becomes this tidal flow that is always acting on us . . .

In the second part of a three-part series, Editor-at-Large Alan Mendoza Sosa continues his conversation with poet and translator Robin Myers. In this installment, they continue their discussion on multiplicity in translation, touching on canons in Spanish literature, conceptual writing, and collaboration. Read part one of the interview here.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): Have you felt that commercial interests interfere with what gets published and translated?

Robin Myers (RM): Always, although I find it hard to express exactly how, beyond my own intuitions and observations, you know? Definitely. I sense that certain authors become “hot” authors, and so other writers will get grouped together or hyped in response to them or in comparison to them. And of course authors in translation are very susceptible to being treated as automatically “representing” the country or even the region they come from, which is hugely problematic. Among many publishers there is a real interest in contemporary Latin American fiction writ large, which is obviously never a balanced playing field. With literature translated from Spanish to English, there are lots and lots of books being translated from Argentina, Chile, quite a few books from Mexico, and far fewer from other places. You know, very unequal.

AM: Usually very little, next to nothing from Central America, I would imagine.

RM: Totally, next to nothing. Yeah, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, I’d say.

AM: Sometimes Peru, maybe? Or not even.

RM: Yeah, Peru a little more recently. I’m thinking of Katya Aduai, Gabriela Wiener. But anyway, my hope is that as interest in translation as a field continues to grow, and with increasing advocacy for translators as artists, the range and multiplicity of authors who get translated will also keep growing. I think all of that is on the rise, which is thrilling.

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 6, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas and Suhasini Patni

This month’s edition takes us to India and Mexico!

With Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand in frequent contributor Daisy Rockwell’s English translation taking the International Booker Prize recently, Indian literature is having its moment. Editor-at-Large Suhasini Patni’s contribution to this edition of A Thousand Lives could not be more timely then, spotlighting as it does another pioneering female Punjabi author. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Amrita Pritam, the first female poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, is one of the most prominent feminist figures in Indian literary history. Not only did she take a public stance against marriage, she also openly wrote about female sex and desire, and questioned gender-enforced roles. According to writer and translator Khushwant Singh, her poems about the plight of refugees made her “immortal.” Written in 1950, the book’s title, Pinjar, means ‘skeleton’ in Punjabi. In this radical novel, a Hindu girl, Puro, is abducted by a Muslim man, Rashid, as an act of revenge against her community. She’s given a new name, Hamida, and her life from before is erased. When she tries to go back to her parents, she is seen as tainted and turned away. Forced to return to Rashid and settle into a new life, she eventually has a child with him. During the fraught years of partition, women had to become skeletons, “with neither a face, nor mind, nor a will, nor identity.” Hamida is enraged at the condition of women like herself: “Some had been forced into marriage, some murdered, some stripped and paraded naked in the streets.” The book details unexpected brutality, acts of desperation, and highlights the struggles faced particularly by women in 1947. It was adapted into a successful Hindi-language film in 2002.

—Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large for India

 

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Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015), and its unsettling opening paragraph, which would doubtlessly throw the reader into a vertigo-like state, is a captivating read bound to make you question (if you haven’t done so already) the significance of borders, their concrete reality, and multiple figurative dimensions. Makina, a switchboard operator, is sent on a mission to find her older brother, who, lured by the empty promises of a substantial inheritance, had chosen to undergo a dangerous water crossing in order to reach the neighboring country—an almost mythical land to which his fellowmen flee in search of the so-called “better life.” The Mexican author’s use of symbolism and his timely focus on the issues of migration, immigration and war reveal the fragility of one’s identity and the various traps that await the self. As for the language of the book, I would simply like to mention translator Lisa Dillman’s note, which informs us that the Spanish original “is nothing short of stunning, and translating it is both fulfilling and daunting.”

—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria 

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 27, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from the Czech Republic and Mexico!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on new translations of Czech poetry, as well as books fairs and celebrations of acclaimed writers in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Czech Republic

On 19 May, Bianca Bellová launched the English translation of her award-winning novel The Lake at the Czech Centre in London. “Whether The Lake is better described as dystopian or realistic depends, I suppose, on one’s opinion about the state of the world and what can be done about it,” said the book’s translator Alex Zucker. For him, the book “stands out for the incisiveness of its style and the evocativeness of its setting,” he told Alexandra Büchler in an interview published as part of Parthian Books’ Talking Translation series.

Meanwhile, Büchler’s own translation of the poetry collection Dream of a Journey by Kateřina Rudčenková has been longlisted for the coveted Oxford Weidenfeld Prize. You can read a tribute to Büchler, a tireless advocate for the translation of literature from Wales in both English and Welsh into languages across Europe through her role at Literature Across Frontiers. Those in the UK can catch Rudčenková and her fellow Czech poet Milan Děžinský at the Kendal Poetry Festival on 25 June, while poets Stephan Delbos and Tereza Riedlbauchová will be reading translations of each other’s poetry in Prague on 26 May.

There is more Czech poetry just out from Karolinum Press as part of its Modern Czech Classics series: The Lesser Histories by Jan Zábrana (1931-1984). In the words of its translator Justin Quinn, the collection “at times resembles a loose, shifting congregation of voices, some talking clearly, others muttering indistinctly, on occasion shifting from one language to another.” Quinn’s foreword, excerpted in LARB, provides a great introduction for Anglophone readers to Zábrana, a towering figure in Czech literature who, in addition to being a poet, was an outstanding translator from Russian and English, as well as a diarist whose “thousand pages or so of selected diaries bear witness to a splendid, if bitter, solitude.”

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2022)

May 19, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Despite a quarter marked by global upheaval, our team members continued to publish and organize literary events

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently co-organized—jointly with Isabelle Gribomont—an international week-long event on Literature and Computation which he capped off with an intermedia computational performance titled Code Is Poetry.

Blog Editor Darren Huang reviewed Diana Abu-Jaber’s “Fencing with the King” for the Los Angeles Review of Books on April 1.

In March, Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac was asked by the ALTA board to come back as interim president, after Anne Fisher resigned as president following the invasion of Ukraine. Elias-Bursac will serve in this capacity until November 2023.

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood’s joint translation (with Peter Sherwood) of her mother’s memoirs My Seven Lives: Jana Juráňová  in Conversation with Agneša Kalinová, published by Purdue University Press last October, was launched at an event in London on  April 27.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new braided essay out in The Rupture and a short story in The Baltimore Review.

Assistant Managing Editor Marina Dora Martino’s poem “Death with Three Left Feet” was published in POETRY’s April issue, Exophony, featuring poets who write in English as an additional language.

Assistant Managing Editor Michal Zechariah published a review of Maayan Eitan’s Love (tr. by the author) at 3:am magazine and a review of Elizabeth Clark’s Boy Parts at The Rumpus. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 13, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Carol Khoury

New magazine releases in Palestine, book launches in Mexico, and more!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on new magazine releases in Palestine and book launches in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

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

Even amidst the present global turmoil, the independent editorial scene in Mexico has been thriving. In the first quarter of 2022, thirteen independent publishing houses joined forces to put out Placeres mínimos, a book with texts by a diverse group of both local and international authors. The book is free for readers with any purchase from one of the participating publishers. The writers anthologized in the collection include several authors familiar to Asymptote readers, such as Mariana Enriquez, Ariana Harwicz, and Patrycja Pustkowiak. It is the second year that such a collaborative effort has taken place, and Jacobo Zanella and Mauricio Sánchez—the editors who coordinated the collection—show enthusiasm for continuing the tradition every year.

I attended the book’s launch event on April 29 in Querétaro’s Center for the Arts. Editors from the publishing houses Gris Tormenta and Minerva talked about the long process of coordinating the collection, highlighting how enthusiastic and committed to the project all the editors involved were. The collection’s theme was “Environments,” an abstract prompt that allowed the editors to curate an eclectic selection of texts. Among these are older pieces such as “Pasaje del diario de viaje de un navegante”—an except from the travelogue of Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian from the sixteenth century—but also more modern texts, such as “The Painter of Modern Life” by Charles Baudelaire, and many contemporary essays by living authors.

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Multiplicity as Part of the Process: An Interview with Robin Myers

May 11, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

I’m always trying to think about what sounds harsh, or sweet, or fluid, or abrupt—about the consequences of sound.

I had wished to interview Robin Myers for a while now, particularly after reading her bilingual book Tener/Having and finding out that she had translated into English some of my favorite contemporary writers, including Isabel Zapata, Andrés Neuman, and Ave Barrera. My interest in meeting her only grew stronger when I discovered that she lived in Mexico City, where I grew up. Though we live in quite distant parts of the city, I feel like sharing the experience of living in this chaotic yet exceptionally effervescent place immediately made us neighbors, peers, and even accomplices.

The interview took place in a bright and slightly too warm day in Coyoacán. We sat down at a lovely café that is also home to the most important feminist independent bookstore in Mexico. The original interview is almost three times longer than what I present here. But even though this is an abridged version, readers can get a full sense of Myers’s thoughtfulness, creativity, and generosity. I hope they enjoy listening to her as much as I did.

Alan Mendoza Sosa (AM): What were your earliest experiences with translation?

Robin Myers (RM): I loved reading as a child, and as a teenager I became especially interested in poetry. In retrospect, I realize I did have experiences of reading poetry in translation, but I didn’t really think about what that meant. As a high school student, somebody had given me a book by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who I loved, and there were a few poems that made a strong impression on me, but I don’t remember actually stopping to think about who had made that happen in English.

I would say that my path into translation happened in two, for a long time parallel, ways that didn’t actually touch. One was a love of poetry—both reading and writing it—and the other was an interest in Spanish, specifically because I was really curious about Mexico. I have some family history in Mexico, and I wanted to spend time here, and I understood as a kid that that meant I had to learn Spanish as well as I could. So I studied it in school and began reading in Spanish to the extent that we were given literature to read in class. Once I had learned enough Spanish to be able both to read and to speak more comfortably, I had the experience, living in Oaxaca, of coming across a poem in English that I loved and wanting to be able to share it with a Spanish-speaking friend. So my first experience as a translator was translating a poem into Spanish, which I’ve never done ever again.

AM: I read about this poem in one article, and from what I understood you haven’t published it, right? And you are not planning on doing so.

RM: Nope. Somebody else can do a much better job.

AM: But that’s a good question that I often find myself asking. What do you think about translating to a language that isn’t your mother tongue? Because I feel like sometimes people who study or engage with translation fetishize the mother language. Do you know what I mean?

RM: Yes, absolutely. To be honest, I think that’s something I did for a long time. I had this sense of the first language as the “dominant” language, and it’s been through talking with and reading other translators that I’ve come to realize what a problematic way of thinking that is—about language and about the multiplicity of languages in our lives and how multilingual so many people are, and how many different kinds of intimacy there are with different languages. I think it’s been a continual process of moving away from that mindset. In my case, I don’t personally feel very comfortable translating into my second language, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think other people can and should. Or that it isn’t crucial that they do. You know?

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 22, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Julia Sherwood

Longlists and talks in Slovakia and Mexico

This week, our editors-at-large report on paper shortages, literature prize longlists, and efforts to deconstruct the writing workshop. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Slovakia

Over the past year, Slovakia has not escaped the paper shortages that have affected the publishing industry all over the world, increasing printing costs and extending production times which, in turn, led to fewer titles being published. All this is likely to push up the price of books, in some cases by as much as 10-20 per cent, making Slovak readers, who already tend to spend less on books than their counterparts in many other European countries,  even more reluctant to buy new works of literature, particularly by Slovak authors.

On 9 March, the longlist of Slovakia’s  most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, was announced. The eclectic mix of nominations includes new works by four previous winners, two of them past Asymptote contributors: Šesť cudzincov (Six Foreigners, excerpt here) by Marek Vadas, and Balla’s ‘polyphonic novel’ Medzi ruinami (Amidst the Ruins), as well as Stanislav Rakús’s Ľútostivosť (Mournfulness) and Ivan Medeši’s Vilkovia (Two Vilkos). The longlist features two other previous Anasoft Litera nominees: Ivana Dobrakovová for her latest novel Pod slnkom Turína (Under the Sun of Turin) and Vanda Rozenbergová with Zjedla som Lautreca (I’ve Eaten Lautrec), and two further women writers, Ivana Micenková with Krv je len voda (Blood Is Only Water) and Nicol Hochholczerová with her taboo-breaking  debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Is Inedible). Another debut, Lukáš Onderčanin’s Utópia v Leninovej záhrade: Československá komúna Interhelpo (Utopia in Lenin’s Garden: The Czechoslovak Commune Interhelpo), is the first book of literary reportage to make it onto the longlist, while Arpád Soltész’s thriller Zlodej (The Thief) is the second genre novel in the prize’s history deemed worthy of inclusion among the top ten titles.

On 17 March the town council of Kremnica, a medieval gold-mining town and site of the world’s oldest still-working mint, unanimously approved an application to set up the first European Translators’ House in Slovakia. Named Zechenter House after the doctor, travel writer, and journalist Gustáv Kazimír Zechenter Laskomerský (1824-1908), it is expected to open its doors in two year’s time. The organisations behind the initiative are SOS Kremnica, a local NGO for the preservation of the town’s crumbling architectural heritage, and  Mona Sentimental, run by translators Renáta Deáková and past Asymptote contributors Eva Andrejčáková and Gabriela Magová.

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