Experience the world anew through non-human eyes in “Vivarium,” our Spring 2023 issue! From macaques to marmots, muntjacs to mosshoppers and microscopic prokaryotes, a superabundance of literary life overflows from 30 different countries. In this thriving biosphere, you’ll find work from Estonia and Oman flowering in the same soil as Alaa Abu Asad’s Wild Plants and our first entry from Bolivia via Pulitzer Prizewinner Forrest Gander. The same Pangaean ecosystem sustains our animal-themed special feature headlined by Yolanda González, recipient of the 2001 Premio Café Gijón Prize, and 2018 Booker International longlistee Wu Ming-Yi. Alongside these, there are the always thought-provoking words of Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, which bloom in both the Interview and Poetry section—the latter also shelters Fernando Pessoa, whose brilliant co-translators Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari have rendered him in one of his most mordant heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos.
Place: Spain
Our Spring 2023 Edition Is Here!

Featuring Fernando Pessoa, Franca Mancinelli, Wu Ming-Yi, and Yolanda González in our animal-themed special feature
Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women’s Writing!

Join us as we highlight the vital contributions of women to literature and translation.
March 8th is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to lift up the work of women in world literature. Below, find a selection of pieces published on the blog in the past year, across essays, reviews, translations, and interviews, curated to represent the breadth and brilliance of women working in writing.
Interviews
A Conversation on Kurdish Translation with Farangis Ghaderi
by Holly Mason Badra
But when you look deeper, when you look at archives, and look at early Kurdish periodicals, you find women. You discover these forgotten voices. An interesting example of that is Zeyneb Xan, who published under the pseudonym of Kiche Kurd (“Kurdish girl”). In 2018, when a publisher was reprinting Galawej (the first Kurdish literary journal published in 1939–1949), they decided to have sections on contributing writers. They came across this name, and one of the researchers working on the project uncovered that the identity of the writer was Zeyneb Xan (1900–1963), the eldest sister of Dildar—a very well-known figure of Kurdish literature who wrote the Kurdish anthem. Although her family was a literary family and at the center of literary attention, her manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Her truly fascinating poetry collection covers a wide range of themes from patriotism to women’s education and liberation.
Wild Women: An Interview with Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton
by Sophia Stewart
For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence.
To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda
by Rose Bialer
Maybe if I was born in some other place, I would be writing about something else, but I do believe that Latin America is a very violent continent, especially for women, and in all of our traditions of women’s literature, there have always been women writing horror stories in Latin America. . . I do believe that it’s because you can’t write about anything else. That’s how you live life. You are afraid for your life. You are scared of the violence in your family, the violence between your friends, the violence in the street. You can’t think about anything else except how to protect yourself from violence.
Memory as Terrain, Museum, Dictionary: On Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao—New York—Bilbao

The mythologization of one’s personal repertoire begs the question of significance: what makes something worth telling?
Bilbao—New York—Bilbao by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, Coffee House Press, 2022
“I realized that our dad’s whole family history was made up of round trips, flights, and returnings,” reflects author Kirmen Uribe. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao, a novel which won Uribe the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain, stems from the family history in question. Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin, it is a sort of metanovel that straddles fact and fiction, laying its mechanisms bare. Within the brackets of his own travel—a flight from Bilbao to New York—the narrator’s mind rambles through various elements he would like to weave into his hypothetical novel: interviews, folklore, philosophical reflections, images, and anecdotes. He meditates on structure and process, always on the precipice of making decisions, giving the whole novel the impression that it’s just about to start.
Uribe is from the Basque fishing town of Ondarroa, where the men have historically spent large parts of the year on the water. Urbanization, industrialization, and the mechanization of the fishing industry have by now, however, made the traditional way of life nearly obsolete. As a member of the intermediary generation, the rhythm of this extended round-trip journey is still familiar to Uribe; movement is not a means to an end, but a comfortable and creative mode of being that always ends in a provisional homecoming.
Throughout, the reader senses that his search for the novel’s structure is a search for meaning. Uribe’s desire for the moments that make up his personal, family, and national history to coalesce into narrative is tangible, though he struggles to make them conform. Details, encounters, images—he feels their weight and wants a story to give them coherence. But they resist, and his resulting frustration is echoed by the reader. When a new anecdote begins, we wonder: where does this fit in? Why should I immerse myself in this moment? Is this character major or minor?
Memory has always been the terrain that grounds seemingly disparate moments, and Uribe’s memory is like the ocean maps that his ancestors drew for their fishing journeys; the features depicted are those most salient to the cartographer. Before the time of GPS, Uribe recalls his father drafting a map of his habitual fishing ground off the coast of an uninhabited Scottish island called Rockall. It was a personal map, jealously guarded, that showed the significant underwater features and the migratory patterns of the fish. Rockall echoes through the novel, looming large like a landmark, as it would have been for Uribe in his youth—the place where his father was when he wasn’t home. I looked it up on Google Maps, but as I zoomed out to see where it was in relation to the United Kingdom, it quickly disappeared. READ MORE…
Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2022

Writing life as it is lived—that is, writing life that is half-lived.
In our Fall 2022 issue, we are presenting work ranging across thirty-two countries and nineteen languages, moving and shifting the demarcations of nation and language with the fluidity and imaginative capacities of language. Here, blog editor Xiao Yue Shan presents a roadmap through some of the most moving, exciting content encased within this latest release, including a text from our feature on Armenian literature, an essay on the “job” of writing from Catalan writer Montserrat Roig, and a Indonesian fiction of human distances—colonial, geographical, and carnal.
In every country there is a river, along the banks of every river there are people, and within the minds of each person there persists a single heartbeat of a mind that begins, as they situate themselves along the river, to pulse with that river’s inimitable current, to infiltrate that moment of flow with a different rhythm, that which they have carried with them and now relieve into the waters, and the water does what it does—it merges. In Aram Pachyan’s fluid, lyrical excerpt from P/F, translated sensitively from the Armenian by Nazareth Seferian, this instance of communion is fortified with the author’s masterful command of oratory and soliloquial language, iterating a return to faith “. . . like the prodigal son, sitting on your rib seeing my salvation in your murky waters, my peace in your obscurity, the lymph of life still gurgling in your grime.” The excerpt demonstrates not only the immense living intelligence of inhuman bodies, but also their pivotal and profound point of contact with human emotion—grief, loneliness, resolution, and hope. P/F is described as a text that swims in memory, and even in this brief extract we are afforded a wide-ranging glimpse at memory’s infinitely mutable potentials, of the seeds of experience which exponentiate into monuments of time, equally deceptive as it is formative, equally polluted as it is seeking of purity, and ever-changing even as it attempts to convince us of its sameness. In long, ranging lines melding concrete situation with poetic abstractions, Pachyan begins to tells us of this river:
This is not the Euphrates, nor the Tigris; not the Seine, the Thames, the Danube, nor the Po. The Getar has no bloodline in common with the daughter of the ocean, the Styx that flows in the land of Hades. The gods have not taken any oaths on its waters. There are no emphatic proverbs about it, no books or odes. It is left out of all possible discussions, it is off the planet’s axis.
And still it flows, merging what is cast in with what is hidden in its depths, and it is this movement that reminds us of the eternal sanctuary, in cities and villages alike, where one can stand and watch one thing become another, to watch time become memory and memory urge back to feed once again into time, and find in this merging some solace. READ MORE…
In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis

[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.
Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.
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 USD15 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.
Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?
Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.
María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.
MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.
RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?
MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.
MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…
Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva

As the novella progresses, there is a blurring between author and protagonist, between the author’s writing and the writing within the writing.
In Muriel Villanueva’s poetic, undulating The Left Parenthesis, a young mother works towards repair and reinvention, threading together the disparate reflections of selfhood. Under the guise of notes on reprieve, Villaneuva delves into surreal ascriptions of consciousness, of a psychological journey that braids together experience and fantasy. In beautiful, spare language, The Left Parenthesis is an open punctuation, seeking outwards to define that which is in constant flux—life.
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 USD15 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.
The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva, translated from the Catalan by María Cristina Hall and Megan Berkobien, Open Letter, 2022
I knew you weren’t well, but I pretended it wasn’t true, because the whole thing made me sick, too. If you died, so did I. If we were a pair, what would that make me afterward?
What do you do when you define yourself by your relationship to another person, and that person ceases to exist? How do you go about allowing the self that you have become to crumble away, making room for a new self to grow? Muriel Villanueva’s The Left Parenthesis—a slim, surreal novella tracking a woman’s trip with her young baby to a small beach town—examines precisely such questions in sparing, direct prose.
The narrative follows the inner life of a woman seeking to understand herself. Throughout the novella, the protagonist, also named Muriel, unpacks and dissects her three selves: the self that is a mother to her daughter Mar, her wife-self (she tells us at the start that she is a widow), and the self that acts as a mother to her own husband. She grapples with the fact that she was never sure which of her selves would emerge when she opened her mouth, a response to her husband’s oscillation between his child-self (the one she felt compelled to mother) and his burgeoning man-self. This three-week excursion, a brief parenthetical phrase within the novel that is her life, is something she undertakes to hopefully catalyse a transformation within her, a process of purging and healing.
Threaded through this book is the eponymous theme of an opening parenthesis, an explanatory and exploratory phase of existence that is separate—parallel—to the day-to-day. “At the beginning of my stay here I thought the cove with the shape of a waning moon. Now I think it’s only a parenthesis. It opens over here and I don’t know where it closes.” The cove to which the protagonist retreats is curved like a parenthesis, simultaneously opening out and welcoming in. This symbolic shape is mirrored in the curve of her arm as she breastfeeds her infant daughter, nurturing her baby as she herself is being nurtured by this trip, this secluded spot to which she has retreated. READ MORE…
Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

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.”
The Body as Dispute: On Carnality

Talking—or writing—seems to be the only method by which the excruciating loneliness of being a single, physical body can be ameliorated.
Carnality by Lina Wolff, translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry, Other Press, 2022
God was not really dead when Nietzsche proclaimed it through his speaking-box of Zarathustra. The sage of the German philosopher’s negations was, in fact, cementing the divine being in the noumenal; Nietzsche treated the death of God not as a state of things, but as a verb. It is not a death in the fact of non-existence, but an assassination. God is trapped in that liminal state of dying, and we are its killers, perpetuating the ongoing lineage of a refusal to believe. This is the way it was a hundred years ago, when atheism was radical and conscious, when a lack of faith had to make its way forward by obliteration, when such words had teeth.
In contrast, despite a nun being the prime orchestrator of events in Lina Wolff’s Carnality, God really does seem to be dead, a fact that no one fixates on because it would be like penning a manifesto of the Earth being round. Amidst the vast moral quandaries that swirl through the text, the ancient lessons and axioms that had once served as answers are nowhere to be seen, making room for that “ancient nobility” of chance to storm in between all those narrow spaces between us and the world, us and each other, us and ourselves. Adultery, caretaking, organ donation, euthanasia, murder—it’s all just happening. No choreography in the theatre of choice.
When a yet unnamed writer takes on a three-month travel grant in Madrid, she settles in the city the way one does in an airplane seat: procedural, passive, and with just a little bit of unarticulated dread. Having studied there in her youth, she is familiar with the city’s thorns and sieges, and from the first paragraph, we know—no one sane would choose to spend their summers in Spain’s capital. Still, small pockets of reprieve are there to be excavated: the ceaseless gurgles of wine pouring from dark bottles, the evening’s ink blotting some of the heat, the bright imagination of a city that holds newness in its oldness (“It’s down there. Life,” she thinks to herself). This transition of scenery outside the windows is settled quickly and efficiently in the space of a few pages, then Wolff draws the curtains, puts a drink in the narrator’s hand, and tunnels down into the strange, mutable basement-structure of story—a world which, its walls being made of words, shifts constantly with the mere logic of telling.
Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Book fairs, award shows, and passings from Hong Kong, Spain, and Iraq.
This week, our editors from around the globe report on recent literary awards in Hong Kong, examine the links between the literary scenes in Spain and Romania, and reflect on the passing of a revolutionary Iraqi poet. Read on to find out more!
Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong
The awards ceremony of the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards was conducted online on 22 May. Renowned Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheng Yin) was honored with the Life Achievement Award for her tremendous contribution to Hong Kong literature. Moreover, essayist Tung Chiao won the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts, and fiction writer Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung was awarded Artist of the Year for the literary arts category. While two works by Tse, Snow and Shadow and The Door, are available in the English language, Tung Chiao’s works have yet to be translated, despite the fact that he is already a highly acclaimed author in Chinese literary circles.