Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a folding of dreamscape into landscape—a study of some of earth’s most majestic topographies through the discursive, vivid wanderings of a mind led by its own fascinations. Made up of just over five hundred notes, this compilation of observations, narratives, fantasies, and contemplations track a journey through the Alps in colours, in flanks and peaks, hearsay and memories, macabre moments of comedy, and a continual rumination on the crafting of writing and composing. These deft workings of language have been rendered into a fluid and chimeric English by Katy Derbyshire, and she speaks here of Mountainish’s scepticism of mountains, the beauty and comedic tone of the prose, and ‘little narrative islands’.
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.
Matthew Redman (MR): One of my favourite aspects of Mountainish is when the narrator talks about the mountains and her fear of them; there is a kind of a mistrust of the mountains poking through a lot of the time, expressing itself in a lack of awe, a lack of overwhelm. When she’s faced with these mountains, it’s more like she’s peering at them, or stealing glances.
Katy Derbyshire (KD): Well, the narrator gives us that in the very first of her notes, when she starts off with this drive through the Alps and is terrified that they’re going to collapse onto her—and I think that continues all the way through. It really endeared me to the book, her scepticism. We, the two of us, between ourselves, we called ourselves ‘mountain sceptics,’ because Zsuzsanna doesn’t just accept this Swiss myth of the mountains’ magnificence. She sees the beauty, very much so, but she also sees the insularism—which she calls racism sometimes—and she sees the expectations and the narrow-mindedness that comes along with the landscape. READ MORE…
Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025
Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.
In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.
Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.
In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.
With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…
Contributors:- Bella Creel
, - Meghan Racklin
, - Xiao Yue Shan
; Languages: - French
, - German
, - Italian
, - Macedonian
, - Spanish
; Places: - Chile
, - France
, - Italy
, - Macedonia
, - Switzerland
, - Taiwan
, - Turkey
; Writers: - Agustín Fernández Mallo
, - Damion Searls
, - Elsa Gribinski
, - Giorgio Fontana
, - Lidija Dimkovska
, - Sedef Ecer
; Tags: - dystopian thinking
, - identity
, - interpretation
, - nationality
, - painting
, - political commentary
, - revolution
, - the Cypriot Question
, - the Macedonian Question
, - translation
, - visual art
, - Winter 2025 issue
, - world literature