Posts filed under 'MARGENTO'

What’s New with the Asymptote team?

May 5, 2016  |  in News  |  by Theophilus Kwek

This month has seen a bumper crop of updates from the Asymptote team!

Poetry Editor Aditi Machado published a new chapbook, Route: Marienbad, with Further Other Book Works, and has three poems in the new issue of The Capilano.

Three of Drama Editor Caridad Svich’s playtexts have been published alongside critical essays as JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and other plays, by Intellect Books. Her new play, De Troya, directed by David Lozano, will also be performed on May 15 and 16 on the Amphibian Stage in Fort Worth, Texas.

Contributing Editor Howard Goldblatt published his first collection of original short stories, A Night in a Chinese Hospital.

Nonfiction Editor Joshua Craze has a new essay out in Chimurenga’s Pan-African magazine, Chronic, about the United Nations (UN) mission in South Sudan, wilful ignorance, and the vagaries of UN flight timetables. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Asymptote team

April 7, 2016  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

This month, catch Asymptote's editor-in-chief at the London Book Fair and at SUTD's Translation Symposium!

Senior Editor (Chinese) Chenxin Jiang spoke on the panel “I’m Not Dead Yet: Translating Living Authors” with Jason Grunebaum, Anna Rosenwong, and Cole Swensen, at AWP in Los Angeles. An excerpt of her translation of Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was featured in The Atlantic.

Assistant Editor K. T. Billey‘s translations of Icelandic poet Bragi Ólafsson have been published in Circumference. Her poetry collection “Vulgar Mechanics” is a finalist for Lincoln Center Fordham’s Poets Out Loud publication prize. Her poem “Self-Portrait, Skull & Ornament” has been shortlisted for Arc Magazine‘s Poem of the Year—vote on the Reader’s Choice Awards here! Her poetry will also be featured in the inaugural Brooklyn Poet’s Anthology forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press in 2017.

From 30 December to 4 April, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood accompanied Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki on a US reading tour with his novella Lullaby for a Hanged Man (translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Calypso Editions in December 2015). The tour included events at the Word bookstore in Brooklyn, Boston University and UNC Chapel Hill. Next week, on April 12, Julia will be speaking at the London Book Fair on a panel entitled “Non-native Translation: Is It Time to Rethink Where Good Translations Come From?”

Also participating in a London Book Fair panel is Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong, who will talk about “Discovering Stories in Turkey, Asia and Africa” on April 13, and then about “The Politics of Translation” at Singapore University of Technology and Design’s Translation Symposium on April  21.

Romania & Moldova Editor-at-Large MARGENTO saw to the publication in Romanian translation of Ryan Mihaly’s interview with Richard Zenith from our October 2015 issue in Asymptote’s new Romanian partner journal, Observator Cultural.  Also in Romania, after an informal interview with MARGENTO, poet and editor Violeta Savu published in the literary magazine Ateneu a presentation of Asymptote covering the Romanian writers featured so far in our journal and also reviewing our latest issue, a contribution also made available online on the writer’s blog.

New Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek’s third collection of poetry, Giving Ground, was launched in Singapore by Ethos Books. His review of Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Aeneid VI was published in the Oxford Culture Review, and three of his poems were featured in Coldnoon, the international journal of travel writing.

Last month, Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao published an essay on Eka Kurniawan’s novels Man Tiger and Beauty is a Wound in the Sydney Review of Books .

Crowdsourcing a Poet

January 28, 2016  |  in Essays  |  by MARGENTO

"...I asked a number of significant writers for an input on the place of this writer in our literature..."

Have you ever thought of starting a poetry crowdsourcing? While contemplating writing on Alexandru Muşina’s magnetic personality (as a tie in to Ruxandra Cesereanu’s article in our July issue), the idea presented itself to me as the best way of introducing him to Asymptote’s readers; definitely an exciting opportunity to bring people together around the work of this amazing poet. Why? For at least two reasons. First, Muşina is one of the most important poets of Generation 80 (the poets that changed the face of Romanian poetry starting back in the 1980s), and arguably its most influential theorist, teacher, and public figure. Therefore, given the writer’s impressive public profile, crowdsourcing arises as a truly viable option in trying to unveil the many facets of his personality as mirrored by poets, critics, and theorists from various schools and walks of life. Second, taking the pulse of the current literary scene by asking some of its most outstanding representatives for input on the matter would obviously provide remarkably candid insights into the writer’s legacy, but it may also add up to a quick x-ray of Romanian letters, a sort of present-day portrayal of a young literature as revisiting an established man…; this latter aspect may prove of interest particularly since Cesereanu’s article focuses mainly on the place of Muşina’s poetry (and specifically his poem “Budila Express”) in the historical context of the communist regime and Ceausescu’s dictatorship (when the poem was first published). READ MORE…

The Latest from Our Editors & Contributors

February 11, 2015  |  in News  |  by Eva Richter

Updates about Asymptote’s international team!

For all you graphic novel (in translation!) fans: contributing editor Adrian Nathan West translated A Human Act, about the Second Mafia War, by Manfredi Giffone, Fabrizio Longo, and Alessandro Parodi for Words Without Borders. And in Brouillon, he discusses the challenges of translating alliteration in Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny; in this case, his search through the Oxford English Dictionary leads him to “Vauntmure,” “a beautiful, obsolete word” and a type of fortification wall.

Transaction Press has just published past contributor John Taylor’s collection of essays A Little Tour through European Poetry. It follows John Taylor’s earlier volume Into the Heart of European Poetry and discusses a great number of translations, including poetry from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Portugal. It even presents an important poet born in the Chuvash Republic—not to be missed!

In November, Joshua Craze, nonfiction editor, published an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Redacted Mind, with New York’s New Museum as part of its center for translation. The center previously hosted another book project of his, How To Do Things Without Words. In his introduction to Craze’s work, Omar Berrada, co-director of Dar Al-Ma’mûn, said, “In most cases, looking for whatever text lies behind the redactions is bound to fail. Instead, Craze proposes to examine what the redaction performs. Rather than uncovering the secret beneath the mask, understanding depends on looking closely at the surface itself. It is an art of description, of listening to surfaces.”

READ MORE…

Summer News from Asymptote

August 28, 2014  |  in News  |  by Eva Richter

Plays, data maps, video projects, and book reviews from Asymptote's team of editors and contributors!

Remember Isle-to-Isle? Chief executive assistant Berny Tan and Sher Chew’s collaborative data visualization and experimental reading project based on Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island? (Now say that three times fast!). Well, the yearlong project is going strong, and the two collaborators reflected on their first five weeks with Mr. Verne in the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping. In this fascinating read, they delve into the trials of imagining the novel in map and diagram form.

For all you D.C. and Austin theatergoers: drama editor Caridad Svich’s Spark will receive its world premiere at theTheater Alliance, Anacostia Playhouse, on September 4–28, 2014, in Washington, D.C., under Colin Hovde’s direction. Likewise, her play Guapa will be produced at the Austin Community College-Rio Grande Campus on September 25–October 5, 2014 in Austin, TX, under Tomas Salas’s direction.

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Asymptote Never Sleeps: Contributor News Roundup

March 26, 2014  |  in News  |  by Eva Richter

From films to exhibitions, here's what Asymptote contributors have been up to lately.

Coming May 7, 2014! Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa’s widely anticipated screen debut L’armée du salut (Salvation Army) has been making waves at film festivals. Watch an excerpt of the prize-winning movie here and find out more on Taïa’s official Facebook page. For French speakers: a French-language interview with Taïa. Revisit his open letter “Homosexuality Explained to My Mother,” translated into English and Chinese exclusively for Asymptote here.

Alexander Dickow brings Henri Droguet’s poetry to the United States for the first time with Clatters. Published by Rain Taxi imprint Ohm Editions, Droguet’s French text appears beside Dickow’s translation. In the translator’s afterword, Dickow opines: “Never, perhaps, has so pure a litany of despair, vanity, destruction and decay given rise to such vibrant language.” Lovely!

Moving away from the Francophone world… Boey Kim Cheng co-edited a crucial anthology of Asian Australian poetry–get up to speed with the project here. His own poem “Plumb blossom or Quong Tart” appears with voices “from Pakistan to Singapore to Thailand to Goa and beyond, telling diverse, richly textured and evolving stories.”

Forrest Gander is speaking tonight, March 26, at SOAS, University of London, about modern and contemporary Japanese poetry in translation and how it has influenced literature originally written in English. He will tackle the question so many readers have only wondered at: What gets translated and why? Join him and Asymptote contributing editor Sayuri Okamoto.

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