Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 11, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Erica X Eisen, Julia Sherwood, and Lee Yew Leong

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

June 15, 2018 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Barbara Halla, Daljinder Johal, and Tiffany Tsao

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Albania, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

It is a summery Friday in the Northern Hemisphere and that means sun-filled afternoon beverages and literary updates from around the world! Barbara Halla discusses recent publications from Albania and delves into the political debates with which they engage. Daljinder Johal discusses conversations about libraries and marketing that were held at literary festivals around the United Kingdom. Finally, reporting from Australia, Tiffany Tsao discusses the controversy surrounding a recent literary journal cover and provides information on opportunities for emerging writers.

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Albania:

At barely three million people living in Albania, it has become a national sport of sorts to look for traces of Albanians and Albanian influences in other cultures. In this vein, one of the most anticipated books of the season has been Luan Rama’s Mbresa Parisiane (Parisian Impressions). Luan Rama is both a writer and a diplomat. Between 1991 and 1992 he was the Albanian ambassador to France, where has spent most of his life since, writing several titles on Albanian culture and its ties to France. A good portion of this new book veers toward familiar territory, dwelling on the lives of famous authors that made Paris their home. Yet its real appeal is Rama’s research into Albanians who lived in Paris and, more simply, reading the perspective of an Albanian writing about his life in Paris.

Asymptote Book Club: In Conversation with Martin Aitken

March 8, 2018 | in Book Club, Interviews | by Jacob Silkstone

Love can be a terrible thing, as terrible as its absence.

Continuing our monthly series of Asymptote Book Club interviews, Martin Aitken discusses his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.

Aitken, currently translating the sixth volume of Knausgård’s My Struggle alongside Don Bartlett, tells Asymptote’s Jacob Silkstone how readers are now more open to the idea that “English isn’t all there is,” and why it’s sometimes better to “switch yourself off as a translator and just read.” And, given the novel’s title, there’s also time for a brief meditation on love’s potential to be “a terrible thing, as terrible as its absence.”

Jacob Silkstone (JS): Love strikes me as a book that changes tone dramatically when read for a second time. Apparently innocuous lines (“He thinks he’ll look out for her on the bus tomorrow,” for example) suddenly take on a tremendous amount of weight. Do you generally read a novel cover to cover before beginning a new translation, to get a sense of where the plot is heading, or do you start translating immediately?

Martin Aitken (MA): This is a very short book, a novella, and every sentence in the Norwegian has been faceted very carefully indeed. The translator’s challenge is to poise the target-language sentences in the same way. I couldn’t envisage embarking on a novel like this without having read it first. I used to jump in at the deep end a lot, with crime fiction especially. There’s always a risk of being caught out by twists of plot when you do that, though of course rectifying mistakes is a lot easier these days than I imagine it used to be. However, with literary fiction I now prefer to spend time with the original before getting started on anything. With a novel like Love, so much of the work is about immersing yourself in the atmosphere of the piece, and I think the best way into that is to switch yourself off as a translator and just read. Getting the sense of the thing as a reader first, listening to its music as you move through the story, is a different thing entirely from the focus applied in crafting the translation.