Posts filed under 'testimonial'

Behind the Scenes with Emma Page

January 13, 2019  |  in Essays, News  |  by Emma Page

At Asymptote, you don’t need to live in New York or London to work at a world-class literary publication.

Did you hear? We recently released our first recruitment drive of the year, advertising many newly available openings (from poetry editor to social media manager), offering readers a chance to get involved behind the scenes as Asymptote enters its ninth year of curating the best in world literature. Some of you who might be curious about this opportunity (bear in mind that the application deadline is less than 10 days away!) may wonder what it’s like to work for a dynamic literary journal such as ours, so today, in a weekend special, we are sharing a testimonial by Communications Manager Emma Page, who tells us why she chose to become a part of our global movement.

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After completing my MA in Translation at Lancaster University in the UK this past October, I spent quite a bit of time figuring out what to do with myself. I considered looking for a position in publishing, but opportunities appeared few and far between. I eventually landed on freelance business translation, which I love, but the work didn’t quench my thirst for the arts. At a loss and living on the isolated Isle of Man, I started looking for remote opportunities at literary journals and websites.

I had been reading Asymptote since it was a brand-new venture and I was a high schooler just discovering the world of literary translation, but I had never considered working for them. As freelancers and artists in the social-media era, we are often told by our elders to be suspicious of “opportunities” to trade our work for “experience” or “exposure.” It’s a catch-22: If you can’t afford to work for free, you can’t gain the experience to qualify for the rare, extremely competitive paid gigs. I believe this is a real problem in the arts world, and that it directly contributes to the marginalization of non-wealthy voices. READ MORE…

Our 48hr Liveblogging Continues With Cuba EaL Ezio Neyra

January 28, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Ezio Neyra

Getting closer and closer...with just 36 hours and less than $4,000 to go!

Ezio Neyra (editor-at-large, Cuba): Reina María Rodríguez—whose brilliant work was featured in our April 2011 issue—is a Cuban poet, narrator and editor who, although well known and recognized within Cuban (literary) territory, is only just beginning to gain an international audience. Thanks in part to receiving the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda—one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish language—as well as to the exposure afforded by Asymptote‘s own international reach, Rodríguez’s sensitivity, which frequently focuses on the Centro Habana area where she lives, is now reaching readers all around the world.

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Our 48hr Liveblogging Continues With Romanian EaL MARGENTO

January 28, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by MARGENTO

We now have 42hrs left to raise $7,669 and hit our goal! Please keep your fingers crossed for it to happen.

MARGENTO (editor-at-large, Romania): “Eutychia,” from our July 2012 issue, has been identified by Simona Popescu—poet, critic, and the foremost authority on Romanian poet Gellu Naum’s (1915 – 2001) work and life—as the Naumian poem par excellence, not in the sense that the rest of his huge oeuvre is contained in it, but because it stands out as one of the most comprehensive and emblematic expressions of the poet’s creed and poetics. And, more importantly, it highlights the unmistakable way in which his work was not only an art but a mode of existence.

A visionary, a great shaman—le grand chaman de Roumanie, as a French critic once called him—whose poems have always worked as Pythic oracles, Naum was also an incredibly shrewd and inclusive craftsman. The very personable and humorously playful person that he was in everyday life was the same as the artist who integrated biographical details, political critique, and popular culture (along with erudite and alchemically-oneiric intertexts) into his mesmerizing rhythms, expansive diction, and enthralling imagery. Although—or rather particularly because—he was a true poeta vates, a poet-prophet, he did not look down on the trivialities of common existence. His corrosive ironies never settled upon postmodern detachment, and, instead of rendering the verse flat, his absorption of the ‘insignificant’ actually turned the everyday into something magical, miraculous, and overwhelming.

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Our 48hr Liveblogging Begins NOW!

January 28, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Sophie Hughes

We now have 48hrs left to raise $7,799 and hit our goal! Please keep your fingers crossed for it to happen. First up, let's hear from Mexico editor-at-large, Sophie Hughes.

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Sophie Hughes (editor-at-large, Mexico): The grim truth is that most auto-fiction written by contemporary writers who have grown up and live in Mexico is likely to disturb international readers who haven’t themselves experienced endemic violence at a local level. But Julián Herbert’s Tomb Song (a remembered and fictionalized account of his childhood spent drifting through Mexico with his prostitute mother), excerpted in our 2014 Latin American special feature, possesses a warmth, wicked sense of humour and acuity which rightly upends the reductive association of narcolit with purely harrowing-lit.

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Why Asymptote Matters Today

January 23, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Adrian Nathan West

Every time a new journal or small press launches, it is a major event for literature; every time one closes, it is a disaster.

It is a rare person who will affirm that things in English-language publishing are exactly as they should be. The #readwomen 2014 campaign emphasized the scandalous gender bias in publishing, promotion, and reviewing; the translation database at Three Percent tracks abysmal figures for foreign fiction in translation; and anecdotally, anyone who has dealt with large publishers cannot help but lose heart at their willingness to lose millions on lavish advances for famous has-beens while refusing the relatively minor risk of publishing foreign writers of great stature.

The situation is hardly better with journals and magazines. While a cornucopia of poorly funded, university-based journals offers prospective writers and translators next-to-no visibility, more famous outlets, many of which state in their masthead a willingness to publish the new, the daring, and the uncategorizable, go on cranking out one mind-numbing workshop story after another. Then, up in the ether, are the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and their ilk, at the gates of which the translator clamors like poor K. before the portal of Kafka’s castle.     READ MORE…

Worlds-Within-Worlds: A Testimonial

January 19, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Tiffany Tsao

Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao on Indonesian writing—and how Asymptote fits in a new, more nuanced "World Literature"

Asymptote’s mission is to introduce not only literary voices from a wide range of countries, but a greater number of voices from within each country. That’s where our twenty over editors-at-large, from Cuba to China, come in. Their goal? To seek out the worlds nestled within worlds that may be invisible from the outside. With their fingers on the pulse of their regions’ literary scenes, our editors-at-large act as extra eyes and ears for our section editors, ensuring a stream of the freshest content from the world over. Often this work is commissioned from scratch (see Mui Poopoksakul on Contemporary Thai Fiction or Yardenne Greenspan on Contemporary Israeli Literature). Editors-at-large also organize outreach events, partner with local journals, and send us literary dispatches for the blog. Our Indonesian editor-at-large, Tiffany Tsao, who gave us this dispatch from the 2014 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, wrote the following blog post to commemorate our fourth birthday.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

World literature is a loaded word with a lot at stake. The term makes a grand promise: access to literatures, in foreign tongues, about unfamiliar peoples, in far-flung places. “World Literature” promises to reveal the astounding diversity of the globe through letters.

But its execution risks the exact opposite effect: in place of diversification, simplification; in place of multiplication, diminishment. A handful of writers behave as spokespeople for an entire nation, ethnic group, even continent; a single novel purports to function as representative of a variegated and ever-varying literary and popular culture of any given context. This prospect of oversimplification alarms both skeptics and advocates of world literature alike, and (unfortunately) even the most good-intentioned of attempts to avoid this plight may count for naught. READ MORE…