Posts filed under 'TopTen2022'

Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #1 A Ray of Light by Star Kim Su-on

December 31, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

The wonder of this piece is in how the eerie images burn in your mind long after the story ends.

And here is the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the attention that Korean literature has received all of this past year (LTI Korea reports that “Korean literature published overseas scored a total of four wins and nine nominations” in 2022), the top spot goes to a South Korean author: the 28 year-old Kim Su-on who made an appearance in our Winter 2022 issue via cotranslators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler with her fittingly named short story “A Ray of Light.” 

As a ray of light will momentarily illuminate the objects in the dark it passes over, so too do the nameless figures in Kim’s story come to life via impressionistic brushstrokes such as these:

Light drifts over the faces of the people lying down, asleep, inside their houses. They shrug off the blankets draping their bodies and, one or two at a time, wake up. Though they strain to remember the previous night’s dreams, the more they try, the faster the dreams vanish. They start each day without any such memories. A certain sadness has become the foundation of their days. Each person’s sadness differs in scale, and so each person passes the days differently.

Through “writing [that]  fuses elegant, simple lyricism with startling, at times nightmarish visions,” a dystopian world is conjured with irrefutable logic. Plot is almost an afterthought: If there is a story at all, it centers on a nameless woman in a house that is surrounded by a forest littered with mute and directionless bodies, dead birds and animal carcasses. At the heart of this forest is a lake, which forms the backdrop to naked lovers who have never left the only place the light touches. Only the shadow of a man wrapped in a blanket remains in the darkness.

The wonder of this piece is in how the eerie images burn in your mind long after the story ends. “Once you read it,” add translators Lee-Lenfield and Buehler, who shared with us that they brought into English Kim Su-on’s “spooky irrealism” during the darkest days of the pandemic,“you can’t get it out of your eyes, your ears.” For this fact alone, ”A Ray of Light” is nothing short of a masterclass in worldbuilding.

That wraps up our end-of-year countdown! If you’ve enjoyed what we’ve brought you in 2022, please help us bring you more of what you love in 2023. In addition to these massive issues (only four remain to our big 5-0!), we’ll also keep bringing you weekly dispatches, fortnightly airmails, monthly book club selections, and quarterly educational guides—all of which we work so hard on behind the scenes on zero institutional support. Answer our commitment by becoming a sustaining or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month. Signing up only takes three minutes, but your support would mean the world to us, truly! See you on the other side of 2023!

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #2 Borges and the Blind by Abdelfattah Kilito

December 29, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

Our second most-read piece of the year is Abdelfattah Kilito’s Borges and the Blind, expertly translated from the Arabic by Ghazouane Arslane (who was also interviewed about this article on the blog by Senior Assistant Editor Alex Tan). A lithe and subtle essay on Borges’ famous short story Averroës’ Search, it glides with a rather un-essayistic lightness that belies how profuse it is with ideas. We’ll limit ourselves to pulling on one of its threads: Borges writes at the threshold between European and Arabic literatures; he is a bridger, and—why not, though Kilito never says so explicitly—a translator of sorts bringing the literature of Arabic to the West. The essay never prescribes and Kilito consciously forswears snobbery; nevertheless, as he unpacks allusions only Arabists could know and Europeans would not deign to scrutinise we find suggestions on how to read Borges’ work—and indeed any work at all rooted in an unfamiliar culture. Dismiss those foreign words and names at your peril. With Borges as with the best translations, a trove of knowledge is resting literally under your nose, if only you think to look for it. It’s a thrilling notion, and there are other ideas that spark similar thoughts throughout Borges and the Blind. Like so many articles in this year’s top ten, it very much bears rereading.

Here’s an excerpt:

One is curious, in this context, about Borges’s relationship with languages, and namely with the Arabic language. He knew, of course, Spanish and English (his grandmother was English) and was proficient in French and German. He lived in four languages, but what about Arabic? In one of his poems, a rare and equivocal verse attracted my attention: “What language / am I doomed to die in?!” This could mean in what language will death strike me, or in what language am I to die, what is the language in which it is my duty to die? Borges partly made up his mind when, wondering, he added: “The Spanish my ancestors used / to call for the charge, or to play truco / The English of the Bible / my grandmother read from / at the edges of the desert?” He mentioned the two languages closest to his heart. What is rather strange, however, is that he would die in neither of them, let alone in French or German. He would die in a fifth language he had not expected or intuited to die in, a new language he was indeed able to acquire. Which language? The Arabic language, which he had started to learn during the last year of his life. Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.

If this piece has sparked an interest in Abdelfattah Kilito’s literary criticism, your next stop has to be his Dream of a Baghdad Night, translated from the French by former team member Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg for our Spring 2019 issue. If all this talk of bridge-building inspires you to join us behind the scenes, on the other hand, take note that we’re already advertising our first recruitment call of 2023. From Editor-at-Large to Assistant Blog Editor, check out the newly available positions here and send in your application today!

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #3 An Interview with Georges Szirtes

December 28, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In her brilliant interview, Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality.

“Pulling narratives together is an act of blind construction, an exploration of the valid. Constructions suggest artificiality. And it is true, in legal prose terms, that poems, as constructions, are artificial and therefore unreliable. But poets should not be afraid of construction: construction is the poem’s natural way of witnessing.” 

Acclaimed poet and translator from the Hungarian Georges Szirtes comes in at Number 3 in our countdown of the most-read articles of the year, via his interview in the Winter 2022 issue. Renowned for both his poetry as well as for his translations, Szirtes writes prolifically and without pretense in print and on social media. As a translator, Szirtes is perhaps best known for his work on Hungarian phenom László Krasznahorkai (his translation of Satantango won the Best Translated Book Award in 2013; while you’re here, why not also read our interview with László Krasznahorkai?).

In her brilliant interview, our very own Rose Bialer reveals Szirtes to be a poet grappling with and exploring constraints—of memory, borders, mortality. Szirtes offers intimate insights on the lasting impact of his experience of migration in childhood and the memories—“small fragments of coloured glass that may—with a lot of luck—add up to a stained glass window of sorts”—that he has pieced together from the family photographs that he carried on the journey from Hungary to England. These memories drove Szirtes to reclaim the Hungarian language twenty-eight years after it “went to sleep.” Visualizations of what might have been permeate Szirtes’ poetry; taken as a whole, his collections reconstruct the story of his life, with glimpses of reality that appear as if frozen in film.

For example, of his latest work Waking in the Yellow Room, Szirtes says:

These are exercises of the imagination based on my experience of him [my father] and on my own sense of what Jewishness entailed for him then and what it entails for me now . . . The yellow room is the house of the soon-to-be dead. I see him as the child squatting in the corner. 

In this experiment, Szirtes rewrites the constraints of memory, suggesting a new reality in which his father didn’t eschew Judaism for Atheism in the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust. In addition, “there are increasing reminders of mortality as one grows older; in my case the death of friends, the pandemic, my own state of health . . . my mother’s early death . . . I have been sure from the start that the apprehension of mortality is what drives the whole artistic project.” 

This is not the first time Szirtes has been featured in Asymptote, his poem The Swan’s Reflection: two sides of a postcard headlined our English Poetry Feature as far back as in our Fall 2011 issue, alongside Lydia Davis’s very first translations from the Dutch, new translations of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, and a survey of Croatian novelists by Dubravka Ugrešić. Find contributing editor Sim Yee Chiang’s behind-the-scenes look at this issue from our #30issues#30days showcase. If you’re inspired to submit your own work after dipping into our twelve-year-old archive, check out our submission guidelines here and send in your best work today! 

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #4 Envy by Elfriede Jelinek

December 27, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee; there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash.

“The waistband of Brigitte’s pants is so tight already, I’m surprised she doesn’t have to saw herself in half to get undressed! Her blouse, not so much: everything in there went south ages ago, but then that’s the way of all flesh. Brigitte has gone from the big top to the big bottom: in the one-ring circus of life, she is a one-woman seesaw, a no-man band.”

Number 4 is a monster of a text from our Summer 2022 issue, an extract of Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek’s Envy, translated from the German by her frequent collaborator Aaron Sayne. Envy is viscerally unhappy in the finest Jelinekian tradition. Weirdness, deep pessimism, and misery are the big tonal flavors here. We are captive to a sadistic narrator who rants and raves and betrays her characters at every turn. Asymptote’s Liam Sprod puts it perfectly: this is the quintessence of “Mitteleuropa miserablism”: festering nastiness and narrative complexity and gallows humor.

Our narrator possesses total knowledge of the inner lives of the characters who litter her monologue, (a middle-aged piano teacher; the eighteen year-old boy she lusts after; his divorced mother who works all day in the bank the next town over). Their most pathetic longings are laid bare with sadistic glee, there are conspiratorial asides, loopy digressions about the financial crash and cannibals, and awful, awful puns; after a while it dawns on you that the mockery is not only for her benefit, but also possibly for ours. You get the sense she might be trying to make us laugh—worse, she might be trying to impress us, to curry our favor, even. There’s a pervasive meta-awareness to all the scorn and mockery—these may well be repulsive gifts laid at our feet. Is she afraid of us? Should she be? Is she insane? Read and decide for yourself. It’s powerful, polarizing stuff—a narrator so finely poised between awareness and delusion—and it rewards rereading. This may well be why it climbed so high on this list.

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #5 The Hundred-Faced Actor by Edogawa Ranpo

December 26, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it . . . Was I hallucinating?

Is Edogawa Ranpo Japan’s Edgar Allan Poe or is Edgar Allan Poe America’s Edogawa Ranpo? Securing the fifth spot in our countdown of ten most-read articles in Asymptote’s pages from 2022, “The Hundred-Faced Actor” makes good on the reputation of Edogawa Ranpo–as a masterful spinner of horror stories and the father of Japanese mystery. 

If you haven’t yet read “The Hundred-Faced Actor,” translated brilliantly into the English for the first time by Lin King for our Spring 2022 issue, we invite you to step into another person’s skin in this psychological thriller, which José Garcia Escobar, Editor-at-Large for Central America, praised as “bizarre, unique, and fascinating.” Told by an older narrator to a younger audience, this discomforting tale takes us on an excursion to a banned theater featuring the titular actor of hundred likenesses—and the revelation thereafter that emerges amidst old newspapers that is tied to a slate of grave robberies. We can’t bear to give away the twists and turns, but suffice it to say that Ranpo leaves his reader intrigued and a bit queasy. Helping to peel back the layers of mystery is translator Lin King, who shared in her translator’s note: “ The ease with which Ranpo’s work can be translated across both languages and time is, I believe, a testament to the timelessness of his themes: people’s capacity for harming each other, as well as our tendency to dismiss said harm as “impossible” and “faked” when we witness it. In this sense, Ranpo’s work is perhaps more relevant today than ever.”

Here is an excerpt of the fiction:

I’d told R ahead of time that I preferred to watch from the back of the room, but for some reason he sat down in the very front row instead. When the actors came close to the edge of the stage, their faces were only about one ken apart from ours, and we could see every minute detail. But even as close as we were, we still couldn’t make out the smallest flaw in the Hundred-Faced Actor’s disguises. If he was playing a woman, he was a woman; if he was playing an old man, he was an old man—the transformation was absolute. For instance, the wrinkles: an average actor would use makeup to draw on the wrinkles; if you were to look from the side, you’d see through the illusion straight away. The sight of black ink smeared haphazardly on soft, plump cheeks is enough to make anyone chuckle. But the Hundred-Faced Actor—how did he do it?—had actual wrinkles etched into his flesh. And that wasn’t all. Every time he changed disguise, the shape of his face would also change completely. “Miraculous” didn’t cut it: depending on the situation, his face would become round or long, his eyes and mouth would grow big or small, and the very shape of his nose and ears would change dramatically. Was I hallucinating? Was there some sort of secret technique that made something like this possible? To this day, my questions remain unanswered.

In all its shapes, and across myriad cultures, literature extends our notions of what’s possible and helps us conceive a better world—in short, it is a benevolent force of good in this age of divisiveness. If you are feeling generous this gift-giving season, why not support our mission to seek out and publish the very best in world literature? It only takes three minutes to sign up to become a sustaining member or masthead member from as little as USD5 a month!

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, As Chosen by You: #6 An interview with Maureen Freely

December 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

To translate [Pamuk] was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break.

2022 was a bumper year for fascinating interviews, and one of the best of the bunch, in this humble editor’s opinion, is also our sixth most read article of the year. For our Summer issue, Assistant Interview Editor Rose Bialer sat down with acclaimed translator Maureen Freely to discuss her upbringing in Istanbul, the craft of translation, and the state of literature in Turkey today.

It takes two to make an interview really work: Bialer has a knack for perceptive questions, and Freely is lyrically articulate about her unusual upbringing. Unsurprisingly, the conversation is full of gems, such as when she talks about working with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk as the English translator of his novels. Their relationship is complex, delicate, respectful, and as Pamuk’s star rises, it grows increasingly strained. The two are “exact contemporaries” and grew up in similar parts of Istanbul, and when he writes about his childhood in the city, his memories, so different from her own, start to crowd out hers:

I love that chapter he wrote about hüzün, and the black and white city that it veiled so hauntingly. To read it is to go into a trance. To translate it was to fall under a spell that took me several years to break. I could no longer see the golden Istanbul I’d known as a child. As for the campus where I’d grown up and he’d gone to school, he passed over it in just a few paragraphs. He wrote about the library, and he wrote about skiving. When we were going through that part of my translation, I pointed to the gap between two of those paragraphs, and I told him that my whole life had vanished into that blank space.

If you’re curious about some of Freely’s output, read Irmak Ertuna Howison’s review of her translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn from the Asymptote Blog.

And if her interview piques your interest in Turkish literature, don’t forget that our twelve-year digital archive is a veritable treasure trove of gems waiting to be discovered.

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #7 An Interview with Emma Ramadan

December 23, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

What I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion.

We use our bodies to write, to type, to think, to read aloud, to listen, to gauge by our gut whether or not a sentence is right . . . When a sentence isn’t right, I feel it immediately in my back . . . what I bring to the table as a translator is precisely that I come at books from a place of emotion. That urge to translate a book comes from seeing what it can do for a reader emotionally, what it does to me emotionally, how it can impact the way people feel in the world.

For longtime followers of Asymptote, it will come as no surprise that our seventh most popular article of 2022 was Claire Mullen’s interview with Emma Ramadan from the Fall 2022 issue. An established, sensitive and sought-after translator from the French who not only interned with us way back in 2012, but also appeared in our pages throughout the years thereafter, Ramadan is the recipient of a Fulbright, NEA Translation Fellowship, the 2018 Albertine Prize, and the 2021 PEN Translation Prize.

In this interview, which easily topped our internal survey of favorite articles from the issue, Ramadan shines a spotlight on the lesser known role of the translator—that of the archive researcher, as demonstrated by her work on Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

For example, she describes following a “little tingle” into the Providence Public Library where she finally discovered the elusive French manuscript of Panics that she had been looking for, to no avail, in France—no less.

This illuminating interview surely sets her apart as a translator whose practice goes beyond mere questions of language.

After reading what she has to say in our current issue, we invite you to revisit her other appearances throughout the years as well. For just a taste:

Former Blog Editor Allison Braden interviewed Emma Ramadan in October 2020 on her translation of Meryem Alaoui’s Straight From The Horse’s Mouth, in which Ramadan reveals “something that I do with every book, actually—is that I read out loud as I translate.”

In her September 2018 conversation with former intern Mallory Truckenmiller, Ramadan discusses her dual role as character and translator in Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, and the embodiment of the act of “Translation as erotic.” ”Getting inside the author’s psyche, recreating their words,” she says, is “incredibly intimate . . . intellectually stimulating . . . sexy.” 

If you find yourself itching for more insights into translation direct from the horse’s mouth—including the opportunity to pose direct questions to translators during the live Q&A session with the author and/or the translator of the title that we conduct each month—we invite you to join the Asymptote Book Club, for which past members have read Ramadan’s translations of Alaouai and Matthieussent alongside other cutting-edge works of world literature!

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #8 My Dear You by Jasna Jasna Žmak

December 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Then we both mulled over the misfortune of words and the misfortune of the Croatian language . . .

Coming in at number 8 is Samantha Farmer’s translation of Croatian writer Jasna Jasna Žmak’s My Dear You from our Winter 2022 issue. Inspired by a possibly apocryphal vignette the narrator reads in a Barthes essay, about a tribe that removes a word from its language each time a member dies, Žmak’s pair of lovers wonder what would happen if the same rule were applied to Croatian. They dive into the thought experiment with a winning balance of whimsy and seriousness, partner briskly correcting narrator’s occasional lapses of logic, until they reach a sobering conclusion: Croatian would not be long for this world, even accounting for dialects and Serbo-Croatian, even if you included slangs and nicknames and toponyms, even if you made a new word every time a baby is born. It’s a tale as old as time, an idle what if? spiraling into an anxious oh no. But such thoughts can be bracing, and so they prove here, as they prompt a very sweet reflection on the preciousness of words:

At that moment, I realized that the idea wasn’t very romantic. I realized that I wouldn’t want even a single word to disappear from the world, not even from the list of words I hate, not even superlatives.

My Dear You, in the words of Farmer, is a “breezy romance”—a happy novel about a gay couple in the Balkans. Its happiness is precious, and softly subversive, with the knotty issues that trouble queer and Balkan fiction placed in the subtext for a change. Maybe it’s more than breezy: there’s a heft to the feelings and ideas that blurs the distinction we tend to make between weighty stories and happy ones. Follow Farmer’s recommendation and read this story aloud, preferably to your own “dear you.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #9 Two Stories from Hervé Guibert

December 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Bridget Peak

In deft strokes, these brilliant short stories illuminate the tortured inner lives of an art critic and an editor

He lived off the economy of his body. After putting it deliberately to bed, he would annihilate it, as it were, when he forced himself to wake up early to write an article. And this was what displeased him: to be—just like a laborer—a producing machine, with even his body brought to heel, his sleep transformed into a positive, mechanical phase of work, a sort of battery, a rejection of sensual pleasure.

What happens when the bodily economy of writing meets the market economy of publishing? From the Summer issue, coming in at number 9, The Photography Critic and The Editor by cult author Hervé Guibert (tr. Daniel Lupo) captured the universal anguish of sacrificing your very self to fulfill the base needs of subsistence. Written in the 1980s, Guibert’s writing feels eerily timely, bringing into focus the relentless droll of capitalism, whose insidious reach extends even to such “artistic” fields as publishing. For those of us who fancy ourselves creatives, the market economy’s suppression of artistic impulses is particularly chilling, compelling the art critic of the story to write for money as opposed to for his own satisfaction.

Guibert, who was also a filmmaker, photographer, and critic, wrote prolifically in his last year, before dying at the age of thirty six from complications of AIDS. It is not surprising then that his writing is “close to the body,” as translator Daniel Lupo points out in his interview with Meghan Racklin, our Assistant Editor for Fiction, who wrote elsewhere that she is  “a fan of Hervé Guibert’s writing generally, but hadn’t encountered him in quite this mode before; the sentences are shorter, the stories more barbed and direct. It was a pleasure to see this different gradation of his work and his commentary on artistic production, the labor of writing, and the market realities that surround the creation of art seem enormously relevant to the work of writing today.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2022, as Chosen by You: #10 The Loden Cape by Thomas Bernhard

December 19, 2022  |  in News  |  by Matthew Redman

Sordid familial backstabbing from a modern master

As this year draws to a close, Asymptote invites you to look back at the most-read articles of the year. These are the ten pieces that resonated most with our far-flung readership, the texts you read, shared and returned to in the greatest numbers. 2022 was a year of sudden jolts, strange twists and great upheaval—qualities that each of these pieces speak to in their own ways. Superb translations and insightful interviews await!

Kicking off the list is Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loden Cape” excerpted and translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. In it, an old man tells his lawyer of a plot to defraud him of his business. The conspirators? His own son and daughter-in-law, who have taken over the running of the business and have forced him to move into the rooms above the shop floor, where he cannot interfere with their plans. The conspiracy is murky and the details emerge with difficulty, not least because Humer is a haphazard raconteur. Isolation and grievance have left him erratic, prone to wandering digressions and sudden bursts of invective. Humer’s words have been recorded with near stenographic fidelity by his lawyer, Herr Enderer—whose private, scathing impressions have themselves been inserted into the story by our unnamed narrator. A delightfully torturous mise en abime results, with Humer’s rants and Enderer’s marginalia crammed together into a mess of perspectives and voices. Sentences like the following are typical:

“Suddenly, says Humer, writes Enderer, I said: no, not onto the third floor, not onto the third. That’s final! Not into those inhuman quarters! I said, Humer says, writes Enderer, not into that dismal crawlspace.”

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The bile fairly sloshes; this is all vintage Bernhard. In his translator’s note, Charlie H. Zaharoff mentions the author’s fondness of the “nested sentence”—a pretty term that draws attention to the intricate structural joists that keep the chaos in its frames. That it all fits together is a testament to the quality of Zaharoff’s translation and it’s a pleasure to unpick the strands. Unsurprisingly, the text was a favorite among Asymptote staff as well, making a series of best-of lists for our Summer issue. Our copy-editors took particular pleasure in its knottiness. Says Liam Sprod:

“[…] his nested sentences spiral out into evermore convoluted logics and precise obsessions, until the clauses build and build to an almost unsustainable mass. It is equally alienating and difficult, but that is where there is the perversity of enjoyment.” READ MORE…