Translation Tuesday: “Home Country” by Ksenia Rogozhnikova

May 28, 2024 | in Translations | by Nina Murray

the thieving babushka / carries her loot / down the freezing streets

This Translation Tuesday, we are honored to present a poem by the Kazakh poet Ksenia Rogozhnikova, deftly translated by the Ukrainian poet Nina Murray. With wry humor and plainspoken kindness, the poem’s unnamed speaker bears witness to the antics of a “little match girl” far more defiant and vivacious than her namesake, and to the theft of a roll of toilet paper by an old woman in a shopping center. Together, these images form a subtly generous portrait of urban life, a flicker of warmth against winter’s chill.

Home Country

the little match girl
sets things on fire
with the tiny bombs
she throws
under people’s feet

I dive into a mall
to get warm
let an elderly woman
ahead
into the bathroom

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 27, 2020 | in News | by Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our Section Editors pick their favorites from the Winter 2020 issue!

We thought of the Winter 2020 issue as a fantastic salad, surprising and delightful in its compact variety. We’re willing to concede, however, that it is a large salad; the challenges it presents might be more approachable if they’re coming from a buffet. With so many delights and delectables on offer, where does one begin? Perhaps, we humbly suggest, with these selections from our section editors, which include a Federico García Lorca play and an Eduardo Lalo essay.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Kurdish Feature Editor:

Brought into English by Caitlin O’Neil (a former team member, I’m thrilled to say), Corinne Hoex’s sensuous—and sensational—Gentlemen Callers is full of exquisite treats, rivaling Belgian compatriot Amélie Nothomb’s wit, humor, and imagination. Although Asymptote makes it its mission to move beyond world literature’s Eurocentric focus, it’s gems like this that remind me that there’s still much to discover from smaller, less heard-from countries within Europe. I would consider it scandalous if Hoex’s fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road. From the Poetry section, Gnaomi Siemens accompanies her sexy, updated take of Ephemeris (horoscopes from the 16th century) with a thought-provoking note: “Horoscopes (hora / time, skopos / observation) are ephemeral. Translation is an observation of time and a holding up of the writings and ideas of one time to observe them in a new temporal context.” Pair with Joey Schwartzman’s 21st-century renderings of T’ang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Whip-smart and bittersweet, these timeless poems about transience will stay with you for at least a little while.

From Sam Carter, Criticism Section Editor:

This issue’s Criticism section introduces us to two poetry collections that embody the Asymptote mission by refusing to be contained by borders, whether linguistic or geographic. Our very own Lou Sarabadzic takes us through the important work done by Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology, which contains poems from ninety-three writers and nineteen languages in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of this terrible atrocity. And Emma Gomis reviews Time, Etel Adnan’s latest exploration of temporality and poetic form that arose from a series of postcards exchanged with the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar. READ MORE…

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 20, 2020 | in News | by Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Winter 2020 issue!

Asymptote celebrates its ninth anniversary with the Winter 2020 issue, featuring new work from thirty-one countries and twenty-two languages (including three new ones: Kurmanci, Old Scots, and Serbo-Croatian)! To help you navigate through such an abundance, our blog editors reveal their favorite pieces below:

Each issue of Asymptote brings with it a utopian vision—that many nations (thirty-one, in this case) may share a page, with each literature distinct but gathered in communion, resulting in a chorus that somehow does not subjugate any single voice. As always, I am astounded by the way one is allowed to travel along the cartography of these collected texts, and how vividly they summon the worlds available in their language.

For a while now I’ve been entertaining the thought that the first step to harnessing language (if there is such a thing) is to distrust it, and so was stopped short by the first line of Eduardo Lalo’s “Unbelieve/Unwrite”:

Unbelieve. Unbelieving the world means questioning the structures that sustain it.

And a couple lines on:

Unbelieving so that writing will wash ashore, like a gift.

These writings are the result of a great loss that causes one to take solace in nothingness, and seems particularly resonant today in the age in which traditional anchors—nationality, religion, family, certainty in our survival as a species—are quickly being drained of their staying power. Arriving in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s devastation, Lalo seeks to dismantle our reliance on infrastructures both physical and psychological, while simultaneously being brilliantly aware of life’s unassailable fullness. Lalo continuously returns to the art of writing as a source of stability and control, and in doing so affirms the act of writing as a way of approaching the world, absolving the art of its mystery but instilling it with conviction. It is bleak and somehow victorious. READ MORE…

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Translation Tuesday: “At Least Here, It’s Warm” by Guram Rcheulishvili

January 29, 2019 | in Translations | by Trevor Durham

“There was the sound of smacking lips: he threw the blanket over his head, but still, he heard it. His heart ached.”

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Guram Rcheulishvili tells the story of Vaja Jandieri, alone, in an unfamiliar environment, as he attempts to ski in Bakuriani, Georgia. Excitement and then ennui set in amongst the snowy slopes where the people speak Ossetian, and are from another world unlike Vaja’s . . .

Vaja Jandieri was now sitting in a small, warm room. He could hardly ever find such a room. This year, Bakuriani was extremely cold. Thin walls were unable to stop these freezing chills. Vaja was sitting, pleased that he had found such a warm room. The housekeeper set the tea to boil as a small boy memorized his algebra formulas. The door suddenly flew open, as a woman, his Ossetian neighbor, burst in.

“This year is so cold,” she said.

“Yes, woman, the walls aren’t able to stop it,” said the housekeeper.

“Mom,” said the boy as he closed his work, “in school it’s so cold, tha-”

“At least here, it’s warm,” said Vaja.

Announcing the Winter 2018 Issue of Asymptote

January 18, 2018 | in News | by Asymptote

Celebrate our 7th anniversary with this new issue, gathering never-before-published work from 30 countries!

We interrupt our regular programming to announce the launch of Asymptote‘s Winter 2018 issue! Here’s a tour of some of the outstanding new work from 30 different countries, which we’ve gathered under the theme of “A Different Light”:

In “Aeschylus, the Lost,” Albania’s Ismail Kadare imagines a “murky light” filtering through oiled window paper in the ancient workroom of the father of Greek tragedy. A conversation with acclaimed translator Daniel Mendelsohn reveals the “Homeric funneling” behind his latest memoir. Polish author Marta Zelwan headlines our Microfiction Special Feature, where meaning gleams through the veil of allegory. Light glows ever brighter in poet Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s “syntactically frenetic” “Arachnid Sun”; and in Erika Kobayashi’s fiction, nuclear devastation blazes from Hiroshima to Fukushima.

The light around us is sometimes blinding, sometimes dim, “like a dream glimpsed through a glass that’s too thick,” as Argentine writer Roberto Arlt puts it, channeling Paul to the Corinthians in The Manufacturer of Ghosts. Something dreamlike indeed shines in César Moro’s Equestrian Turtle, where “the dawn emerges from your lips,” and, as if in echo, Mexican writer Hubert Matiúwàa prophecies for his people’s children “a house made of dawn.” With Matiúwàa’s Mè’phàà and our first works from Amharic and Montenegrin, we’ve now published translations from exactly 100 languages!

We hope you enjoy reading this milestone issue as much as everyone at Asymptote enjoyed putting it together. If you want to see us carry on for years to come, consider becoming a masthead member or a sustaining member today. Spread the word far and wide!

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Translation Tuesday: “Icelanders” by Vanda Rozenbergová

May 23, 2017 | in Translations | by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

But it’s wintertime, it’s been snowing a lot and as long as the weather stays like this the sky will be the same every day.

Shortlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, it will not be unfair to say that Vanda Rozenbergová is a master of the short story form. In this story, she explores domestic tensions and dashed dreams through the skillful use of a child narrator.

I was in my room playing with my toy cars but Becko kept taking my black sports car away so I had to give him a slap on the hand, Stop it, Becko! I said. I’d been working on a racetrack for my lorries but because it was a Sunday I had to listen to my mum cursing ‘cause the kitchen is next to my room. “Bloody Sundays,” she said, then I heard a pot lid bang on the floor and a knife strike a chopping board. I used to think she was crying but she was just moaning aloud about having to cook. “I’m as lonely as little orphan Annie,” she kept shouting but Daddy and I had no idea who little orphan Annie was. And there’s another thing I don’t get: why does my mum keep doing stuff she hates, why does she keep roasting meat, peeling potatoes, grating carrots, baking and frying, and why does she always clean up afterwards but never sit down with us to eat and instead say she’s had her fill, having breathed in all the cooking smells. And then in the morning she pulls my trousers up to my ears, bundles me into the car and starts doing her hair as we’re driving and tells me with hairpins in her mouth to eat all my sandwiches at school ‘cause she made them for me even though she didn’t feel like it, she hates making sandwiches, as if I didn’t know she hates making them. I’m sure by next year I’ll be making my own sandwiches. But why does she keep on doing stuff she hates? Why doesn’t she just stay in bed and rest and receive visitors, why doesn’t she give me, Daddy, and Becko a hug and ask us to bring her a cup of tea?

When I ask her about it she blames it all on Daddy, but he’s totally not like her, he loves to lounge around and crack jokes, never in a hurry to go anywhere, not even to work. All my friends like him, and sometimes they go to see him for a chat ‘cause he works in the kebab shop next to our school. He doesn’t serve people at the counter, he’s at the back prepping vegetables. He brings home kebabs and doughnuts but Mum doesn’t eat that kind of stuff so it never makes her happy. Becko is not my real brother, I’ve made him up. I told Dad about him and he said that it was OK, that there was this other world and Becko does exist there. When he said that he was lying on a rug under the window looking at the sky, and then he told me a secret, which is that sometimes on his way home from work he stops by the hospital to see his friend who’s sick. I didn’t know what to say so I asked if at least his friend had a nice room, if it had a telly and stuff like that. Of course there’s a telly, said Daddy, and went over to the next room to put some Icelanders on the stereo. Because my Dad loves Icelanders. He loves Icelandic music and Icelandic people.