The first incarnation of the literary festival Poligon was held in Mostar on September 25-27, 2015 at several different venues in the city. The decentralization of the festival and the “occupation” of Mostar’s cultural hotspots by poets and writers helped revive the city’s dormant literary scene. The festival was imagined as a space for dialogue between authors from the former Yugoslavia, an opportunity for strategic planning and strengthening of interregional literary exchange. In the words of Mirko Božić, the initiator and co-organizer of Poligon, the festival hopes to put Mostar on the region’s literary map by providing a multi-medial platform for literature, but also visual arts and music. READ MORE…
Posts filed under 'world literature'
Poligon Literary Festival: A Dispatch by Ivan Šunjić
"This year's Poligon boasts three prize winners: Krivokapić, Kaplan, and Pajević."
In this episode, we look at the concept of home; how we shape it and how it shapes us. Yardenne Greenspan takes a look at literature of trauma, bringing us work by two Israeli authors Yonatan Berg and Ron Dahan, who recount the horrors they have seen (and have been a part of) in their country, as well as Yehiel De-Nur better known by his pen name, Ka-Tzetnik 135633, a Holocaust survivor who in bitter detail recounts his time in Auschwitz. What unites these authors is their experience with LSD. Flashbacks to their traumatic experiences directly inform upon their writing and present the reader with a complex portrait of trauma. Daniel Goulden brings us a report from the Brooklyn Book Fair with recordings of Jonathan Lethem, Vivian Gornick, John Leguizamo, Cecily Wong, and Chinelo Okparanta discussing their respective homes and how that informs upon their work. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 5th June 2015: Don’t Write Your Memoir.
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happiest of Fridays, Asymptote pals! This is the first week Katrine, new blog co-editor, is on board—so let’s give her a big web-round-of-applause (tapping on the keyboard in the comments section helps). Hi Katrine! You might recognize Katrine because she was a judge for the Best Translated Book Award so, yeah—she’s a celeb.
Speaking of celebs, our former Central Asia Editor-at-Large, Alex Cigale, recently guest-edited a section on Russian poetry over at the Atlanta Review—it’s definitely worth checking out (and look for a blog interview on the guest-editing process soon). If you are a fan of the Norwegian Nobel Prizewinning bard, Tomas Transtömer, here’s a treat—his final interview given before his death, in translation. And, speaking of poetry—the New Yorker has an interesting piece on Jihadi poetry and what it means to share some words.
Multitasking artists: American playwright Tennessee Williams took up painting, once (just like American ex-President Dubya, whose outsider-art paintings I frankly prefer). And Dany Lafferière, a Haitian novelist who came of age in Canada, is the first non-French citizen to be admitted in the prestigious Académie Française.
What are your favorite authors’ favorite words? Here’s a little list. And what’s your favorite curse word—it might not have existed too long ago (except, of course, for “fart,” which has stood the test of time).
How does it feel to write and never be read? Most of us know, all too bitterly. But perennial Nobel-speculation and speculative-fiction writer, Canadian novelist/poet Margaret Atwood, has written for a library that won’t be available for another one hundred years. Will we all be screened-up e-readers by then? The Chicago Tribune thinks not. Nine hundred years later, we’re still collectively obsessed with the old Icelandic god, Loki, though. What gives?
Finally, please, and for the love of God—unless you are Karl Ove (in which case it is already too late): delete your memoir. If it’s written from a female perspective, it’s less likely to win any big prizes, anyway (ugh), unless, of course, it is the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (congrats Ali Smith for How to Be Both, this year’s prizewinner). Prizes aren’t always great, though: even judge Marina Warner (from the Man Booker!) is bemoaning the dearth of world literature available in English—good thing journals like Asymptote are working to buck that trend.
It’s that time of year again, dear readers—we at Asymptote blog are on the hunt for the freshest, funniest, most clever and on-the-pulse writing you’ve got, related to literature, translation, and the way words shape our world.
Like our journal, we are committed to publishing creative, original, and knife-sharp pieces in conversation with world literature, translation, and global culture—which means we love to read and publish original pieces and translations by writers, thinkers, and artists like you. So if you have something to say, read on—and get in touch!
Asymptote blog looks for voice, depth, and topicality in its postings. We welcome regular and one-time contributors, and publish essays, dispatches from literary events, interviews, book reviews, in-depth examinations of the world-at-literature and the world-at-large, as well as weekly new translations of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama!
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Highlights from the blog’s recent past include:
Nina Sparling takes an up-close look at food, translation, and literature—how do we read “terroir,” Emile Zola’s Les Halles, and Colette’s kicked fish?
Florian Duijsens’s “Pop Around the World” column examines “House of the Rising Sun,” well, around the world.
In The Tiff, a new recurring column, leading translators debate some of the field’s most pressing current issues.
Matthew Spencer’s on-the-edge column The Orbital Library teases out the intersections of the sci-fi genre and translation.
A conversation between two legends of Russian-to-English literary translation is uncovered—picking bones over a Russian restaurant menu, of all things.
Josh Billings discusses the often-fascinating histories behind the wheeling-and-dealing ghosts of world literature—its translators!
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If you’d like to contribute, but don’t quite know where to start, here are a few simple ways you can join the list of blog contributors:
1. We’re looking for reviewers to write about new translated or translation-related books. In your e-mail, talk about a few works you would like to review and why.
2. We’re also looking for translations, published every Tuesday in an ongoing series (predictably dubbed Translation Tuesday). In your e-mail, let us know your translation ideas, as well as your connections with authors or specific works. Permission and rights are necessary prior to publishing.
3. We’re looking for general musings related to translation, poetics, writing, the industry, current events, politics, visual arts, film—whatever fits your fancy! We’re amenable to all sorts of different writing
Variety is our bread-and-butter, so if you have something new you’re itching to say, we might just be the platform for you! Please send us a proposal with some information about you, how you’d like to contribute, and a writing or translation sample at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Rolling deadline.
One sad summer—possibly in 2010—I came across Vivian Gornick’s The Men in my Life. The book’s premise is simple. Gornick’s essays, written with characteristic clarity and poise, profile writers such as such as H.G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, and James Baldwin. From works and lives so very diverse, Gornick discerns one common thread: loathing, especially of the self, was often a potent inspiration. Loneliness, too.
The book’s title is less playful—and more literal—than one might think. Gornick’s men here are not just any men, nor just any literary men. They are, indeed, the men in her life. Each of her essays resounds as a conversation between two minds; the kind of conversation that doesn’t so much blur the distinction between life and letters as it nullifies the need for it. The book, for me, sparked a lasting fascination with essays by writers on writers—the very best of which open up the conversation to a third party, a sort of kindly voyeur: the reader.
And then a friend introduced me to Asymptote, an online journal with a whole section devoted to precisely that format. What better way to introduce writers little known in the Anglophone world than through the unique voice of another? However intimate the relationship between a writer and their mentor, colleague, rival, or translator, and however close or far apart they may be in age or geography—publishing these essays in English exposes these networks of admiration and craft, revealing tantalizing lines of further inquiry and further reading. READ MORE…
Worlds-Within-Worlds: A Testimonial
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…
Diversifying Translation
"But since any piece of literature could fit under its umbrella, 'World Literature' is not so much a genre as perspective."
In 1827, the seminal German humanist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—noting that literature was being shared across national borders of Europe and beyond—wrote the now-famous line: “the era of World Literature is at hand, everyone must do what they can to hasten its approach.”
We consider this quote the start of a global literary consciousness that shifted the conception of literature from a reflection of national character to a global phenomenon reflecting the (purportedly universal) human spirit. READ MORE…
Last night, at an intimate jazz bar hidden away on one of Berlin’s many courtyards, Readux books presented its gorgeous second set of books. Hardly larger than the next generation of cell phones, these little books are designed for brief escapes, mini-breathers away from your screen (although they’re of course also available as ebooks, who are we kidding?).
There were readings, short discussions, and delicious and plentiful vodka tonics, spring was very much in the air—it’s no coincidence that these books do well on lunch-break benches underneath Berlin’s tender first blossomings. READ MORE…