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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Forks Out: Our Ninth Anniversary Issue Is Here!

January 16, 2020 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

To celebrate, here's a huuge salad with a 31-country flavor spectrum, Forrest Gander, Kurdish Poetry, and the results of our essay contest!

Asymptote’s Winter 2020 edition has landed, and it concocts “A Fantastic Salad” with every ingredient you could wish for. Start with a double serving of interviews with Forrest Gander and Cecilia Vicuña, then get a bite of drama by Federico García Lorca, alongside new work from 31 countries. Our special of the day is Kurdish Poetry, honoring a people imperiled by Trump’s perfidy.

Discover our three contest winners chosen by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, each celebrating an author deserving of wider recognition on the world stage. Taking top honors, Jonathan Cohen introduces Dominican poet Pedro Mir, the Whitman of the Caribbean. Runners-up Lara Norgaard and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba wrote about Indonesian writer Putu Oka Sukanta and Argentinian novelist Alberto Laiseca respectively. Together, they walk home with $1,000 in prizes.

Culinary traditions have a long history. Taurus loves “to cook up some delicious,” according to Gnaomi Siemens’ modernized Old Scots Horoscope. Bai Juyi’s minimal lyrics in eighth-century Chinese are also transformed by Joey Schwartzman for contemporary sensibilities. Continuing this issue’s exploration of colloquial modernity, Alice Inggs transposes Nathan Trantaal’s Kaapse Afrikaans into non-standard English for a poignant glimpse into South African poverty. Some Artists from Iran give us “The Visual Language of Protest,” a unique document of turbulent times, while Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas describes his own nation’s suffering through poetic paradox: “I am thirsty water.” Our own Lou Sarabadzic reviews an important new anthology Poetry of the Holocaust, remembering yet more suffering not to be forgotten. READ MORE…

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Lee Yew Leong

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Barbeque for Underground Poetry: Death and Life in the Subaltern Circles of the Buenos Aires Literary Scene

February 25, 2019 | in Essays | by Lara Norgaard

It was a space where anyone could perform anything, where anyone could consume anything, where the bathroom was not for the faint of heart.

Image credit: Andrés Toledo Margalef

It was hard to say goodbye to El Pacha. Tomorrow is the day, they would say, and then they’d say the same thing the next day, until half a month had passed. Finally, one day, they went into the patio and looked up at the unusual tree, its old roots amassed in concrete, and tore it to the ground. Anyone who wanted to could take a limb. Later, they returned to take chunks out from the wall in the library. On the final day—at least, what is remembered as the final day—they started throwing all of El Pacha’s innards out onto the street: decrepit couches, decorative broken TVs, pieces of wood, empty cases of beer, everything, out into the tiny alley that lies on the border between the neighborhoods of Villa Crespo and Almagro. They sat on the couches and, as in a cremation or medieval execution, lit the pile of debris on fire. They took out sausages and large cuts of meat from their bags and began to roast them over the licking flames. With the exception of that unusual feast, they spent the rest of the funereal night doing what they always had done: they drank, played guitar, and took turns reading their poetry aloud.

El Pacha was an important space in the Argentinian underground poetry scene until it closed roughly one year ago, in March 2018. It had operated illegally out of the second floor of a spindly residential apartment building; participants would be informed of weekend events through an email listserv, Facebook pages, or word of mouth. Though the space passed away, El Pacha still serves as an example of how writing is a community process and provides a window into how politics and economics mold the unique structure of Buenos Aires’ literary scene.

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 27, 2017 | in Dispatches, News | by Flora Brandl, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Sarah Moses

Updates from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and Austria

Would you believe we have already reached the end of January? We’ve already brought you reports from eleven different nations so far this year, but we’re thrilled to share more literary news from South America and central Europe this week. Our Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, brings us news of literary greats’ passing, while her new colleague Maíra Mendes Galvão covers a number of exciting events in Brazil. Finally, a University College London student, Flora Brandl, has the latest from German and Austrian.

Asymptote’s Argentina Editor-at-Large, Sarah Moses, writes about the death of two remarkable authors:

The end of 2016 was marked by the loss of Argentinian writer Alberto Laiseca, who passed away in Buenos Aires on December 22 at the age of seventy-five. The author of more than twenty books across genres, Laiseca is perhaps best known for his novel Los Sorias (Simurg, 1st edition, 1998), which is regarded as one of the masterworks of Argentinian literature.

Laiseca also appeared on television programs and in films such as El artista (2008). For many years, he led writing workshops in Buenos Aires, and a long list of contemporary Argentinian writers honed their craft with him.

Some two weeks after Laiseca’s passing, on January 6, the global literary community lost another great with the death of Ricardo Piglia, also aged seventy-five. Piglia was a literary critic and the author of numerous short stories and novels, including Respiración artificial (Pomaire, 1st edition, 1980), which was published in translation in 1994 by Duke University Press.

The first installments of Piglia’s personal diaries, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi, were recently released by Anagrama and are the subject of the film 327 cuadernos, by Argentinian filmmaker Andrés Di Tella. The film was shown on January 26 as part of the Museo Casa de Ricardo Rojas’s summer series “La literatura en el cine: los autores,” which features five films on contemporary authors and poets, including Witold Gombrowicz and Alejandra Pizarnik.

On January 11, the U.S. press New Directions organized an event at the bookstore Eterna Cadencia in anticipation of the February release of A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero and translated by Frances Riddle. Guerriero discussed the book, which follows a malambo dancer as he trains for Argentina’s national competition, as well as her translation of works of non-fiction with fellow journalist and author Mariana Enriquez. Enriquez’s short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire (Hogarth), translated by Megan McDowell, will also appear in English in February.