Posts featuring Eliot Weinberger

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 11, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Asymptote, MARGENTO, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary updates from Ireland, Hong Kong, and a special on the Nobel laureate!

A world of news in this week’s roundup! From Ireland, discover the ambitious and innovative work of Macha Press, a collective pursuing a literature that is “international and intergenerational”; from Hong Kong and China, the fifteenth edition of the renowned International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong highlights the topic of translation; and from the Asymptote team as a whole, catch up on Han Kang, this year’s Nobel laureate in Literature.

The Asymptote Team, Reporting from our Fortnightly Airmail

And the winner of the Nobel is . . . Han Kang! After Annie Ernaux, the latest female winner in 2022, Han Kang is the eighteenth woman—and the first from South Korea—to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee’s citation commends her “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Her works confront acutely difficult subjects with a rare fearlessness and sensitivity, whether it be the personal, as in the Booker International Prize-winning The Vegetarian—a feminist classic of modern Korean literature that offers a powerful rebuke to a world that too often silences women—or the historical in Human Acts, where she depicts the Gwangju student massacre of 1980. In an exclusive essay for our Winter 2016 issue, her longtime English translator Deborah Smith describes the impenetrable potency of her style in this book: “Whenever I translate her work, I find myself arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there . . . the images themselves are so powerfully evoked by the Korean that I sometimes find myself searching the original text in vain, convinced that they were in there somewhere, as vividly explicit as they are in my head.”

After checking out our coverage of her latest novel in English translation, Greek Lessons, dive into more Korean Literature in the two Special Features we organized in partnership with LTI Korea, available for free in our Spring 2018 and the Winter 2023 editions.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland

One of the most significant events in recent Irish letters was the establishment of Macha Press in August and the subsequent announcement regarding its first two book launches, the debut already scheduled for October 17. Macha Press is a collective endeavour recently founded by seven poets with wide-ranging practices and experience: Siobhan Campbell, Ruth Carr, Natasha Cuddington, Shannon Kuta Kelly, Kathleen McCracken, Alanna Offield, and Lorna Shaughnessy. As stated in their first newsletter; “all founders are currently based on the island of Ireland and share a vision for the press that is international and intergenerational.” According to Lorna Shaughnessy, one of the founders, a poet-translator (featured in Asymptote Spring 2020), and a personal friend of mine, the aim of the press has always been to produce two books of poetry a year, one by an established or historical poet whose work the editors feel merits recovery, and one by an emerging poet.

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Reaching for a New Home: An Interview with Alexander Dickow

May 23, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

I’d rarely encountered a work that seemed to draw at once on so many different registers and languages; it’s an incredibly heteroglossic work.

Longtime readers may remember our Close Approximations international translation contest, which saw Asymptote give away more than USD20,000 to twenty-five best emerging translators (over four iterations in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019)—some of whose translations we promoted to a wider readership through our partnership with The Guardian. One of my thrills as editor-in-chief is to see texts that we have championed—with money we raised by ourselves, or out of our own pocket, since we are not supported by any institution—find permanent homes with publishing houses. Among these is Alexander Dickow’s translation of Sylvie Kandé’s The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, which judge Eliot Weinberger picked as runner-up in the inaugural contest back in 2014, and which was finally released as a book with Wesleyan University Press three months ago, eight years after its debut on our website. Naturally, I was curious about the journey Dickow, also a former Communications Manager between 2017 to 2020, undertook to publication. Here is the conversation that ensued after I reached out to him.   

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

How did you first encounter Sylvie Kandé’s poetry and what drew you to translate her The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore?

In fact, poet Susan Maurer posted an excerpt on a listserv—WOMPO, the Women in Poetry listserv, I believe. I’d rarely encountered a work that seemed to draw at once on so many different registers and languages; it’s an incredibly heteroglossic work. I was impressed enough with the excerpt that I sought The Neverending Quest out shortly after, and then reached out to Sylvie to compliment her on such a remarkable epic. We entered into conversation, and I ended up translating the portion for Asymptote’s contest without the intention of translating the whole book—but then got drawn into the project further, and decided to tackle the entire thing.

Much like, say, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Neverending Quest offers readers an alternate history—in this case, what would have happened had explorers dispatched in pirogues by Malian Emperor Abubakar discovered America before Christopher Columbus; in the final canto, though, there is a fascinating pivot: from the ordeal of the fourteenth-century voyager to that of the twenty-first-century migrant crossing treacherous waters. What do you think the poet is trying to achieve with this?  

As for the comparison with modern-day migrants, it postulates that Abubakar’s outsized heroism (dangerously close to pure folly) is similar to the heroism of these men and women searching for their destiny. A common misperception is that African migration happens because of economic or political desperation. But in fact, that migration, which mostly happens within the African continent, is more a kind of initiation, an Adventure! rather than an act of desperation, and that’s true even when economic or political hardship may be present also. Alassane, the migrant of whose name we are unsure and whose name echoes that of Ulysses, is very much this kind of hero: we see him leaping into the ocean to swim for shore, evading the coast guard and deportation. Does he make it to shore? I don’t know! But he is likely to look more and more like a hero in days which will see huge numbers of climate refugees striving for a home. Alassane is reaching for a new home. Abubakar also, or the people of Mali who accompany him, in their own way. Aren’t we all?

I want to give credit where credit is due: the above response comes as much from hearing Sylvie speak, and from conversations with her, as it does from my own imagination.

The edition that Wesleyan University Press released three months ago sets the French original with your English translation side by side, and it was great to be able to compare the two. It’s thrilling to see how much you were able to get across in the English translation—plus, it also sings! What were some of the challenges you faced in the translation process? I’m eager to find out about the nuances that were perhaps sacrificed, in your opinion. 

Nuances I sacrificed: at the end of certain “laisses” (groups of verses of unequal length that constitute the epic’s segments, modeled on the laisses of the Song of Roland for instance), Sylvie turns to metrical verse. I decided that would be a bit jarring in some cases for Anglophone readers. In other works, such as my translation of Max Jacob’s Central Laboratory (Wakefield Press, forthcoming around July 2022), I translate in metrical verse, as well as I can. But it didn’t seem worth the risks in this case. I waffle about whether that was the right decision, and still can’t really decide. Another thing that doesn’t translate as well are the Africanisms of the French, borrowed from linguistic habits of West Africans who speak French, particularly in Senegal. I did my best, but there are obviously no direct equivalents. The same ultimately goes for some ordinary French colloquialisms—slang and the like is always challenging in translation! READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 3, 2021  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Dive into our wide-ranging tenth-anniversary issue with our blog editors.

In ten years of Asymptote, we’ve brought you a stunning array of texts, from writers familiar to those brought out newly into the light, words of conviction, ardor, invention, and precision have graced our pages, and our history-making Winter 2021 issue is no different. Featuring three new languages—Cebuano, Kahmiri, and Marathi—and deploying works from thirty-one countries in total, we are additionally featuring a curated selection of writings in our Brave New World Literature feature, which presents a myriad of talented voices navigating and graphing the changing landscape of world literature. Here, our blog editors are rounding up their selections of the pieces of the Winter 2021 edition that ignite and inspire.

The notion of a brave new world literature indicates—beyond the trepidations upon coming towards the unknown—the writer’s own, omnipresent fears about their own craft. In writing, one is always fighting against the futility of the word, how it falters to encompass even a single sensation, let alone the impatient fabric of the milieu. Each piece of writing is measured up against its time to determine its true subject, and the works included in our landmark Winter 2021 issue has to bear the comparison to a moment in history that comes close to being immeasurable, both in the frenzied proceedings of markable events, and in the psychic tracks it has carved across the globe, as each person was forced to consider—in distinctly unequal polarities of rumination or emergency—what it means to have lived through, to be living through, such a time.

This seamless interchange between writer, reader, and the present shared between them—the writing must level all three terrains while insulating its cargo of ideas. As I move through this marvelous gallery of texts that the latest issue of Asymptote gathers, I was struck by the various and telling constellations they formed with this precise moment.

In Jan Němec’s excerpts from Ways of Writing About Love, there’s a beguiling—and somewhat precious—self-conscious tone, rendered with grace by David Short, that runs through the three proses, almost as if the writer has already recognized that the bold display on the awning of the text—those two feared and wasted words, writing and love—has already pushed the language deeply into that murky deluge where only those two most indulgent peoples, writers and lovers, would willingly submerge themselves. But as the oral rhythm of the story taps itself out (Němec and Short are to be commended for their preternatural sense of how the voice paces itself), and the symphony of the mind conducts its singular cacophony, one comes to decipher its inner textures, in which writing and love are scrutinized for the particularly heightened quality one achieves during such occupations—attention to how time, and knowledge, and sensuality congregate. READ MORE…

We’re Reached Our Milestone Tenth Anniversary! 🎉

January 28, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

And we’re celebrating with a new issue (and some very big names in world literature)!

Dear reader,

I’m thrilled to present “Brave New World Literature,” our special milestone edition marking ten full years of curating the very best in contemporary letters. Highlights include an exclusive last interview with James Salter conducted before he died in 2015, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Alain Mabanckou, as well as a trio of essays by intellectual heavyweight Eliot Weinberger, former Granta editor John Freeman, and frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang—all suggesting a “culturally multidirectional” way forward for the next decade.

In addition to featuring a “writer’s writer” (the aforementioned James Salter), we’re proud to debut in English a “true poet’s poet” (the Mexican Max Rojas) in a roster that also includes poet superstars Najwan Darwish and Carlos de Assumpção. Elsewhere, fellow Brazilian writer Adelice Souza and Hungarian author Anna Mécs give us a pair of stunning fictions in which women perform (or postpone) their deaths, while our first nonfiction lineup under new Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki sees a fascinating pseudo-scientific colonial document answered with a modern memoir of Egyptian politics. In light of the recent protests by Navalny supporters all across Russia, Artur Solomonov’s drama—also about enacting death, while portraying the machinery of state propaganda—could not be more timely: The play was in fact considered so politically inflammatory that it has only ever been staged underground. All of this is illustrated by talented guest artist the Australia-based Naomi Segal. READ MORE…

Something Like Delight: An Interview with So J. Lee

August 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The lines I love most in Korean are often the hardest to translate into English. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous language pairing.

For So J. Lee, 2020 has been a year of growth. Just two years after their first translations were published, the Seoul-based writer and translator became Modern Poetry in Translation’s current Writer-in-Residence, recently released the fourth issue of chogwa (their quarterly e-zine showcasing multiple translations of a single poem), and will publish their full-length translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla next month, followed by Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon and Lee Soho’s Catcalling in 2021.

For an emerging translator working in the midst of a global pandemic, Lee’s list of publications is undeniably impressive. But one of the many things that 2020 seems intent on teaching us is that growth can no longer be measured solely in terms of productivity and output. In correspondence and conversation, it’s clear that So J. Lee has already embraced a new kind of metric, acknowledging growing pains and citing introspections, laughter, and everyday pleasures as equally significant indicators of their progression. This was especially evident when I contacted Lee in June, keen to learn more about their forthcoming books, zine, bilingual events, and drag performance. I wanted to begin our interview with a discussion around the imminent publication of Unexpected Vanilla, but instead, Lee asked if we could start the conversation with an unusual announcement . . .

—Sarah Timmer Harvey, July 2020

So J. Lee (SJL): Can I start this interview by announcing my hibernation this winter?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course! Can I ask why you intend to hibernate?

SJL: When Kim Tae-ri was asked about her plans after shooting a film and a TV series back-to-back in 2018, she said, “I plan to enter hibernation. I grew ten cm over the winter break prior starting high school. Let’s see what happens this time.” I love her casual re-articulation of rest as an opportunity for growth. I mean, rest is also rest. I don’t want to glamorize busyness, in the slim chance anyone sees me as a glamorous being. My vibe is more Pizza Rat anyway.

STH: Apart from the obvious pressures facing the world at the moment, what has kept you from resting over the past few months?

SJL: Grief. Ineffable grief and rage. Somehow we have to rest and allow for joy amidst it all. I’m still practicing. 

I’m animated by my three forthcoming books, Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021), all of which I reflect on in my recent essay, “Not Exactly a Sister.” I translate women writers who write about women for women, so the word Unni became an organic through-line for introducing their works all at once.

As Modern Poetry in Translation’s Writer-in-Residence, I’m also hosting a virtual workshop on Lee Jenny’s concrete poem “Space Boy Wearing a Skirt.” After that will be my interview with Lee Soho and the fifth issue of chogwa!

STH: Wow, you have been busy! Can we talk about your translation of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, which is set to be published by Tilted Axis next month?  In 2019, Asymptote published several poems from the collection, including my favourite, “Erasable Seeds.” The poem describes a connection between two people as “a newly thickening forest” grown from “small seeds.” I think about that poem a lot. Like most of Lee Hyemi’s work, it is incredibly sensual and also reminds me of that moment when you first read a poem or line in someone’s poetry or fiction that’s so striking, you know that you just have to translate it. Do you remember which line of Unexpected Vanilla did that for you?

SJL: I was assigned in a translation workshop to translate a poet I’d never read before, and I wanted to try someone younger than Heo Su-gyeong, whose poems I’d tried translating as an undergrad. Then a title caught my eye: Unexpected Vanilla. I read the poem “Femdom” in the final section and realized that this young Korean woman was writing surrealistically about kink! I wanted to tell all my friends about it, which remains my biggest motivation to translate.

I’ve written about the Unni line in “Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” so many times already, but it’s simply iconic. Plus, Lee Hyemi wrote a variation of that line in my copy of the book: “We must be one person, cunningly divergent. Sharing an intimate language.” I’ll always remember the way she pulled out a stamp shaped like a fish and blended multiple colors before pressing it to the page. READ MORE…

Winter 2014: A Rookie Among Giants

September 13, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Alexander Dickow

Living now under the shadow of Trump, the contents of the issue seem even more desperately near to us.

It takes a while for the blog to hit its stride. Editing to a quarterly schedule is different than editing to a daily one, we quickly discover. It does not help that both ‘founding’ blog editors jump ship within three months (Nick’s elegiac last post goes up on 30 October; Zack’s 31 December). Fortunately, the rest rally and get us through. (One bright spot from that time is Patty Nash’s breezy roundups—a breath of fresh air.) Five weeks after it inaugurates, Aditi Machado’s post on the blog gets picked up by Poetry’s Harriet Blog, joining mentions in BBC Culture and The Guardian. The Guardian article gives a nod to Asymptote’s first-ever London event in January 2014, also the first of many multi-continental events in honor of our 3rd anniversary. These go on to include panels and readings in New York, Zagreb, Boston, Philadelphia, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sydney over the next three months. A point of pride: determined to organize an event in Asia, I somehow manage to pull off a reading without a single team member on the ground, thanks to NYU Shanghai, contributors Eleanor Goodman and Eun Joo Kim, and a friend who happens to pass through. In New York, under real threat of snowpocalypse, Asymptote supporters Eliot Weinberger, Robyn Creswell, Idra Novey, Jeffrey Yang, and Daniella Gitlin all show up to our anniversary event at Housing Works emceed by then Assistant Managing Editor, Eric M. B. Becker, to read alongside Cory Tamler, first prize-winner of our inaugural Close Approximations translation contest (as written up in WWB Daily’s dispatch here). Here to get you excited for the Winter 2014 issue (featuring, among others, a translator’s note that I got J. M. Coetzee to write) is Alexander Dickow, runner-up to that very contest and Asymptote Communications Manager since April 2017. But, first, check out Winter 2014’s issue trailer—probably our best ever—by then Video Producer Sarah Chan.

I knew of Asymptote since its inception in 2011, but it was only in January 2014 that I was named runner-up in the first edition of Asymptote’s Close Approximations translation contest. That contest has had a lasting impact on my work: I later won a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant to finish translating Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, which was first showcased in Asymptote and is now under consideration by a major publisher. Evoking the Winter 2014 issue of Asymptote, then, cannot not be a little about my own relationship to Asymptote, even though I was an eager young rookie among the issue’s giants— J. M. Coetzee, Jana Beňová, and Michael Hofmann, to name a few. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: #30Issues30Days Edition

September 10, 2018  |  in Multimedia, Podcast  |  by Dominick Boyle

Dig through our archive with Dominick Boyle, who unearths gems from South India, Chile, Sweden and more!

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In celebration of Asymptote’s milestone 30th issue, Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle dives into the archives to uncover some of his favorite recordings from the archive. In this episode, he revisits poetry set to music in Tamil and Spanish from Aandaal and Enrique Winter, and snarky telephone conversations with a whole city by way of voice-mail from Jonas Hassen Khemiri. He also spotlights: the touching suicide notes left by Jean Améry, which reveal 3 different sides of a man in his death; experimental Vietnamese poetry by Bùi Chát, which comes to life read by translator Jack J. Huynh; and Owen Good’s translations of Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth, which Eliot Weinberger awarded first prize in our inaugural Close Approximations contest. Take a walk down memory lane—this time with your headphones on!

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Translating Indigenous Mexican Writers: An Interview with Translator David Shook

October 12, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translations  |  by Ryan Mihaly

"I suspect many casual bookstore readers might not know how many languages are still spoken in Mexico. The sheer diversity is astounding."

David Shook is a poet, translator, and filmmaker in Los Angeles, where he serves as Editorial Director of Phoneme Media, a non-profit publishing house that exclusively publishes literature in translation. Their newest book is Like a New Sun, a collection of contemporary indigenous Mexican poetry, which Shook co-edited along with Víctor Terán.

Seven translators in total—Shook, Adam W. Coon, Jonathan Harrington, Jerome Rothenberg, Clare Sullivan, Jacob Surpin, and Eliot Weinberger—translated poets from six different languages: Juan Gregorio Regino (from the Mazatec), Mikeas Sánchez (Zoque),  Juan Hernández Ramírez (Huasteca Nahuatl), Enriqueta Lunez (Tsotsil), Víctor Terán (Isthmus Zapotec), and Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya). I corresponded with Shook over gchat to speak with him about the project.

***

Today is Columbus Day, a controversial holiday in the United States. Several cities have recently adopted Indigenous Peoples’ Day over Columbus Day, clearly a victory for recognizing indigenous cultures in the United States. Which leaves me wondering: how are the indigenous Mexican writers recognized today in the Mexican literary landscape?

As someone who regularly visits Mexican literary festivals and also translates from the Spanish, I’ve observed the under-appreciation of indigenous writers firsthand. Mexico’s indigenous communities make up 10 to 14% of its total population, and you certainly don’t find anywhere near that percentage of literature being published in Mexico today. READ MORE…