Posts featuring László Krasznahorkai

What’s New in Translation: September 2024

September 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Higgs, Fani Avramopoulou, and Henry Gifford

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.

From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.

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Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.

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Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

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What’s New in Translation: January 2023

January 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Matthew Redman

The latest reads from Hungary, Sweden, and Kurdistan!

2023 is already setting up to be one of the most wide-ranging and bounteous years for literary purveyors of the world, with an abundance of exciting works slated for publication. This month, we’re presenting three texts that enrapture the imaginative prospects of a world in translation: László Krasznahorkai subverts every expectation for the travelogue, Bachtyar Ali braids storytelling and truth-seeking, and Maria Adolfsson reasserts feminist presence in the male-dominated mystery genre. 

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A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions/Serpent’s Tail, 2023

Review by Matthew Redman, Digital Editor

László Krasznahorkai is among Hungary’s most feted writers in the Anglophone world. His works, characterised by inordinately long, slow sentences which chart the depths of obsession and madness, have earned him a cult of devoted readers and international acclaim, while his translators—Georges Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet—are lauded writers in their own right. However, his most recent novel to be translated into English, A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East, is an intriguing departure from the works that have made his name. The vast sentences he is known for are intact, but they are used in service of a radically different tonal palette. Where his other novels use length to induce futility and despair, A Mountain to the North explores the beatific, languorous, and even beautiful possibilities of extreme syntax.

Set in Japan, the novel takes the form of a travelogue—albeit with the sheer mass of textual detail slowing the journey to an ooze. Strip this away and you find comparatively simple structural bones: a train deposits us at a deserted platform somewhere in Kyoto, we leave the station and wander half-lost through empty streets until we arrive at our destination, a Buddhist monastery in which we remain for most of the novel, touring the grounds and slowly penetrating the interiors. It is a balmy late afternoon, there are beautiful gardens all around, the monastery is silent and exquisite. This part of Kyoto is almost entirely bereft of inhabitants, but the emptiness is one of the rare details that Krasznahorkai chooses not to linger on. In fact, the absence is fortuitous, because the novel is uninterested in people; what consumes the author instead is the immutable, near indescribable beauty of things wrought in accordance with Japanese tradition. With the streets and monastery empty, the prose is freely devoted to the description of his sublime surroundings. Plants in their carefully tended gardens; the shrine’s architecture—their calculations and materials, the minutiae of their construction; the nigh-divinely sagacious prescriptions according to which every detail within the monastery was planned, planted, and built; the commitment at every turn to the tireless refinement of perfection; and above all the feel of all of this beauty—the texture and the grain, and the effect on the soul.

Each chapter houses a single enormous sentence that describes and extols a single beautiful object (a gate, a shrine, a statue) or craft (carpentry, gardening), and ends only when Krasznahorkai deems the subject exhausted. As demanding and unconventional as this novel is, it is not difficult in the way that experimental fiction is often thought to be.  For all its density, there is a deceptive simplicity, even a solicitousness to Krasznahorkai’s prose. His sentences are slow enumerations in service of a simple message that never changes: the monastery and everything within it are perfect, and it could only ever have been so, for it is all the product of patient, genius craftsmen adhering immaculately to faultless prescriptions. The long succession of accounts of perfect things has an incantatory quality, the meticulousness neither torturous nor bewildering, but rather intended to soothe. Krasznahorkai wants to leave you tranquil:

[…] it was something like a labyrinth, of course, but at the same time the chaos causing the oscillation of the layout of these streets wasn’t frightening and even less so futile, but playful, and just as there were finely wrought fences, the grated rolling gates protected by their small eaves, above, leaning out from both sides here and there, were the fresh green of bamboo or the ethereal, silver foliage of a Himalayan pine with its firework-like leaves unfolding; they bent closely over the passerby as if in a mirror, as if they were protecting him, guarding him and receiving him as a guest within these tightly closed fences and gates, these bamboo branches and the Himalayan pine foliage; namely, they quickly gave notice to the one arriving that he had been placed in safety […]

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The Possible Transformations Between Covers: On Storybook ND

December 15, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

The series’ humor, experimental spirit, and eye-catching design serve as the literary equivalent of an invigorating rollercoaster ride.

Storybook ND, by various authors and translators, New Directions, 2022

In autumn, literary publishers New Directions released a new compilation, corralled under a dreamy concept: Storybook ND offers fiction “to be seen and read for an hour or two . . . [Books] to fall into for a spell, in the space of an afternoon, or early evening, or on waking.” Curated by writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, the series introduces six “long stories or short novels” that can be read as parables, travelogues, or auto-fiction. While startlingly diverse in narrative approach, the common thread among these works seems to be the writer’s classic zeal to bridge a gulf—between life and art, flawed reality and transcendent fiction.

With each book ranging anywhere from sixty to ninety-six pages, Storybook ND currently features one original English-language story—Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool—and five translated works: The Woman Who Killed The Fish by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser; Three Streets by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani; Early Light by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene; Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki; and The Famous Magician by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. While DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool is not a translated work, it can be read as a virtuosic reflection on aesthetic representation and translation; specifically, DeWitt illustrates how both fiction and translation, in transforming reality or a foreign context into something intelligible, can also reflect the writer/translator’s inherent bias and their latent wish to control content.   READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

June 20, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Kent Kosack and Liam Sprod

This month's edition takes us to Germany and Hungary!

Looking for a summer read? Our editors are here to discuss some of what they’ve been reading lately, which range from German theology to QR code-studded Hungarian novellas. Read on to learn more!

László Krasznahorkai’s latest novella, Chasing Homer, is an experience. Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki and published by New Directions, the novella includes an original score by Miklós Szilveszter and images by Max Neumann. The music, accessed by QR codes at the start of each chapter, offers an anxious and propulsive accompaniment to Krasznahorkai’s virtuosic sentences: soundscape as panic attack. The plot follows a paranoid and unnamed narrator fleeing unknown killers—or, parable that it is, perhaps his, and our, mortality—in short bursts of manic interiority. The music, prose, and Neumann’s images, which have echoes of Edvard Munch’s moody lithographs, combine to pull the reader along as spectators to a timeless chase and maybe even as sympathetic fellow prey.

–Kent Kosack, Director of the Educational Arm READ MORE…

Thoroughly Mainstream or Decidedly Alternative: An Interview with František Malík

December 16, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Julia Sherwood

The arts are indispensable as a way of sensitizing people, contributing to equality, pointing out what is truly important, and setting priorities.

František Malík is an extremely busy man. Just over the past few months, he has organized several book festivals; the Martinus Literature Tent at Slovakia’s largest music festival, Pohoda; and several episodes of the literature review podcast, LQ (Literárny kvocient)—to name just a few. Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has managed to catch him in a rare moment of respite, and in the following interview, they discuss various facets of arts and literature in Slovakia today.

Julia Sherwood (JS): For a country of five million, Slovakia has a quite an astonishing number of literary festivals taking place throughout the year. You have been associated with several of them, most notably the BRaK Literature Festival. How did this festival start, and what makes it different from all the others? 

František Malík (FM): Eight years ago, when we started BRaK, the Slovak literary scene was far less diversified than it is today. While it is true that we now have more literary festivals than we used to, I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that it’s a disproportionate amount for a country of five million. Not long ago, I visited Iceland with a group of Slovak writers; Iceland’s population is less than one-tenth the size of Slovakia’s, and yet its cultural and literature policies are much more advanced and the arts receive far more funding. They also have quite a few literary festivals. This is just one example; a similar trend can be seen in all developed countries.

If I may correct you slightly—what we have emphasized right from the start is that BRaK is a book festival. This is not just a terminological difference, it also has to do with the content. We try to see a book—an aggregate of various artistic approaches—in a holistic way, rather than focusing solely on the literary element. At BRaK, we highlight all the constituent parts of the book—from publishers at the centre of the festival, graphic designers and illustrators who often host workshops, to copyeditors and translators, as well as writers. BRaK has always striven to be international and to showcase the greatest names throughout the book world, not just from Slovakia and the neighbouring countries.

JS: Of the various festivals you have organized, which do you regard as the most successful and which were the most fun?

FM: In the course of eleven years on the scene, I’ve helped to launch several festivals, and I’ve also been fortunate to work with some great teams. I like your question—having fun, and enjoying something in the broadest sense is what really matters, although the COVID-19 pandemic has taken some of the fun out of it.

I enjoy organizing everything I’m involved in. For example, I really enjoyed the first edition of the Slovak/Czech festival Cez prah/Přes práh (Over the Doorstep), an apartment festival now in its fifth year. It’s held in actual homes in the centre of the capital, Bratislava, but also in apartments that have since gained the status of institutions, as there is a growing trend to hold cultural events in flats. In the previous regime, flats played a specific cultural role. They served as educational and cultural institutions, as venues for lectures in philosophy, theatre performances, exhibitions . . . People were driven out of official venues and into their homes. Over the Doorstep aims to commemorate these flats and the role they played.

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An Impeccable English: Notes on the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

November 18, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Erik Noonan

The unstated significance of the way the books are written in English is the meaning of the Translated Literature Award.

As both writers and readers anticipate the results of the National Book Awards this upcoming Wednesday, we at Asymptote, to no surprise, are keeping a particular eye out for the outcome of the Translated Literature category. In this following essay, Assistant Editor Erik Noonan gives us a probing and interrogative look at the five books on the shortlist, looking beyond content to pursue answers regarding the linguistic journeys that these works have taken, in order to be chosen.

With the reinstatement of the Translated Literature category, the National Book Foundation is clearly attempting to correct the gender and culture biases of years past. From the beginning of the category in 1967 until 1983, when it was discontinued, every winning author was European with only four exceptions: Yasunari Kawabata in 1971, the anonymous author of The Confessions of Lady Nijo in 1974, the anonymous Chinese author(s) of Master Tung’s Wester Chamber Romance in 1977, and Ichiyō Higuchi with the Japanese authors of the Ten Thousand Leaves anthology in 1982. Lady Nijō and Higuchi were the only two women, albeit long deceased, to be awarded during the prize’s first iteration. Among the translators, Karen Brazell and Helen R. Lane won in 1974, Clara Winston won with Richard Winston in 1978, and Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link won in 1980. The rest were male. In 2018, the category was reinstated and the entry criteria revised, so that both the author and the translator had to be alive at the beginning of the awards cycle to qualify. Last year, the first of its new phase, author Yōko Tawada and translator Margaret Mitsutani took the award for The Emissary. This year, you can expect this corrective trend to continue (for example, every book on the longlist was written in a different language). READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2019

May 13, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Jacob Silkstone, and Nestor Gomez

Your guide to this month’s newest literature in translation.

This month brings us a set of novels in translation from some of the giants of international literature: László Krasznahorkai, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ananda Devi. These reviews by Asymptote team members will give you a taste of an exiled baron’s return to his home town, a meditation on fascism and gender relations, and the decline of an older woman living in a London divided by race and class. 

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Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions, 2019

Review by Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor

“With this novel,” László Krasznahorkai told Adam Thirwell in their conversation for the Paris Review, “I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life . . . When you read it, you’ll understand. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming must be the last.”

Ottilie Mulzet’s English translation of Báró Wenckheim hazatér has, understandably, been one of this year’s most keenly-anticipated books. It opens with a “Warning,” a labyrinthine eight-page sentence ending with a sigh of weariness that merits quoting at some length:

I don’t like at all what we are about to bring together here now, I confess, because I’m the one who is supervising everything here, I am the one—not creating anything—but who is simply present before every sound, because I am the one who, by the truth of God, is simply waiting for all of this to be over.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 18, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Diána Vonnák, Jacqueline Leung, and Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Your weekly literary news from around the world, all in one convenient package.

Awards, new translations, and a poet working to help the homeless—all this and more awaits in today’s dispatches! From Hong Kong, Hungary, and Indonesia, our editors-at-large have the latest updates.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, reporting from Hong Kong

In the last few months of 2018, Hong Kong saw the deaths of several literary greats, but with January comes commemoration and activity. Martial arts novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung, or “Jin Yong,” passed away on October 30, 2018, just half a year after the publication of Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born, the English translation of one of his emblematic wuxia series set during the Song Dynasty. A Bond Undone, the second volume of the quartet, will be published at the end of this month in Gigi Chang’s translation. Its release is likely to gain even more traction in the aftermath of the writer’s passing.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 26, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Diána Vonnák, Hodna Nuernberg, and Lara Norgaard

This week, the global literary world was busy with prizes, language politics, and festivals.

Join us on a journey around the world from Hungary to Morocco and Brazil to find out more about the latest festivals, prizes, and news in world literature. Come back to our blog next week for other news and pieces about world literature. 

Diána Vonnák, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hungary

One of the highlights of the Hungarian literary scene, Margó Festival and Bookfair took place between 18-21 October. The festival happens twice each year, and while the summer edition focuses on contemporary writers in general, autumn is dedicated to emerging new voices and to literary translation.

The Margó Award is a relatively new initiative that helps to launch a young prose writers’ career each year, awarded to the best debut novel or short story collection of the year. Previous winners include Benedek Totth, whose debut novel Dead Heat (Holtverseny) will be published in English by Biblioasis in 2019 and Mátyás Szöllősi, whose new novel Péter Simon is out now. Short stories of this years’ winner, Anna Mécs peek into young women’s lives as they navigate the chores of adult life. Mécs writes in a voice that merges accuracy with much-needed lightness and acerbic humour.

The audience could meet authors in dozens of readings and roundtable discussions during these densely packed four days. Man Booker winner László Krasznahorkai’s new novel, Aprómunka egy palotáért follows librarian Hermann Melvill’s wanderings in New York into his labyrinth inner world, delivered in Krasznahorkai’s signature, meandering sentences, while György Dragomán’s Rendszerújra collects his politically themed short stories that grapple with oppressive systems, be they political or technological.

Many eagerly awaited new works were discussed from the emerging new generation as well: Boldizsár Fehér debuted with a satirical utopia of social experiment, and a new novel by Péter Gerőcs follows a portrait photographer’s quest against forgetting, Sándor Neszlár published a volume of experimental prose that pairs every kilometre he ran with a sentence, while Ilka Papp-Zakor‘s new collection sketches out a surreal Budapest with zoo-animals on the run. Two documentary films rounded the experience, portraits of Nádas and Krasznahorkai.

As the festival is over, celebrations give way to anxiety over the ongoing culture wars of the Orbán government, that switched to a higher gear in the past months, dismissing the director of Petőfi Literary Museum, and airing plans about a potential centralisation of literary publishing. Meanwhile, many writers protested against a new law that criminalises rough sleeping. Politics and literary production are increasingly different to disentangle, but events like the Margó Festival are strong testimonies of resilience.

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Fall 2016: A Fresh Opportunity to Talk

September 23, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Garrett Phelps

Asymptote’s power lies in its willingness to account for the inexpressible and use it as ground-zero for its vision.

Halldór Laxness, Stefan Zweig, László Krasznahorkai—just when you think you are announcing just these three international literary superstars in the Fall 2016 lineup, it turns out you have four. On October 3, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti controversially unmasks Elena Ferrante as Anita Raja. But, even before Gatti’s unwelcome revelation, I had already picked out Anita Raja’s contribution as a highlight and intended to include her name in all our issue-related promotional materials. Fearing that we would be accused of riding the controversy, I drop a note to Criticism Editor Ellen Jones: “What do you make of all this Anita Raja = Elena Ferrante business? Is it opportunistic of us to feature her name in our publicity materials (which we already sent for printing) and on the cover (which can still be changed)?” The issue’s been on her mind as well. “We want to avoid the same kinds of accusations NYRB are getting in this morning’s papers,” Ellen says, “but I don’t think it would do too much harm to have her as one among many names in our promotion materials… I don’t think we need to bury a good essay on purpose, in short.” But what about in the promotional materials themselves? How much do we say about Anita Raja? Communications Manager Matthew Phipps decides in the end to take a risk and state matter-of-factly that Elena Ferrante has been unmasked as Anita Raja (which anyone who has been following literary news already knows). Too frazzled to make a call on the copy after staying up for 36 hours to put together the video trailer (it’s been a while since I made these for Asymptote, and I am rusty), I sign off on the newsletter. That’s how, in spite of a massive publicity blitz that involved printing and distributing 4,000 postcards; print and digital ads in the Times Literary Supplement that set us back by 900 GBP; 97 personalized emails to media outlets, 90 tweets, 20 Facebook posts, and seven blog posts about the Fall 2016 issue (all documented in then Marketing Manager Ryan Celley’s publicity report here), dear reader, we still came to be booed. Here to introduce our Fall 2016 issue is Assistant Editor Garrett Phelps. 

What a work of literature ‘means’ is always tough to get a feel for, let alone talk about. Of course a famous theorist or two have claimed this is an insurmountable difficulty. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. Not being too slick with the theoretical stuff, I’ll just say that literature is meaningful to the extent it’s ambiguous and open-ended. And if any idea unifies Asymptote’s Fall 2016 issue, it’s the way interpretive problems result from this state-of-affairs.

For Anita Raja, ignorance is the reader’s point of departure and return. In “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance” she argues that “the translator must be above all a good reader, capable of diving into the intricacies of the text, taking it apart, discerning all its nuance. The translator is, in short, a reader required to puzzle over the complexity of the original text, line after line, and to piece it together in the new language—a fundamentally impossible task.” Good translators are, essentially, readers par excellence. Anyone who’s dabbled in the field probably won’t find this idea controversial. Sooner or later, though, even a top-notch translator hits the same wall as the average reader, who’s more okay letting intricacies, nuances and puzzle-pieces remain gut-feelings. Demanding much more is futile even if doing so is worthwhile. This is especially true of translation, where success is often the sum of accumulated failures. READ MORE…

Summer 2013: What a Tentative, Unruly Enterprise Language Is

September 11, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Dylan Suher

How miraculous it is when a translator is able to express someone else’s thoughts—it is already so difficult to express your own.

We have organized four IndieGoGo campaigns in all our eight years now, and each of the last three times, it’s sucked so much life force from us that we have, on one occasion, even had to skip an issue (there is no Spring 2015 edition) to recover from it. For some reason, however, it does not take long at all after our first campaign to hit our stride again. A sampling of what we were up to immediately after April 2013, apart from sending ‘thank you’s and perks to 231 supporters: We (1) launched our first-ever translation contest; (2) organized a massive translation project that saw translations into eighteen additional languages of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s brilliant send-up of racial profiling; (3) revamped our website to include a map (thus allowing readers to access our content by geographical region); (4) nominated ourselves for a TED Prize (albeit in vain) and, last but not certainly not least; (5) held our largest recruitment drive ever. The rapid expansion takes a toll: my inbox is invaded daily by check-ins. Fortunately, around this time, we migrate to Trello for issue production work. To give you a sense of how much back and forths are required for just one article (say, Can Xue’s interview conducted by Dylan Suher and Joan Hua, as recounted by Dylan below): Trello records 84 comments by 12 team members spanning the period of May 28 to July 15. Here is Robyn Creswell of The Paris Review on the Summer 2013 issue: “It’s hard to read in a heat wave, but the July issue of Asymptote is so absorbing I hardly notice my sweat drops hitting the keyboard. Even more impressive than the diversity of things translated—book reviews in Urdu, fiction in Bengali, poetry in Faroese—is their quality.”

The Summer 2013 issue of Asymptote is a fine illustration of the principle that translation is just a special subset of the general problem of communication: the problem of trying to relate your experience to someone else, of trying to put something “in other words,” of trying to put something into words in the first place. This principle comes across most clearly in Naoki Higashida’s attempts to relate his experience as an autistic person, and in the visual section’s pieces on asemic writing and Ghada Amer’s use of Arabic script. All three remind us what a tentative, unruly enterprise language is. The shapes shackled into service by the Phoenicians millennia ago long to return to the wilds of visuality; when tasked with expressing the plentitude of the autistic mind, simple words seem as crude a tool as a chert axe.

The problem of referentiality epitomized by these pieces runs throughout this entire issue. The way Banaphool’s “Nawab Sahib” (translated by Arunava Sinha) seems to exist just outside the bounds of reality, its repetitive structure, and its surprising twists all suggest a fable (or a joke), but the moral to which it points remains sublimely hazy. E.C. Belli, translating Pierre Peuchmaurd, repeats the word “glimmer” again and again in a mantra of irreducible images: “The glimmers of lakes, of iron, of girls”; “The glimmers of otters inside their prey.” The insistence of the repetition pounds significance into a non-entity of a word. READ MORE…

The 2018 Man Booker International Shortlist: the Subjective Nature of Literary Merit

April 26, 2018  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

"Fiction at its finest”, as the Man Booker tagline describes its self-imposed mission.

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader,” Vladimir Nabokov reminds us in his article “Good Readers and Good Writers”. There are so many books in this world, and unless your life revolves solely around books, it might be hard to be widely read and an active re-reader. Attaining this level of perfection that Nabokov describes is impossible, but the idea of re-reading as a tool to better understanding the value of a book underpins the philosophy of the Man Booker Prize International’s judging panel since its inception.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 23, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Diána Vonnák, and Jessie Stoolman

The most exciting world literature news—all in one place.

It’s Friday and that can only mean one thing at Asymptote: reports of exciting developments in the world of literature. This week our focus falls on a diverse set of countries, including Tunisia, Hungary, and Hong Kong. 

Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Tunisia: 

In just a few short weeks, the 34th edition of Tunis’s annual Book Fair will begin, where numerous prize winners will be announced, including the winner of the newly created Prize for Literary and Intellectual Creativity, or prix de la créativité littéraire et intellectuelle.

However, if you’re itching for activity now, don’t fret, there are numerous literary events taking place throughout Tunisia in the meantime, with a special focus on young writers and readers. Specifically, the 10th annual Festival of Storytelling, organized by the Tahar Haddad Cultural Association in Tunis, has already begun and will continue until March 25th. The festival is dedicated to preserving Tunisian oral traditions, as each day it presents a storyteller, or حكاوتي, who brings to life tales taken from regional oral literature. Similarly, the literary association “Above the Wall” (فوق السور), created for young writers, will host its 10th annual assembly on March 20th and 21st in Benzart, one of the northernmost cities in Tunisia.

Further south, in Sousse, on April 1st, the Book Lovers Association of Sousse will hold a discussion at Le Paradoxe, a local cultural café, to discuss the Tunisian writer and poet Shafiq Tariqi’s award-winning novel, Lavazza (لافازا,) which questions the full realization of the Tunisian revolution. In 2015, the novel was awarded a monetary prize for creativity by the journal, Culture Dubai (دبي الثقافة). READ MORE…