Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 12, 2024 | in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup | by Andriana Hamas, Charlie Ng, and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from Macedonia, Hong Kong, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors-at-large report on prizes in Macedonia, literary festivals in Hong Kong, and unexpected literary losses in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The Slavko Janevski Foundation, a Macedonian foundation dedicated to the advancement and promotion of cultural values, recently selected Edinstven Matičen Broj (which translates to Unique Master Citizen Number) by Lidija Dimkovska as the novel of the year for 2023.

Lidija Dimkovska was born in1971 in Skopje. She is a poet, novelist, and translator, whose literary interests and expertise extend beyond national borders and include early Macedonian poetry, contemporary Slovenian poetry, and contemporary minority and migrant writing in Slovenia. Currently based in Slovenia, Dimkovska works as a freelance translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature. Her work has been translated into 15 languages, including English, German, French, Romanian, Slovenian, Croatian, Polish, Serbian, and Albanian. English translations of her work include the poetry collection Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers—translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, and published in 2006 by Ugly Duckling Presse—and What Is It Like?—selected poetry translated by Ljubica Arsovska, Patricia Marsh and Peggy Reid and published in 2021 by Wrecking Ball Press—which made World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022 list. Her poetry has been described as “honest and uncompromising” by the writer Goce Smilevski; Edinstven Matičen Broj is no different. Named after an identification number assigned to every citizen of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it offers an unflinching study of identity loss and dehumanization.

“The question that I ask in the novel and that each of us should ask is whether we really exist, even when we have a unique master citizen number, and that question everyone should answer separately, individually and, perhaps, only in silence of their heart,” said Dimkovska at a recent press conference. The jury at Slavko Janevski highlighted her “acute sensitivity to zeitgeist”, which has allowed Dimkovska to dramatize the abstraction of “rootlessness and displacement” in “concrete life scenarios”. Her prose devastates with its candor—she writes in a clipped and probing narrating voice, reminding readers of “[m]oments when you can no longer breathe in the cramped apartment, when you are so lonely and alienated from the people who should be close to you, that you simply have to go somewhere so as not to lose yourself.” READ MORE…

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Hong Kong International Literary Festival
Slavko Janevski Foundation
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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 20, 2020 | in News | by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

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

Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and twenty-four languages, as well as a Galician Poetry Special Feature. Not sure where to begin? Our blog editors can help, as they reveal their top picks from the new issue below:

It’s difficult to write, these days. In this state of global precarity, wrenching us from our patterns into stasis, the days stretch towards their completion; daily urgencies take on a more sinister tone, heightened by circuity. There is indeed time, heavier in our stock, yet the dilemma remains: the heaviness, the disintegration of form, the failure of words to justify their surroundings. After a while I realized that it is because in order to write, and to write forcefully, the writer must be able to imagine a world in which their text survives, and contributes. Yet the time has arrived, much sooner than anticipated, of a future in pieces. I’ve never been one to envision literature as a portal for escape—it seems to me that the most sublime of texts enforce us into the deep centre of the world we live in. So from Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue—a wondrous collection of work that arrives, across boundaries, to strike a new presence—I selected certain poems that bring a special dignity to our capacity for visioning.

Natalia Toledo’s poems, translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda, stir vibrant tremors across the senses. Precise in intimate reference and conditioned with everyday magic, her language is of the sacred nature we infuse into the ordinary in order to contextualize the world to our definitions. Take “Prayer”:

For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.

Translation Tuesday: “Punctuation of Life” by Lidija Dimkovska

June 20, 2017 | in Translations | by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh

Now we meet in front of the immigration desks

In this poem by Lidija Dimkovska, the full stops at the end of each word raise more questions than the simple answers they appear to be. These categories create both lack and excess in meaning when stripped from their contexts—there is a sense of isolation but at the same time a certain kind of clarity that in life, for better or worse, we often move from having just one home to having many.

Punctuation of Life

“Those who forgot me would make a city.”
Joseph Brodsky, May 24, 1980

Home.
Fatherland.
Language.
Family tree.
Individual and collective memory.
Archetypes.
Atavism.
Uniqueness.

Ah, a misprint.

Home?
“Fatherland”
Language!
Family tree;
Individual and collective memory…
Archetypes –
Atavism:
Uniqueness.

Complaint.

Those who have forgotten me, Joseph,
would make not one but three cities,
except the citizens have either died or moved away.
Now we meet in front of the immigration desks
at the border of the earthly, or the heavenly kingdom.
One alien is akin to another,
so we all fill in the forms together
passing the same pen from one to another.
It’s only the punctuation of life
that we all, covering the form with our hand,
write
for ourselves.

Translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Patricia Marsh

Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia. She is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She competed her PhD in Romanian literature at the University of Bucharest, Romania where she worked as a lecturer of Macedonian language and literature. She lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia and translates Romanian and Slovenian literature to Macedonian. She has published six books of poetry and three novels, translated to more than 20 languages. She received the German poetry prize “Hubert Burda,” the Romanian poetry prizes “Poesis” and “Tudor Arghezi”, the European Prize for Poetry “Petru Krdu” and the European Union Prize for Literature, among others. In the States, The American Poetry Review in 2003 dedicated the cover page and the Special Supplement to her. In 2006 Ugly Duckling Presse from N.Y. published her first collection of poetry in English, Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers, and in 2012 Copper Canyon Press published her second book of poetry pH Neutral History (short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award 2013).

Ljubica Arsovska is editor-in-chief of the long-established Skopje cultural magazine Kulturen Život and a distinguished literary translator from English into Macedonian, and vice versa. Her translations from English into Macedonian include books by Isaiah Berlin, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and plays of Lope De Vega, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, and Tennessee Williams. Her translations from Macedonian into English include works by Lidija Dimkovska, Dejan Dukovski, Tomislav Osmanli, Ilija Petrushevski, Sotir Golabovski, Dimitar Bashevski, Radovan Pavlovski, Gordana Mihailova Boshnakoska, Katica Kulafkova, and Liljana Dirjan, among others.

Patricia Marsh is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, author of The Scribe of the Soul and The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto, and translator of a number of plays and poems from Macedonian into English. She lectured in English at the University of Skopje for a long period before returning to live and work in the UK in 1992.

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