Posts featuring MARGENTO

Plunge into the Multilingual Writing Feature from the July 2016 Issue

August 1, 2016  |  in News  |  by Ellen Jones

Readers must ask themselves whether they are entitled to a full understanding —or indeed if such a thing is ever possible.

The past two Mondays here at the Asymptote Blog, we’ve brought you highlights from the July 2016 issue, THE DIVE. This week we’re back with Ellen Jones, editor of the vibrant and provocative multilingual writing section.

The Asymptote July issue special feature on multilingual writing is the second of its kind. The more than two hundred pieces of original poetry and fiction received in response to last year’s call for submissions—many, many more than we were able to publish—opened our eyes to the wealth of new writers who are experimenting with language mixing, and persuaded us that it was necessary to run the feature again.

What I love most about this work is its variety. There are seven contributions, from writers as far afield as Peru, South Africa, and India that, between them, incorporate English, German, Spanish, French, Romanian, Sanskrit, Afrikaans, Italian, Nahuatl, and Arabic. But more importantly, they also make use of the spaces in between these languages: unique cross-lingual sound combinations and associations, and spoken varieties that are thriving but have yet to be documented. There is some poetry, some prose. Some written by well-established literary figures and some by poets who are only just finding their voices. Some pieces for readers of only English, others best left to the true polyglots among us.

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What’s New With the Asymptote Team

July 4, 2016  |  in News  |  by Theophilus Kwek

From reading tours to new publications, here's what Asymptote staff have been up to recently!

Contributing Editor Adrian West launched his new book, The Aesthetics of Degradation, for the occasion of which former Asymptote Section Editor Matt Jakubowski conducted this interview in Berfrois.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać has been interviewed about her authors in Authors and Translators.

Assistant Managing Editor Justin Maki published a review of Jon-Michael Frank’s book of poem-comics, How’s Everything Going? Not Good. (Ohio Edit and Cuneiform Press) at The Small Press Book Review.

Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong’s translation of ‘Next’, a poem by Taiwanese psychiatrist-poet Jing Xianghai, was featured on the Guardian Books Network as part of Asymptote‘s ongoing Translation Tuesday collaboration with The Guardian.

Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu) participated in the CROWD Omnibus Reading Tour, a tour involving 100 writers from 37 countries, starting at the Arctic Circle and ending at the Mediterranean Sea. On his way back, MARGENTO stopped by Bookfest (Bucharest’s International Book Fair) where he contributed to the launch of frACTalia, a Romanian-international consortium of literary journals, publishing companies, and online intermedial archives.

Social Media Manager Sohini Basak has poems published in two anthologies: three poems in 40 Under 40: an anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry (Mumbai, Poetrywala) edited by Nabina Das and Semeen Ali; and a poem inspired by Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in Urban Myth and Legends (Birmingham, Emma Press) edited by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright.

Chief Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek’s new collection of poetry, Giving Ground, was launched in Oxford, and reviewed in the Oxonian Review. He is one of four winners of this year’s inaugural New Poets’ Prize, and has an interview and a new poem about ’Brexit’ in The Missing Slate.

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What’s New with the Asymptote team

April 7, 2016  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

This month, catch Asymptote's editor-in-chief at the London Book Fair and at SUTD's Translation Symposium!

Senior Editor (Chinese) Chenxin Jiang spoke on the panel “I’m Not Dead Yet: Translating Living Authors” with Jason Grunebaum, Anna Rosenwong, and Cole Swensen, at AWP in Los Angeles. An excerpt of her translation of Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was featured in The Atlantic.

Assistant Editor K. T. Billey‘s translations of Icelandic poet Bragi Ólafsson have been published in Circumference. Her poetry collection “Vulgar Mechanics” is a finalist for Lincoln Center Fordham’s Poets Out Loud publication prize. Her poem “Self-Portrait, Skull & Ornament” has been shortlisted for Arc Magazine‘s Poem of the Year—vote on the Reader’s Choice Awards here! Her poetry will also be featured in the inaugural Brooklyn Poet’s Anthology forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press in 2017.

From 30 December to 4 April, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood accompanied Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki on a US reading tour with his novella Lullaby for a Hanged Man (translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Calypso Editions in December 2015). The tour included events at the Word bookstore in Brooklyn, Boston University and UNC Chapel Hill. Next week, on April 12, Julia will be speaking at the London Book Fair on a panel entitled “Non-native Translation: Is It Time to Rethink Where Good Translations Come From?”

Also participating in a London Book Fair panel is Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong, who will talk about “Discovering Stories in Turkey, Asia and Africa” on April 13, and then about “The Politics of Translation” at Singapore University of Technology and Design’s Translation Symposium on April  21.

Romania & Moldova Editor-at-Large MARGENTO saw to the publication in Romanian translation of Ryan Mihaly’s interview with Richard Zenith from our October 2015 issue in Asymptote’s new Romanian partner journal, Observator Cultural.  Also in Romania, after an informal interview with MARGENTO, poet and editor Violeta Savu published in the literary magazine Ateneu a presentation of Asymptote covering the Romanian writers featured so far in our journal and also reviewing our latest issue, a contribution also made available online on the writer’s blog.

New Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek’s third collection of poetry, Giving Ground, was launched in Singapore by Ethos Books. His review of Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Aeneid VI was published in the Oxford Culture Review, and three of his poems were featured in Coldnoon, the international journal of travel writing.

Last month, Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao published an essay on Eka Kurniawan’s novels Man Tiger and Beauty is a Wound in the Sydney Review of Books .