What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

February 21, 2022 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

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Lee Yew Leong

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What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2021)

November 11, 2021 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

Who’s behind your favorite journal and what have they been up to? Here’s a glimpse!

After presenting a transmedia computational poem commissioned by RCI New York, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, guest-edited a special issue of Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties on “Literature and/as (the) Digital.”

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska has two new online publications: a piece entitled “Modern Transit: A History of Feeling in the Polish People’s Republic” and a review of Doireann Ni Ghriofa’s A Ghost in the Throat.

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Laurel Taylor recently published an essay on radical translation practices in Mentor & Muse.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M. L. Martin’s Theater of No Mistakes won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award and is now available for purchase on the Anhinga Press website and through her own website.

Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer has translated German author Katharina Bendixen’s short story “The Third Wolf” for the latest issue of Berlin-based SAND journal.

Assistant Editor Shawn Hoo’s poetry chapbook Of the Florids won the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming in 2022.

Editor-at-Large for India Suhasini Patni has been selected as the Toto Fellow for the Sangam House Residency. She will be in Bangalore in December working on a collection of short stories.

Editor-at-Large for Vietnamese diaspora Thuy Dinh’s review of poet Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory was published in NPR in October.

In addition to being featured in the current issue, Assistant Editor (Poetry) Whitney DeVos’s translations of Nahua poet Martín Tonalmeyotl appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review and, on behalf of Latin American Literature Today, in a chapbook commemorating the winners of the Whiting Foundation’s 2021 Literary Magazine Prize.

Want to join our dynamic international team? We’re wrapping up our final recruitment drive of the year—hurry and submit an application today!

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Lee Yew Leong

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2020)

May 20, 2020 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

From hypermedia performances to publications, Asymptote staff have been keeping busy—even under lockdown!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow’s co-translation, with Sean T. Reynolds, of Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem” is now out with Seagull Books.

Executive Assistant Austyn Wohlers, who has just been admitted into Notre Dame’s MFA program in Fiction, recently published a story, “Lila,” in Short Fiction.

Editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO) will be presenting in late May a Twitter-based (@GraphPoem) hypermedia performance preview of a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology he is editing in French and in English translation and in early June an interactive coding computational poetry performance at Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of Robert Perišić’s novel No-Signal Area, out recently with Seven Stories Press, was reviewed by Ken Kalfus in The New York Times.

Editor-at-large for Guatemala José García recently published the final instalment of a four-parter about the migrant caravan at The Evergreen Review. Click here, here, here, and here for the full series.

Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood recently translated an essay by Czech journalist Apolena Rychlíková for the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe published by Comma Press in March 2020.

On Translating Indigenous Languages

June 7, 2018 | in Essays | by Paul Worley

The translator bears a particular kind of ethical responsibility towards the text, the poet, and poet’s community.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but in 2018 translating Indigenous literatures in the Américas from Indigenous languages and/or Spanish is a political act. Even prior to now, at dinner parties and other settings for droll conversation in the United States, people have often perked up when I mention that I study Mesoamerican languages and cultures. With an interest typically grounded in lost civilizations, ancient mysteries, and, occasionally, UFOs, they usually then follow up with an inquiry as to why, if I study dead languages, I didn’t opt to study Latin, ancient Greek, or Biblical Hebrew instead. When I assert that no, Maya languages such as Yucatec and Tsotsil are far from dead, many people refuse to believe it and are more than happy to contest the point.

Translation Tuesday: “The Train” by Martín Tonalmeyotl

December 5, 2017 | in Translations | by Martín Tonalmeyotl and Paul Worley

Each step is a return: towards death, towards life

From the humorous to the profane and the sacred, Náhuatl poet Martín Tonalmeyotl’s poetic work is firmly rooted in the mountains of his native Guerrero (Mexico) and reflects his commitment to his culture and his language. Far from idealizing his home state, however, Tonalmeyotl’s work frequently takes an unflinching look at a sociopolitical situation where, in addition to the 2014 kidnapping and murder of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa amidst increasing violence from drug trafficking, Guerrero’s citizens have gone so far as to organize independent civil defense groups for protection. In “The Train,” the poet takes up another aspect of life in contemporary Mexico, human migration, in the series of freight trains otherwise known as La bestia (the Beast) or El tren de la muerte (the Death Train) that transport migrants from Central America to the US border.

—Paul Worley

The Train

Each step is a return: towards death, towards life
Each train is a nightmare: of blood, of hunger, of cobwebs
Each child is a piece of fruit: rotten, sweet, bitter, what does it matter
At any rate life is sold to the scavengers
To the rancid wolves who’d like to eat us whole
Because if they don’t devour our stick-thin bones
Their potbellies will become hollow
And they won’t have any shit to feed their own parasites
We should get drunk, I tell you,
So we forget that on this earth
Day by day we are hunted down like rabid dogs

Translated from the Náhuatl into Spanish by Martín Tonalmeyotl
Translated from the Spanish into English by Paul Worley