Posts featuring Stefani J Alvarez

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty! (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Mexico and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large share reflections on prose from Mexico and an event on women in translation in New York. From the wise words of a beloved centenarian writer to a reading celebrating ‘minority’ languages, read on to find out more!

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico

“Prose is everything,” said Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale with cheeky irony. “I have a so-so relationship with poetry, but prose… it presents more challenges to me. Poetry is a matter of rhythm, of good or bad taste. But prose… prose is everything.”

Last year, Vitale reached the modest age of 100, and last week, with unparalleled lucidity, she inaugurated the Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y los Universitarios (Filuni), a book fair organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for students, academics, publishers, and writers. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Mexico, the Philippines, and

This week, our editors-at-large take us many places, from one book fair by the sea and one in the neighborhood that was once home to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Read on for news about new bookstore openings, sonic poetry readings, and upcoming chapbook publications!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The International Book Fair of Coyoacán (FILCO) is taking place from June 7 to 16 in the historic Mexico City neighborhood internationally famous for having been the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The event features stands from more than one hundred and fifty Mexican and international publishers, as well as two hundred events ranging from concerts and dance performances to book launches and roundtables. Among this year’s panelists are cultural luminaries such as the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, the descendants of Mexican historical figures like Emiliano Zapata, and the writer and Asymptote contributor Elena Poniatowska.

I visited the book fair on Saturday, June 9 for a presentation of the most recent book by Rocío Cerón, globally acclaimed experimental Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor. Simultáneo sucesivo is a collection that explores the sonic power of language. During her talk, Cerón emphasized how we live surrounded by sound but rarely reflect on its affective qualities. She demonstrated these qualities by reading from her book with her characteristic performance style: repeating words, modulating her volume, pitch and tone, and varying her speed. This performance style has the power to minimize language’s semantic qualities and foreground its sonic properties. She also played tracks of sound art that accompany the collection. These feature Cerón’s voice, but also include drone, ambient, and electronic sounds that induce a trance on listeners. Cerón’s performance, abstract poetry, and sound art liberate both language and sound from their utilitarian and practical everyday purposes, inviting listeners and readers to experience the texture, timbre, and materiality of language beyond its meaning.

Simultáneo sucesivo is the third installment of Cerón’s trilogy challenging the way in which we relate to language. The other two books in the series are Spectio (2019) and Divisible corpóreo (2022), which Cerón has presented in events around the world. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from China, the Philippines, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors are rounding up some exciting new developments in the word of language, from the annual edition of one of China’s most noteworthy literary awards, to cinematic adaptations of Filipino writing, to an urban festival digging into the intersections of literature and science in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

In one of the stories from her collection, Ba bu ban (Eight-and-a-Half), Huang Yuning writes about the private, sometimes-sacred communion that a sharing of language initiates, as with two tourists sitting together in a Frankfurt subway: “There’s at least one good thing about two Chinese people riding the subway together in a foreign country: the walls are ready-made, and language is the thing that builds a transparent cubicle all around you.”

Huang’s stories won the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize in 2019, and this year, the prestigious award is again taking in submissions to find the next powerful young writer of Chinese-language fiction. Held jointly by the Beijing publishing house Imaginist and the Swiss brand Blancpain, the annual competition is known for seeking out original voices with an intricate attention to language, profoundly developed themes, and an outstanding voice and style that embodies the unique adventure of Chinese writing. Open to writers under the age of forty-five who have published a book between April 2022 and 2023, the winner receives a cash prize of 300,000 yuan to help develop their work. The theme of this years prize is “The Necessity of Complexity”, and in the submissions call, the prize committee asserted the essentiality of literature that addresses the present moment with a fine eye on the past and a rejection of overloaded media narratives. As they state, there is a role in writing that aims always towards truth and its complexity: “. . . because complexity is the point of origin of everything new and the commencement of everything we call the future.” Literature has the role of paying close attention to the strange, the unspoken, and the vast depths of internality; the jury aims to find a work of Chinese fiction that speaks to this task. Since the prize’s inauguration in 2018, I’ve found its selections well deserving of accolade, celebrating work from some of the most bold and talented writers working today, and like many readers of the Chinese language, I am greatly looking forward to see which titles will be spotlit this year.

The jury includes lauded Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who interestingly has gone the way of Nabokov to “renounce [her] mother tongue”, writing and publishing only in English. The writers who have chosen to taken such a path usually speak of a feeling of entrapment within their native language, and Li explained her choice by stating that English is her “private language”she has to actively think her way towards every word. Now that she has become a crucial element in deciding who is to be awarded this esteemed award of Chinese-language literature, it’s tempting to note that reading fiction is not only a way to explore the world through narratives and characters, but through the innate imaginations and freedoms that exist when words are put together in new and regenerative configurations. That is the liberation that styleevidence of that actively thinking mind behind the pagegifts to us: an encouragement to think again about tired words, those beleaguered little artifacts of human history. I think often about the writers of China, all the individuals that are constantly reaching out to embroider, reweave, and patch the fabric of that wonderful, ancient, fraught language, and I remember that words are alive. That they are always in the process of making something new, and that they are protectors and safeboxes for our wildnesses, our freedoms, and all the things that one dreams might be spoken, one day. READ MORE…