Somehow, the year’s end always comes as a surprise. Suddenly, January is upon your doorstep: you’re another year older. This month, Asymptote turns five, a ripe old age for a literary magazine run entirely by volunteers. Yet we haven’t jaded a bit—heartened as we are by the success of our recent mini-fundraiser, and, of course, by this new issue (video trailer here). Aside from exclusive interviews with the great Junot Díaz and Yann Martel, this issue hails never-before-published material from thirty countries. Our star-studded lineup includes Ingo Schulze, Caroline Bergvall, Sibylle Lacan, Olga Tokarczuk, Toast Coetzer, Xiao Kaiyu, and, avid readers will recall, Pura López-Colomé, a Mexican poet who also appeared in our very first edition. Her work resonates beautifully with the clever ouroboros twist presented in our cover image, courtesy of guest artist Jensine Eckwall.

We may die, but our souls somehow survive, in images, in gestures, in words haunting the written page. This eternal return is borne out by our experimental translation feature (beautifully curated by our Poetry Editor, Aditi Machado), in which originals are chewed up only to miraculously transmute anew, inspirited by their originals. Jared Pearce, for instance, took words from ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets and made them sing as though they’d just been hewn. 

The results are shockingly contemporary. From the kaleidoscopic haiku renderings by Martin Rock and Joe Pan, to Bronwyn Haslam’s virtuoso anagrammatic translations of Nicole Brossard or Victoria Cóccaro and Rebekah Boudon’s alphabetic English reordering of Pablo Katchadjian’s alphabetic ordering of Argentina’s epic gaucho poem, the works in this feature have but one thing in common: their sources are gorgeously mangled and truly honored. Too often, translators are seen as prissy, when most of the time, as Jennifer Scappettone says in our interview, they face the toughest of tasks: “Translation obliges that you be embedded, digging your way out of the enemy logic word by word.” Artist Caroline Bergvall also sees it as a big dig, “a construction site with no definite end in sight, a bit like Berlin in the 1990s.” A “border trade” on the tongue, as Greg Nissan’s Uljana Wolf translation might describe it, over in our Poetry section. Brandon Downing takes this trade a step further, as he knowingly layers songs and film footage, only to mistranslate the lyrics and create treasonous subtitles revealing truths lurking just between the frames.

As a religious and philosophical symbol, the ever-ravenous ouroboros is remarkably prevalent, appearing in Egypt, India, and Scandinavia. Reading through the many religious texts in this issue of Asymptote, the universal impulse to look closer, deeper, further, comes through powerfully—whether in Kanya Kanchana’s experimental yoga sutras, Paal-Helge Haugen’s interpolation of Martin Luther’s catechism, or the story of St. Martin as told through Venantius Fortunatus. Faith, it appears, comes in many forms; one character in Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights suggesting we replace the bibles in hotel rooms with books by Cioran. Slovak writer Marek Vadas, adviser to the Cameroonian king of Nyenjei, meanwhile, tells the story of a self-claimed "soul healer" under attack from diabolical forces. We can see how religion twists into myth in the miraculous lives of the fifteenth-century sisters of St. Katharinental, but also in Ottilie Mulzet’s translation of the Mongolian legend of the Dakini Ray of Sunlight. Yet myths also pop up in more secular tales, such as Kuei-hsin Chang’s story about a boy born in (and of?) a river, or in Frøydis Sollid Simonsen’s story about our role in the universe: “every morning I crawl out of the ocean, up from the duvet, sprout legs for walking, unfurl fingers, raise myself upright, put on clothing, slowly become a more and more complex organism.”

Water, too, runs through the work of Kazuko Shiraishi, Japan’s Canadian-born beat poet, who claims to be the “same as” the Hudson River. This issue of Asymptote notes other cross-cultural pollinations as well, what with Richard Wright speaking to a newly independent Indonesia in 1955, East-German author Wolfgang Hilbig raising his fist in tribute to Bob Dylan (in an essay by Ingo Schulze), young Soviet children debating the possibly explosive effects of American chewing gum (in a one-act play by Nina Kossman), or a young Polish architect bribing his way into Picasso’s studio with some chocolate (in nonfiction by Filip Springer). We also examine more direct chains of influence and legacy through memoirs, as Sibylle Lacan remembers her negligent father, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and Habibe Jafarian struggles with the unsolved disappearance of his father, Imam Musa Sadr, likely murdered in Gaddafi’s Libya in 1978.

Years come and go, books are borrowed and sometimes lost, but words linger forever in our minds. In this spirit, we hope you’ll celebrate our fifth anniversary by spreading the word of our special anniversary issue. (Consider downloading our beautiful flyer and putting it up anywhere you think it might reach other lovers of world literature.) You’re also invited to our anniversary events held in select global cities: in New York, for example, where we will be joined by Forrest Gander, Ann Goldstein, Natasha Wimmer, and Frederic Tuten on Mar 3 (limited early bird tickets for only $6 are already on sale here); in London, where we will be joined by Caroline Bergvall, Tena Štivičić and Hamid Ismailov, on Mar 23; in Ottawa, where we will be joined by Luise von Flotow and Rachel Martinez on Apr 3; and in Chicago, where we will be joined by Nathanaël, Rey Andujar and Kolin Jordan on Apr 13. We will continue to unveil even more celebrations on our Events page, on Facebook, as well as in our fortnightly airmails—be sure to subscribe, if you’re not already in our mailing list! And remember: Asymptote may be free but it is not free to produce, so do consider signing up for a monthly donation of $5, $10, or even $50 to lend us your support. Here’s to five more years!

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Team for Issue January 2016

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Yew Leong (Taiwan/Singapore)

Assistant Managing Editors: Sam Carter (USA) and Justin Maki (USA)

Senior Editor: Florian Duijsens (Germany/The Netherlands)

Section Editors:
Lee Yew Leong (Taiwan/Singapore)
Aditi Machado (India/USA)
Joshua Craze (UK/USA)
Caridad Svich (USA/UK)
Ellen Jones (UK)
Henry Ace Knight (USA)
Luisa Zielinski (Germany)
Eva Heisler (USA)

Assistant Editors: Alexis Almeida (USA), K. T. Billey (USA), Julia Leverone (USA), P. T. Smith (USA), and Lin Chia-wei (Taiwan)

Contributing Editors:
Ellen Elias-Bursac (USA), Howard Goldblatt (USA), Aamer Hussein (Pakistan/UK), Sylvia Lin (Taiwan/USA), Sayuri Okamoto (Japan/Italy), Sim Yee Chiang (Singapore), Antony Shugaar (Italy), Dylan Suher (USA) and Adrian West (USA)

Chinese Contributing Editor: Francis Li Zhuoxiong (Hong Kong/Taiwan)

Spanish Contributing Editor: Soledad Marambio (Chile/USA)

Commissioning Editor: J.S. Tennant (UK)

Blog Editors: Patricia Nash (USA) and Ryan Mihaly (USA)

Assistant Blog Editor: Allegra Rosenbaum (USA)

Chief Copy Editor: Diana George (USA)

Assistant Copy Editor: Will Rees (UK)

Podcast Editor: Daniel Goulden (USA)

Audio Editor: Sally Decker (USA)

Interns: Vera Carothers and Chris Schaefer

Editor-at-large, Australia: Beau Lowenstern
Editor-at-large, Belgium: Veronka Köver
Editor-at-large, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Mirza Puric
Editor-at-large, Brazil: Bruna Lobato
Editor-at-large, Canada: Marc Charron
Editor-at-large, Egypt: Omar El Adl
Editor-at-large, Hong Kong: Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan
Editor-at-large, Hungary: Ágnes Orzóy
Editors-at-large, India: Naheed Patel and Poorna Swami
Editor-at-large, Indonesia: Tiffany Tsao
Editor-at-large, Iran: Poupeh Missaghi
Editor-at-large, Israel: Yardenne Greenspan
Editor-at-large, Poland: Beatrice Smigasiewicz
Editor-at-large, Romania and Moldova: MARGENTO
Editor-at-large, Slovakia: Julia Sherwood
Editor-at-large, South Africa: Alice Inggs
Editor-at-large, Taiwan: Vivian Chih
Editor-at-large, UK: Megan Bradshaw

Masthead for Issue January 2016

Fiction: Lee Yew Leong
Nonfiction: Joshua Craze
Poetry: Aditi Machado
Drama: Caridad Svich
WoW: Luisa Zielinski
Criticism: Ellen Jones
Visual: Eva Heisler
Interviews: Henry Ace Knight
Illustrations and Cover: Jensine Eckwall
Chief Executive Assistant: Dallin Law
Executive Assistant: Chloe Currens
Guest Artist Liaison: Berny Tan
Proofreaders: Ellen Elias-Bursac, Diana George, Henry Knight, Allegra Rosenbaum, Will Rees, Beatrice Smigasiewicz and P. T. Smith
Technical Manager: József Szabó
Director of Outreach: Odette Rivera
Head of Programming, Events: Thomas Flynn
Marketing Managers: Rosiė Clarke and David Maclean
Graphic Designers: Berny Tan, Chuck Kuan and Geneve Ong
Video Producer: Daniel Chi Cook
English Social Media: Sohini Basak, Hannah Berk, Georgina Berry
Chinese Social Media: Zhang Zhuxin and Zhang Lingyu
Spanish Social Media: Selina Aragón

Asymptote would like to acknowledge the support and/or contributions of: Evy Anette Fjøren, Erica Mena, Nenten Tsubouchi, Sachiko Nakahara (e-Sendan), Chusekisha Hatsumi Matsui (Kaifusha) and Yuiko Yamaoka (Furansudo).

For their generous donations, our heartfelt thanks go too to Mieke Verloo, Xiao Bao Clark, Watson Crick, Kelvin Ang, David Silverman, C. B. Cooke, Reif Larsen, Nathaniel Jones, Mark Cohen, Gina Caputo, Ryan Eyers, Joan Hua, Sylva Ficovíç, Toetsie Zwitserlood, Aya Sato, Ryan Mihaly, Niklas Hall, Robert Foord, Ian Chung, Ulf Jacobsen, Jeffrey Boyle, Mariam Sharaf, Rebecca Walkowitz, Andrew Wu, Francesca Spedalieri, Tiffany Tsao, Zhou Sivan, Anna Gustafson, Izabela Wojciechowska, Mark Keats, Low Chun Meng, George Henson, Nicolas Marceau, Lynette Lee, Lucy Moffatt, Antoine Wilson, David Maclean, Thera Marie Crane Ringhofer, Bill Donohue, Hannah Berk, James Tierney, Elizabeth Raible, Nicky Harman, Nozomi Sato, Darryl Sterk, Samuel Carter, Will McGrath, Joshua Stenberg, Paul Garrett, Mary Fulham Reynolds, Poh Chee Wee, Marilya Veteto Reese, Mavis Tan Bee Shih, Xilun Xian, Eva Heisler, and Michelle Loh.