Hard at work on Asymptote’s upcoming issue, our editors still have time to write, publish, translate, and organize conferences and plays. Read the thrilling and bizarre ruminations of Forrest Gump’s Slovakian evil twin, an essay on why loss in translation is inevitable and okay, and find out what to do in Seattle now that AWP has ended!
Alex Cigale, Central Asia editor-at-large, has translated poems by Maximillian Voloshin for California College of the Arts’ Eleven Eleven, science fiction poetry by Fedor Svarovsky for The Mad Hatters Review 15, and snappy limericks by Tatiana Scherbina for the Gobshite Quarterly. His interview with the poet and translator Philip Metres in The Conversant is forthcoming.
The Virginia Quarterly Review published “Loss, Betrayal, and Inaccuracy: A Translator’s Handbook,” by Italy editor-at-large Antony Shugaar. Shugaar writes, “If this much loss comes with the translation of a single word, it’s hard to imagine the worlds that are lost with the rendering of an entire novel. But the crucial thing to remember—I often tell myself—is that it doesn’t matter. Loss is invisible; it is what makes it through the net that matters.” Take thirteen-and-a-half minutes to read the rest—you won’t regret it.
Drama editor Caridad Svich’s translation of Federico García Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” will run from March 27 until April 5, 2014, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In Seattle, watch a reading of Svich’s play “Archipelago” at A Contemporary Theatre; it’s described as “a play on memory and a memory play; a dream of life.” And don’t miss the theater conference Svich organized, on The Diasporic Imagination, in Louisiana.
Paris editor-at-large Daniel Medin shares his favorites from Three Percent’s forthcoming Best Translated Book Awards, including A Most Ambiguous Sunday (Dalkey Archive), a collection of stories by June Young Moon that “share[s] the deadpan humor that makes reading Beckett or George Saunders fun,” and Minae Mizamura’s A True Novel, which “recalls the greatest of Yasujiro Ozu’s or Checkhov’s shorter fiction.”
Nonfiction editor Joshua Craze recounts some of his recent reading in Somatosphere, in which he tackles photography theory as it relates to photographers working in conflict-ridden Sudan and South Sudan.
Read “Spring is Coming” by Balla, a translation from Slovak by Julia Sherwood, Slovakia editor-at-large, in The Missing Slate. Also in The Missing Slate, check out Sherwood’s translation of Daniela Kapitáňová’s novel Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book, narrated, as Michael Stein of Literalab put it, by “Forrest Gump’s evil twin.” And he’s not joking! Asymptote previously reviewed this book, noting that “Samko’s unfiltered narrative gives the same weight to simple descriptions of events as to Communist slogans, technocratic jargon, vulgar jokes, racial slurs […] [and] becomes a prism for society’s fears and prejudices.”