Monthly Archives: January 2016

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt of “Bret Easton Ellis And The Other Dogs” by Lina Wolff

An orange canary perched on a stick inside, its head aslant, looking at us with its black pinhead eyes.

So no Dad, not that I’ve lacked for stand-ins. Only my fathers have all been mayfly dads, the kind that are here one day and gone after three days at most. Some left traces behind, a khakicoloured toothbrush in the bathroom, an inhaler, a book on a bedside table, and sometimes those traces would give rise to hopes that they might come back, come in the door to the flat and suddenly be struck by the idea that this really was a bit like returning home, that everything was already herea home, a wife and a childall they had to do was enter and start living. I wrote about all of them in my diary, and because their names eventually started to blur (Valerio, Enrique, Álvaro, José María) I began calling them ‘the Jogging Pants Man’, ‘the Chuckling Man’ and ‘the Tartare Man’ instead, and then their images would immediately reappear before me. ‘The Tartare Man’ once made himself a steak tartare on our terrace. I had no idea what steak tartare actually was until he explained with a lofty expression on his face that this was what sophisticated bohemians in Paris ate. The sophisticated inhabitants of Paris were people whose taste buds had not yet been destroyed by charred meat and fried onions. He took the ingredients out of the bag and put the tartare together in front of us. The tartare consisted of cutting up a packet of raw mince and mixing it right there and then with egg yolk, salt and pepper. Have a tasteit’s delicious, he said and offered the greasy plastic tray to Mum. She turned her head away and pretended not to look, but I did. His fingers closed hungrily around the mess and you could see the pleasure in his face as he pushed the morsel into his mouth. Uhhnn, he said. Then he swallowed and it was impossible not to think of a snake as his Adam’s apple pushed the mouthful down his throat. Please don’t let her let him move in, I thought, and she didn’t.

For his part the ‘Canary Man’ made his mark with a rather distinctive present. Before he arrived Mum explained that this man wasn’t ugly, or attractive, but attractively ugly. He turned up one Friday evening, appearing in the gloom of our hall with a bottle he presented to Mum. Mum accepted the gift and put it on the linen cupboard.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

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Asymptote Blog wants YOU to write on topical issues!

Asymptote blog seeks new contributions on current cultural events and political issues.

“Look at the rose through world-colored glasses,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote. In this spirit, Asymptote is now seeking (translated) poetry and nonfiction directly responding to global issues and worldwide cultural events for publication on our blog.

Subjects can vary widely: the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, the Paris attacks, the work of recent prize-winning writers, anniversaries of significant cultural events, even the release of the new Star Wars film. From politics to pop culture phenomena, we are looking for new writing on the most up-to-date global events.

Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that is translated into English, or consider how translation plays a role in these events.

The goal of this new blog series is to share responses to the most current matters from all over the world, not just its English-speaking territories, and to encourage writers of all stripes to engage with these issues and events.

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Recent highlights from the blog include:

Alberto Chimals essay on Star Wars (aka La guerra de las galaxias [War of the Galaxies]) in Mexico, translated by George Henson

Allegra Rosebaum’s “Spectacle Shopping,” her analysis of Black Friday through the lens of Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle

Say Ayotzinapa,” a special feature in which David Huerta’s poem “Ayotzinapa,” written in response to mass kidnappings and killings in a small town in Guerrero, Mexico, was translated into 20 languages

Jennifer Croft’s “When an Author You Translate Gets Death Threats,” a comprehensive essay which detailed the intense online criticism of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk and Nobel-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s defense of Tokarczuk

Ryan Mihaly’s “Translating Indigenous Mexican Writers: An Interview with Translator David Shook,” posted on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which discussed the controversial holiday 

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Non-fiction submissions should be no more than 1500 words. Translations into English are preferred over submissions originally in English. Send your submissions, pitches or queries to blog editors Ryan Mihaly and Patty Nash at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Send us your best, most critically engaged and creative writing on the important matters of the dayRolling deadline.

Weekly News Roundup, 8 January 2016: Happy New Year!

This week's literary highlights from all across the world

It’s the first news roundup of the new year—and I’m still stuck in the last one: I very nearly typed “2015.” Lots of good things happened since we last caught up—not least of which that Asymptote happily reached its Indiegogo goal (“Indiegogoal?”)! This means you can look forward to our fifth-anniversary celebrations in fifteen events happening all across the globe between now and April. And don’t forget: we’ve extended the deadline for our translation contest—scramble your materials and get it together by February 1st for a chance at literary wealth, fame, and renown!

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In Review: Ali and His Russian Mother by Alexandra Chreiteh

"Can you be loyal to your homeland and religion at the same time, even if they are at loggerheads in the grand scheme of things?"

As an avid fan of Alexandra Chreiteh’s first translated work in English, Always Coca-Cola, I couldn’t wait to dive into her latest effort, Ali and His Russian Mother (similarly translated by Michelle Hartman). While Always Coca-Cola possesses a dynamic, jump-off-the-page narrative, I found Ali and His Russian Mother to be quite the opposite, leaving me rather deflated.

The setting is July 2006. Israel has just declared war on Lebanon while our unnamed female protagonist (let’s call her “X”) is out for sushi. Over the course of the next three-some days, the reader is towed along as X is evacuated along with other Russian citizens to safety. READ MORE…

Cooking Her Way to the Top: Chef Rossi on Feminism and Kosher Hot Dogs

"Rossi tells a story that deeply satisfies the consumers’ appetite."

The Raging Skillet isn’t like other food writing. There are no pictures. Chef Rossi doesn’t bother with the finer points of locally sourced organic vegetables. The recipes rely on her own systems of measurement: a dollop, a shake, a shot, a coffee cup. She believes dishes will work out, even without weighing ingredients to the gram or composing the perfect image (and appropriate filter) for Instagram. The only weddings Rossi writes about are ones she caters. When she writes about cooking, it’s to describe flipping thousands of burgers or deboning a hundred pounds of salmon. Her patience is thin, her work ethic tough. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Kim Seung-Hee

Avantgardists are dreadfully fierce though they do not mean to be.

In Poetry’s Emergency Room

Poetry is emergency room, poetry is oxygen tent, poetry is red blood inside a cold apple,

sorrow is like fertilizer

that must be sprinkled here and there on poetry,

poetry is a pregnant woman’s day,

the day of delivery nobody knows when it will be;

poetry comes racing embracing a bomb,

racing over the clouds.

Yet in one tiny paddy-field,

yellow heads of rice are ripening.

A field the size of a bowl of rice, small enough for a conical hat to cover,

a tiny bowl of a hat-field,

a gruel-bowl sized, rice-bowl sized gruel-field, rice-field,

hat-field.

Ordinary patients recover energy thanks to a bowl of gruel,

so by the power of a small strip of autumnal paddy

I am saved, you are saved,

so once again we lie flat on the field gleaning ears of language

then sow seeds of language

so that golden paddy-fields rise in tiers,

one of your poems,

a steaming bowl of rice, your collection of lyric poems. READ MORE…

The Afrofuture for the Time/Being: In Orbit with niv Acosta

"The collective dance, then, becomes a kind of superhuman entity, not hindered by any one body’s limitations."

We have created constructs that subliminally or consciously reflect the fallacy of race and drive our actions and reactions along racialized pathways. Black dance is one of these constructs. Taking this line of thinking a step further, the black dancing body exists as a social construct, not a scientific fact. However, this phantom body, just like the phantom concept of a black or white race, has been effective in shaking and moving, shaping and reshaping, American (and now global) cultural production for centuries. It has been courted and scorned—an object of criticism and ridicule as well as a subject of praise and envy.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool

DISCOTROPIC is the name of an ongoing project by New York-based dancer, niv Acosta. Proceeding in a series of ‘episodes’–each occurring at a different place and time— DISCOTROPIC deals simultaneously with astrophysics, the history of disco, and a Black sense of danger. With his group of performers, niv has performed various iterations of DISCOTROPIC at the New Museum, MoCADA, Cooper Union, Lehmann Maupin, amongst other notable New York arts venues.

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Asymptote Podcast: The Devil

New Year, new podcast episode!

This month, we examine a character who has been influencing the minds of authors for thousands of years: the Devil. We’ll be taking a look at that fiery hell-demon we all know and love to hate (or fear), but we’ll also discuss how other cultures view this figure. We first consider Maximon, a Guatemalan saint not recognized by the Catholic Churcha fusion of Satan, Judas, Cortes, and the Mayan trickster god Mam. Then we’ll move on to Russia, where we will look at how the Devil influenced two hundred years of their literature. We’ll end with an exploration of the Voodoo religion, which isn’t as devilish as you may think.

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