Monthly Archives: April 2016

In Conversation with Vikram Chandra

"We have never been modern, and our newer forms—which are all hybrids—never have either."

Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi and graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) in 1984. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, was written over several years while getting an MA at Johns Hopkins and an MFA at the University of Houston. While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram taught literature and writing, and moonlighted as a computer programmer and software and hardware consultant. Red Earth and Pouring Rain received outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book; was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and was included in “Notable Books of 1997” by the New York Times Book Review. A novel, Sacred Games, was published in 2006 and won the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction for 2006 and a Salon Book Award for 2007; it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Vikram made his nonfiction debut with Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code,The Code of Beauty published by Graywolf Press in 2014, which was described as an “unexpected tour de force” by the New York Times Book Review. Geek Sublime dwells upon the points of intersection between writing, coding, art, technology, Sanskrit and ancient Indian literature and philosophy.

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Naheed Patel: Your latest book, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty is quite a literary hybrid: part craft essay, part history of computer programming, part social commentary on Silicon Valley, and part treatise on Sanskrit philosophy. All these various part form a seamless mosaic that works to enlighten and totally fascinate the reader in equal measure. How did you make this magic happen?

Vikram Chandra: As is usually the case with writing, through endless rounds of revision, periods of complete frustration and despair, and fumbling around trying to discover the right shape for what I was trying to build.  I actually found this more difficult to do in non-fiction than I have before with fiction.  When I’m writing fiction, I have the characters to guide me; even though there are moments of unknowing and paralysis, I can always trust that if I’m patient and I keep following the characters, I’ll eventually figure out the architecture.  But with non-fiction, or at least this particular non-fiction, it was much harder.  I didn’t have the linear velocities of a plot to draw me forward, so it was much more—as you say—like building a mosaic, putting small pieces together and trying to see the patterns.  The epiphany about the overall structure came very very late in the process, compared to all my other books, and this was scary.  So much of writing is just keeping faith that you’ll work out what kind of beast you’re actually making, and this can wear on you. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 8th April 2016:

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote pals! This week, something different: you might be used to reading reports about book prizes, but the Guardian spectacularly announced the end of its First Book Prize. Womp. And we often report on vanishing languages (ones we often represent—through translation!—in our journal’s digital pages), but we hardly try to preserve them through song.

We know books are important—in Afghanistan, new libraries across the country nourish hungry minds with books. Meanwhile, in the United States, we have the self-loathing book critic.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Asymptote team

This month, catch Asymptote's editor-in-chief at the London Book Fair and at SUTD's Translation Symposium!

Senior Editor (Chinese) Chenxin Jiang spoke on the panel “I’m Not Dead Yet: Translating Living Authors” with Jason Grunebaum, Anna Rosenwong, and Cole Swensen, at AWP in Los Angeles. An excerpt of her translation of Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was featured in The Atlantic.

Assistant Editor K. T. Billey‘s translations of Icelandic poet Bragi Ólafsson have been published in Circumference. Her poetry collection “Vulgar Mechanics” is a finalist for Lincoln Center Fordham’s Poets Out Loud publication prize. Her poem “Self-Portrait, Skull & Ornament” has been shortlisted for Arc Magazine‘s Poem of the Year—vote on the Reader’s Choice Awards here! Her poetry will also be featured in the inaugural Brooklyn Poet’s Anthology forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press in 2017.

From 30 December to 4 April, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood accompanied Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki on a US reading tour with his novella Lullaby for a Hanged Man (translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Calypso Editions in December 2015). The tour included events at the Word bookstore in Brooklyn, Boston University and UNC Chapel Hill. Next week, on April 12, Julia will be speaking at the London Book Fair on a panel entitled “Non-native Translation: Is It Time to Rethink Where Good Translations Come From?”

Also participating in a London Book Fair panel is Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong, who will talk about “Discovering Stories in Turkey, Asia and Africa” on April 13, and then about “The Politics of Translation” at Singapore University of Technology and Design’s Translation Symposium on April  21.

Romania & Moldova Editor-at-Large MARGENTO saw to the publication in Romanian translation of Ryan Mihaly’s interview with Richard Zenith from our October 2015 issue in Asymptote’s new Romanian partner journal, Observator Cultural.  Also in Romania, after an informal interview with MARGENTO, poet and editor Violeta Savu published in the literary magazine Ateneu a presentation of Asymptote covering the Romanian writers featured so far in our journal and also reviewing our latest issue, a contribution also made available online on the writer’s blog.

New Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek’s third collection of poetry, Giving Ground, was launched in Singapore by Ethos Books. His review of Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Aeneid VI was published in the Oxford Culture Review, and three of his poems were featured in Coldnoon, the international journal of travel writing.

Last month, Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao published an essay on Eka Kurniawan’s novels Man Tiger and Beauty is a Wound in the Sydney Review of Books .

Elena Ferrante’s real identity? I don’t really care

"Right, because it’s the work that matters, no?"

I don’t care who Elena Ferrante is. I know some people really, really care, including some folks at The New York Times, which just published an article on the Italian author’s mysterious identity. Some people, it would appear, won’t let it rest until they know the name of the author behind the so-called Neapolitan series of novels, which has rocked the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic.

But not me. Every time it comes up, I think, “I don’t care.”

And it’s not because I’m only slightly interested in Italian literature. Oh no. Italian literature is my life. My idea of paradise is being in a room in Italy—any room—where I’m so surrounded by the Italian language, I feel submerged. I read the Ferrante books one after another in the original Italian. I even have a copy of the Italian newspaper article about Ferrante’s identity that inspired the article in The Times. (My partner happened to be in Switzerland the weekend it appeared in an insert to Il Corriere della Sera, and he brought it home for me).

It’s not because professional nosiness is foreign to me. I’m a journalist, in fact. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Making Skeletons Dance” by Peter Macsovszky

"We’re waiting for a favourable wind in our skulls. Simon taps his forehead and grimaces."

The action of the novel takes place in one day (as in Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway). The main character is Simon Blef, a man who has emigrated to Holland, where he met his future wife, a Mexican-Dutch girl named Estrella. As he waits for Estrella, who is returning from Spain, Simon wanders into the Amsterdam pubs and starts drinking. As time passes, all kinds of memories surface from the past. There is no striking action in the novel; it is rather an impressionistic reverie with glimpses of humour and a mordant commentary on the main character’s ambition to become a writer. This novel was shortlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary award, Anasoft Litera Prize, in 2011.

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1. There’s somebody

whose refuge is a pub like this, neither filthy nor speckless, but the sort of place where a passer-by does not stay too long. Battered, creaky chairs, dust-coated wooden panelling, a slot machine. For somebody refuge means a bar counter, subdued conversation, light music, world-famous glances from bronzed faces. For someone, again, it’s a woman willing to hear the cycled effusions of pain, morning and evening. Hear them, care for them, cultivate  and protect them. Fantasies of alleged wrongs and menaces. For Simon Blef, whom no misery is tormenting today and therefore he claims no concern, refuge means this Amsterdam pub, neither filthy nor speckless, scrunched at the corner of Gravensstraat and Nieuwe Zijdsvoorburgwal. From there Simon Blef gazes at the world, observes passers-by, how they borrow and  steal gestures, each in a way that is both unique and custom-worn. Not quite half an hour ago he was boring through the crowds that came hurtling out from the platforms of Centraal Station and wondering whether to go left and find some quiet boozer in the Red Light District sidestreets, or if he ought to go right and cast anchor as ever in this unprepossessing drinking shop, which basically serves as an entrance hall for a hotel and restaurant on the first floor.

Simon has picked his spot by the window so as to be able to see the doings not only on the street but also by the bar counter. Encompassing with one’s gaze the largest possible segment of the world currently served up: then he feels in a place of refuge. READ MORE…

The Seed for Images: Interviewing Guest Artist Jensine Eckwall

"I absolutely loved all the stories, and learned something different from every one of them."

Illustrator Jensine Eckwall is our guest artist for the January 2016 issue. Her beautiful watercolour illustrations, which manage to be simultaneously delicate and vibrant, illuminate moments in eleven of our texts in the Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama sections. I interview her about her practice, her experience contributing to Asymptote, and her upcoming projects.

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Berny Tan: You’ve illustrated magazine articles, books, zines, and so on, in addition to the eleven texts in our January 2016 issue. Could you describe your process of conceiving and executing pieces based on existing texts?

Jensine Eckwall: If I can, when I receive a text to illustrate, I like to read the whole thing and pick out favorite phrases or words that are particularly evocative of the text’s theme for me.  Then, in the corner of the paper I’m sketching on, I write those words out, as well as other phrases to which I’ve drawn mental connections. That’s often the seed for images, and I extrapolate from there. For commercial projects, I send a series of sketches to the client for approval. For non-commercial projects, I usually run the initial ideas by a friend or the publisher, if there is one. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 1st April 2016: Not April Fool’s Day

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote! It’s April Fool’s (Fools’?) Day today, but I promise I won’t prank you—this roundup-writer is far too pooped from the last week of March to even think about the kinds of deep-cut literary jokes you’d find funny. Plus, too many serious (and big) things happening this week to distract you: AWP is going on right as we speak in Los Angeles, and a number of you are likely checking out all the translation offerings via the famous, tempting ALTA Bookfair Bingo—right?  READ MORE…