Posts filed under 'issue highlight'

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2019

Explore the Winter 2019 issue with our section editors!

Not sure where to start with the brand new Winter 2019 issue of Asymptote? At 35 countries represented, this issue is our most diverse yet, and marks the eighth anniversary of Asymptote. Here, our Section Editors recommend some of their favourite pieces from their respective sections.

The writing of María Sánchez tracks close to the ground; she hunts experience. In “The Next Word,” compellingly translated by Bella Bosworth, we accompany Sánchez in her truck, as she drives around the Spanish countryside, working as a field veterinarian. There is a great slowness to her prose, born of hours of careful observation of people and things. The letters that composed this piece read like prayers, written to an unknown God, in praise of those small moments in which, as Sánchez writes, “life stands still and nothing happens.” There is a delicate empiricism at work here—an empathy with the world and its rhythms that Sánchez reads by looking at her, as if she were the geiger counter of existence. “Sometimes”, she writes, quoting Gabriella Ybarra, “imagining has been the only option I have had to try to understand.”

— Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Editor

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2018

To give you a taste of the Fall 2018 issue, the blog editors share their favorite pieces from Russian, Catalan, and Vietnamese.

Today, we share our favorite pieces from the Fall 2018 issue, released just four days ago, highlighting the diversity of cultures, languages, and literary styles represented. Chloe Lim, writing from Singapore, is joined today by two new blog editors as of last week: Jonathan Egid and Nina Perrotta, writing from the UK and Brazil respectively. Happy reading! 

From the visceral, violent power of José Revueltas’ The Hole to the lyricism of Osama Alomar’s “Nuclear Bomb” and the schizoid voices of George Prevedourakis’ Kleftiko, our Fall 2018 edition plays host to a typically broad variety of styles, forms, and languages. A piece that particularly caught my eye was “Epilogue,” a quiet, sombre short story by Irina Odoevtsova about two Russian émigrées in Nice, their separation and their separate fates.

The story follows the unhappy existence of Tatiana and Sergei, initially as poor migrants surrounded by the Anglo-American holidaying elite of the Riviera, through Sergei’s uncertain departure and Tatiana’s newfound wealth to a tragic conclusion, with much of the story being told through short, terse conversations between Tatiana and Sergei, Tatiana and her new lover and (more frequently) Tatiana and herself. The restrained, even sparse dialogue and plain prose nevertheless creates touching, vivid and tragic characters in strikingly limited space, conveying to us the tragic story of a woman struggling to understand her dreams and desires, and the tragic consequences that come from her acting upon those confused and conflicting desires.

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Three Must-Reads from the Spring 2016 Issue

The blog recommends three more must-reads from Asymptote's April Issue—

Hi there, Asymptote readers! When Asymptote’s April Issue came out (nearly two whole months ago!), we recommended five slick pieces to start off your reading. The issue’s still fresh, featuring dozens of articles, poems, interviews, stories, histories, and visual art definitely worth your perusal. These’ll work to stave off translation cravings until you can get your keyboard on to the July issue—which is slated to come out in a little over a month. Let’s get started (in no particular order, of course):

  1. An Interview with Ha Jin, by Henry Ace Knightrecommended by Allegra Rosenbaum, blog editor

    When I first read Ha Jin in high school, by no means did I appreciate his writing. It wasn’t until I was applying to university that I really started to feel the effect that Waiting had made on my life. Part of the application process in the United States is a personal essay. I wrote the first draft and felt fairly confident about it. I told my mother when she got home. She had just seen Ha Jin talk at her job. READ MORE…

Our January 2016 Issue is Live!

Blog editors Allegra Rosenbaum, Patty Nash, and Ryan Mihaly share their favorites from our glittering 2016 issue

It’s that quarterly, magical time of year again, guys: Asymptote is loud and proud with a stellar January issue. And this is not just any issue—it’s our fifth anniversary issue, “Eternal Return,” and that means Asymptote is practically old enough to head off to kindergarten and start finger-painting and writing poetry (after winning an award a the London Book Fair and becoming a member of the Guardian books network, of course).

It couldn’t be more fitting, then, that this issue features some of our most inventive, thrilling work to date: interviews with Yann Martel and Junot Díaz, a really, really cool experimental translation feature, work and an interview with Caroline Bergvall, and writing from authors that will be sure to capture your literary imagination—like Olga Tocarczuk, who was featured on the blog in a gripping essay by her translator Jennifer Croft—or this fascinating anonymous story called “The Legend of the Dakini Ray of Sunlight (White Tārā),” handily translated from the Mongolian by Ottilie Mulzet. Really, you can’t go wrong, but we can still try to point you toward our favorite issue picks this time around:  READ MORE…

Issue Spotlight: Interviewing Uyghur Poetry Translator Joshua Freeman

"A lot of what's really vibrant and interesting in Uyghur poetry right now is happening primarily on the web, and even on phone messaging apps."

 

Your translation of Merdan Ehet’éli’s poem “Common Night” is Asymptote‘s first piece from the Uyghur. I want to point out two words from the poem: “pig iron” and “hellfruit.” Can you tell us about these words and how you translated them?

The Uyghur word choyun (also chöyün) refers to pig iron or cast iron, and for me it calls to mind something hard and rough. The connotations are much less positive than the words tömür (iron) and polat (steel), both of which are used in Uyghur personal names. In speaking of “a night poured into our spines like pig iron,” Merdan Ehet’éli may be alluding to Tahir Hamut’s well-known poem “Summer Is a Conspiracy,” in which Tahir refers to fear’s “pig iron voice”, which “seeps into the marrow / and hardens.”  READ MORE…

July Issue Highlight: On Rainbows and Resistance

Blog editor Katrine Øgaard Jensen recommends one of her favorite reads from our brand new issue

In case you’re hungry for more recommendations after reading the blog’s 5 Must-Read Pieces from our New July Issue, here’s a write-up about something that’s stuck with me since its publication last Wednesday.

In our latest issue of Asymptote, I was particularly excited to discover three poems by Turkish Gökçenur Ç, author of six poetry collections and Turkish translator of Wallace Stevens, Paul Auster, and Ursula K. Le Guin. I was drawn in by Gökçenur Ç’s first poem, “We’re in the World, So Are Words, How Nice that We’re All Here,” in which intriguingly short, self-contained thoughts such as “Morning is hissing like an empty tap” and “The shadow of a hawk strikes your shadow, / neither you nor the hawk is aware of this” make up the entire piece. This is also the format of the third poem, “I Watch with Love Like a Stupid Student,” which wraps up the three poems nicely.

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