Posts featuring Jan Dammu

My 2016 by Theophilus Kwek

Reading the Refugee Crisis

From today through Saturday, select Asymptote staff will be continuing our annual tradition of looking back on the year—specifically through the lens of literary discovery. First to go is Chief Executive Assistant Theophilus Kwek, who recently placed Second in the 2016 Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation. 

It’s hard to imagine where we were a year ago: on the brink of a nuclear deal in Iran, standing firmly in Europe, and with a cluster of literary titans—including Elie Wiesel, Umberto Eco, Harper Lee, Max Ritvo and Leonard Cohen—to light the road ahead. The intervening months have taken us around blind corners that will, undoubtedly, take many more months to comprehend.

For many, however, that tumultuous journey has been more than metaphorical. From stories of asylum-seekers defying death to reach the Arctic Circle town of Neiden, to weekly reports of dangerous boat journeys across the Mediterranean Sea or the Bay of Bengal, we’ve been confronted this year by the brutal realities faced en route by 65.3 million displaced people worldwide, including 21.3 million refugees. The figures are mind-boggling on their own, but it’s another thing to remember that each statistic represents a fellow human who has braved trials we could never begin to understand.

Or can we? My 2016 has brought—along with border-crossing award-winners like Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith), Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, and Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation—a selection of powerful work bearing witness to the refugee experience, both by refugees themselves, and those involved first-hand in the asylum process. More than before, I am convinced that there are ways that we, as readers and writers, can know and share in these journeys. And in a publishing climate that remains overwhelmingly first-world, settled, and white, the least we can do (with our wealth and our words) is choose to look outside those brackets. READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: Literature and Lies

A new episode has landed!

In this episode, we’re unveiling wild new poetry in translation from Asymptote’s Fall Issue, by taking a close listen to poems by Iran’s Rasool Yoonan (read in Persian by Amir Maleki and in English by Siavash Saadlou), Singapore’s Tan Chee Lay (read by the poet himself) and Iraq’s Jan Dammu (read by translator Suneela Mubayi).  Metaphors unfurl from these lines and stretch into works of art. Finally, we’ll consider the written component of the multimedia poem, “First Person,” by Taiwan’s Hsia Yü. To help us unpack how a translator navigates the original writer’s web, our podcast editor Layla Benitez-James turns to Anita Raja’s essay, Translation as a Practice of Acceptance, which we also featured in the Fall 2016 issue. Exploring lies, little and big histories, and figuring out what Proust is doing in an action movie, this is the Asymptote podcast.

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

Audio Editor: Mirza Puric