Asymptote

Editor's Note

Do other people have inner lives? Or are they just NPCs with no consciousness, no soul? We can’t know for sure! Philosophers call this “the zombie problem,” which also happens to be the tagline of our Summer 2025 issue. Not least because there is an actual zombie featured for the first time in our pages via Carolina Brown’s biting cli-fi; the “zombie problem” is also at the heart of any discussion about AI—the theme of this edition’s wildcard Special Feature. Alongside MARGENTO’s extraordinary hybrid human-AI work, we are proud to bring you an exclusive interview with acclaimed translator Boris Dralyuk, a dossier of poems by the beloved Italian master Alda Merini, a sparkling new update of Austrian modernist Arthur Schnitzler, a pair of pieces by Syaman Rapongan and Anna Tsouhlarakis centering their indigenous worldviews, and our first article from the Azerbaijani amid new work from 32 countries—all of it movingly illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Xin Lui Ng.

The question of consciousness takes center stage in our Special Feature on AI—not the ersatz sentience of AI itself, but rather the uneasy cognizance, among members of the literary community, of its disruptive potential this side of singularity—hence the Feature’s title, “What AI Can’t Do.” From Daniel Saldaña París’s incisive meditation on AI in translation to S. K. Birk’s tale of a fiction-generating chatbot forced into the role of a lonely girl’s eternal yes-man, these pieces highlight the limits of AI as a tool for transforming the more fundamental problems of a society that too often turns a blind eye to hegemony and suffering. Declaring that we’re “cyborgs already, made of flesh and language,” Katia Grubisic draws attention to the role of human error in art, while Valentinas Klimašauskas’s genre-bending Polygon underscores the human biases and motivations built into all technology. I’d be remiss not to mention the extraordinary hybrid human-AI work contributed by MARGENTO: poetry composed by an LLM trained on datasets of their own making, including search data from Asymptote’s archive. The result is utterly unlike human-authored poetry, at once a spectacular showcase of a nascent new form of textual art and a reminder that AI’s greatest potential lies in its ability to augment, rather than supplant, human artistic creation.

Elsewhere, “the zombie problem” becomes grotesquely literal, from the undead trudging across post-climate change Antarctica in Brown’s “Anthropocene” to the humanoid fungi encountered by the hikikomori in Luis Carlos Barragán Castro’s intense mind trip of a story “Cephalomorphs.” One might turn into a zombie too, carrying out inhuman orders on behalf of an authoritarian regime as we see in Syrian writer Bassam Yousuf’s devastating real-life account of a childhood friend-turned-torturer. Even in more idyllic circumstances, one can suddenly discover that one is “no longer there,” that one has become “a suspended, emptied image, merged with its surroundings,” as Slovenian poet Jana Putrle Srdić puts it in “End Of The World, Beginning”; indeed, social norms can disfigure a person until they lead a life that is more performance than living. In Drama, Yannis Palavos gives us the story of a man dogged by crime and a daughter dogged in turn by his memory, her searching monologue part exorcism, part attempt to restore humanity to them both. Appearing in English for the very first time in our fourth Special Feature themed on outsiders, Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’s encounters with Venezuelan refugees unfold across a gamut of misadventures—but through it all he never lets us forget their humanity or his.

In light of the recent flurry of announcements surrounding AI-powered literary translation services, this seems as good a moment as any to gently remind our readers that Asymptote has, for the past fifteen years, been a painstakingly human endeavor. Nothing about our work—from the meticulous curation of each issue to the minutiae of holding together a far-flung, 100-strong virtual team—has ever been generated by machine or delivered at algorithmic speed. If the growing encroachment of AI into daily life has deepened your appreciation for human creativity and labor, we warmly invite you to support us by becoming a sustaining or masthead member. (If just ten new masthead members come aboard, we’ll finally be able to revamp our website—a long overdue update!). Other ways to support our magazine include sponsoring a Special Feature and taking out a publicity package. Want to have your finger on the pulse of international letters? Then join our Book Club—the only one that partners with indie publishers on both sides of the Atlantic—to receive a surprise in the mail each month, selected from the freshest new releases. As always, we invite submissions to our regular categories on a rolling basis; watch this page for our next Special Feature announcement, due to go up soon. In the meantime, visit our daily blog; subscribe to us on Facebook, X, Threads, our two Instagram feeds, and our newsletter for more Asymptote goodness. Long live human-powered literature!

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Team for Issue July 2025

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)

Assistant Managing Editors: Ella Dailey (France/USA), Hilary Ilkay (Canada), Daljinder Johal (UK), Kathryn Raver (France/USA), and Alex Tan (USA/Singapore)

Section Editors:
Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)
Caridad Svich (USA/UK)
Willem Marx (Italy/UK)
Heather Green (USA)
Danielle Pieratti (USA)

Senior Assistant Editors: Chiara Gilberti (Germany/Italy) and Michelle Chan Schmidt (Ireland)

Assistant Editors: Sam Bowden (USA), Terézia Klasová (Czech Republic), Sophie Grace Lellman (USA), Willem Marx (Italy/USA), Catherine Xin Xin Yu (Canada/Italy), Tiffany Troy (USA), Vuslat Demirkoparan (USA), Daniel Yadin (USA), Junyi Zhou (USA), and Lin Chia-Wei (Taiwan)

Assistant Interview Editor: Sarah Gear

Contributing Editors: Ellen Elias-Bursac (USA), Aamer Hussein (UK), Sim Yee Chiang (Singapore), Dylan Suher (USA), and Adrian West (USA)

Art Director: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)

Editor-at-large, Bulgaria: Andriana Hamas
Editor-at-large, China: Hongyu Jasmine Zhu
Editor-at-large, Croatia: Kristina Gadze
Editor-at-large, Greece: Christina Chatzitheodorou
Editors-at-large, Guatemala: José García Escobar, Rubén Lopéz, and Miranda Mazariegos
Editor-at-large, Hong Kong: Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan
Editors-at-large, India: Zohra Salih and Sayani Sarkar
Editor-at-large, Italy: Veronica Gisondi
Editor-at-large, Kenya: Wambua Muindi
Editor-at-large, North Macedonia: Sofija Popovska
Editors-at-large, Mexico: René Esaú Sánchez and Alan Mendoza Sosa
Editor-at-large, Palestine: Carol Khoury
Editor-at-large, Philippines: Alton Melvar M. Dapanas
Editor-at-large, Romania and Moldova: MARGENTO
Editor-at-Large, Sweden: Linnea Gradin
Editor-at-Large, USA: Mary Noorlander
Editor-at-large, Uzbekistan: Filip Noubel
Editor-at-large, Vietnamese Diaspora: Thuy Dinh

Masthead for Issue July 2025

Fiction and Interview: Lee Yew Leong
Poetry: Danielle Pieratti
Nonfiction: Willem Marx
Drama: Caridad Svich
Visual: Heather Green
Outsiders and What AI Can’t Do Special Features: Lee Yew Leong
Illustrations and Cover: Xin Lui Ng

Assistant Managing Editor (supervising Assistant Editors): Alex Tan

Assistant Managing Editors (supervising Editors-at-Large): Daljinder Johal and Kathryn Raver

Assistant Managing Editor (overseeing blog production): Hilary Ilkay

Assistant Managing Editor (overseeing issue production): Ella Dailey

Chief Executive Assistant: Dina Famin

Senior Executive Assistants: Julie Shi and Charlotte Chadwick

Executive Assistants: Meenakshi Ajit and Haeri Lee

Blog Editors: Xiao Yue Shan, Bella Creel, and Meghan Racklin

Art Director: Lee Yew Leong

Guest Artist Liaison: Berny Tan

Senior Copy Editors:Ellen Elias-Bursac, Jennifer Busch, Maggie Wang, and Rachel Stanyon

Copy Editors: Sophie Eliza Benbelaid, Ruairi Casey, Sauvryn Linn, Joseph Mcalhany, Jessica Nickelsen, Matthew Redman, Matilde Ribeiro, Grace Roodenrys, Anna Rumsby, and Sam Steinmetz

Technical Manager: József Szabó

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Spanish Social Media: Sergio Serrano

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Digital Editors: Julia Maria and Savitri Asokan

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Director, Educational Arm: Sarah Nasar

Educational Arm Assistants: Mary Hillis, Marissa Lydon, Devi Sastry, and Sonakshi Srivastava

Book Club Manager: Carol Khoury

Intern: Kate Rowberry

Asymptote would like to acknowledge the support of Il Park, Francesca Spedalieri, Jayoon Choi, and Beth Staples.

For their generous donations this past quarter, our heartfelt thanks go too to Alexander Dickow, Brigid Haragan, Chris Tanasescu, Claire Hegarty, Daniel Hahn, Grace Zivny, Hannah Bowman, Ian Chung, Jeffrey Boyle, Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Lynn O'Neal, Marjolijn de Jager, Mark Cohen, Martin Ingebrigtsen, Monty Reid, Philip Feinsilver, Sharon Wood, Thomas Carroll, and Velina Manolova.

We'd also like to shout out to Reuven Eitan, a new sustaining member since June 2025.

Back

Fiction

Carolina Brown, Anthropocene

Translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell

A penguin spoke to me today. It was extraordinary . . . His voice was smooth, like a radio host. Alex, the world belongs to the hungry and you are very very hungry, he told me.

Emmanuelle Sapin, A Child Is Stolen

Translated from the French by Michelle Kiefer

On Annunciation Day, I stole a child from a maternity ward. I became a mother by committing a crime.

Luis Carlos Barragán Castro, Cephalomorphs

Translated from the Spanish by isaac dwyer

One day my sister, who’d died twelve years prior, appeared in the mushrooms, smiling. She was blooming happily, resuscitated among the pockmarked pupae. The sight of her nearly brought me to tears.

Arthur Schnitzler, from Fräulein Else

Translated from the German by Matthew Redman

I am to seek an audience with Herr Dorsday d’Eperies, and I am to tap him for money, I the winsome grump, the aristocrat, the marchesa, the beggaress, the daughter of a pair of swindlers. How have I been reduced to this? How did it come to this?

Glorianne Micallef, Submission

Translated from the Maltese by Joe Gatt

After a minute of seeing +4476954629442 is typing . . . appear and disappear and appear again and disappear again, he asks her if she thinks it could be his.

Poetry

Gilberto Owen, from Línea

Translated from the Spanish by Jack Chelgren

At every point in time it is always that time
Dead
Sailors’ steps made the land into another bigger ship
The sea undid its bodice with each wave slimmer and slimmer

Ahmad Shamlou, from Elegies of the Earth

Translated from the Persian by Niloufar Talebi

To seek
to find
and then to freely choose
to build
a fortress
of your own self—

Sao Xia, Old Island Telephone Call

Translated from the Chinese by Tsong Chang

tides were menstruation of an island
according to this simple natural phenomenon, she mimed a girl’s coming-of-age
at her feet, crabs scuttled sideways like ants
she now moved with polished grace, no more playful flails to send them fleeing about

Alda Merini, from Emptied of Love

Translated from the Italian by a. Monti

Give me space—space
and I’ll release a nonhuman scream,
this silent scream I kept inside
my fistful of years.

Christos Martinis, from Fuck the Future: Six Poems and a Selfie

Translated from the Greek by Manos Apostolidis

Sending out an SOS from a second-floor apartment
on Kassandrou St. You get used to the noise, don’t
you think? Although with so few wardrobes in sixty-
five m² you must come up with new ways to store
things—et cetera et cetera. You should actually be
thankful. Whatevs. Let us not vulgarise things.

Sayat-Nova, Two Poems

Translated from the Azerbaijani by Peter Orte and Murad Jalilov

My eighty fifth year passed, illness fell on my body,
At ninety, I was sick of it all,
At ninety-five, I became a thousand-year-old hyena.

Jana Putrle Srdić, End of the world, beginning

Translated from the Slovenian by Katja Zakrajšek

The way your breasts point as, teenager, you curl up
in the bathtub, and the way they lie flat on your chest
as you twist and turn in your bed, six, seven decades
into your life, there’s a satisfaction in that . . .
you are a solitude long before being told of the concept of loneness

Marie Lundquist, from The Garden of the Dead

Translated from the Swedish by Miriam Åkervall

A beetle can, for example, be made of copper and sunk in vinegar so that it patinates to a beautiful scarab green. So too can a person become metallic through mistreatment and neglect and reshaped into a neck ring with a lock

Milena Marković, from Children

Translated from the Serbian by Steven and Maja Teref

a strange man invited me and a friend to be
hair models in real london
war began and all our people sat and
watched the news and I said mama now that the war has begun
can I stay in london and be
a hair model
what’s wrong with you she said you stupid cow

Taras Malkovych, Two Poems

Translated from the Ukrainian by Taras Malkovych

One night, after yet another stroll,
we’d return to our reef,
shed our equipment,
and lie in the sand together,
breathing the same air,
until gills bloomed through our backs

Nonfiction

Rafael Toriz, from Animalia

Translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle

The coelacanth is the only living creature to have swum the watery bowels of the Earth from the first night of time until the dawn of our sorrows.

Bassam Yousuf, “When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend”

Translated from the Arabic by Katherine Van de Vate

The man torturing me suddenly stopped and yanked off my blindfold. With a wild-eyed stare, he demanded: “Who are you?”

Syaman Rapongan, from Eyes of the Ocean

Translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk

When it comes to hate, I weep for the Han. But I must also say I am grateful that Chinese characters have given me a window on the world.

Fawwaz Traboulsi, from An Incurable Hope

Translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Zohdi

Gunshots have been blasting since sundown. The fighters are bidding Beirut farewell.

Yuriy Serebriansky, Voices of Kazakh Cities

Translated from the Russian by Yuriy Serebriansky

A request for an almond milk latte is treated as a personal preference, while a request for a Kazakh-language menu is seen as an aggression.

Drama

Yannis Palavos, To the Right of the Creek

Translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck

I bent over the river to see if he had fallen in, if the water had carried him away, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Marius Ivaškevičius, from Banishment

Translated from the Lithuanian by Rimas Uzgiris

I was for an end to our relationship, but a humane one.

Visual

Anna Tsouhlarakis, Echoes of Tradition: On Indigenization, Representation, and Community with Anna Tsouhlarakis

When I began reflecting on the action of indigenization, I thought a lot about what it is that makes a person indigenous.

Mohamed Abdelkarim, Fiction’s Futurability

I believe that myth is not a story or cultural legacy, but a mode of thought and a refuge for finding and depositing different paradigms in a world where meaning has collapsed and global values have withdrawn.

Outsiders

Vedita Cowaloosur, Private Goordial Seeraz

With time, I also started understanding what role we—the colonial subjects from Mauritius—were playing, merely through our presence.

Rodrigo Urquiola Flores, La Venezolana

Translated from the Spanish by Shaina Brassard

“Padre,” he said in that Caribbean accent heard more and more frequently around this city, “help me.”

Deborah Douglas Wilbrink, The Way In

There must be a way to make the concept of communitat real, right here, right now.

Interview

An Interview with Boris Dralyuk

That’s what translators do: We find original forms of expression for unoriginal material.