With thirty-two countries and eighteen languages represented, our Summer 2025 issue is one of adventure, witness, intelligence, capaciousness, drama, mystery, and more. . . We are more dedicated than ever to this fundamentally compassionate work of building a truly global work of letters, which always starts with admiration and awe—so let our editors be your guide as they share the texts that most moved them from this rich compendium.
In what was deemed by both as a ‘never-ending conversation’, Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Alda Merini if she had any unrealised projects. ‘Yes, of course,’ she responded, ‘I never made love to whomever I wanted to, those are projects that went wrong. Those are real projects. We don’t care about the rest.’ Flippant as this may sound, Merini has only spoken what she has proved in a lifetime of tumultuous, searing, and unbounded poems—that love is her lifelong vocation. Love as carnal as it is psychic, as perverse as it is sublime, as unconscious as it is sensational, as much worship as it is despair—in her corpus one finds thoughts racing across topographies in search of adequate metaphor, insanity driving a pin through the core of idea, or the erotic body tingling to the point of immolation. . . To throw the self into love, it seems Merini knew what that truly means; she wasn’t afraid of being taken over by ardor because, after all, it could only have come from her. Love was her fuel, her flesh.
As it is in these poems from Emptied of Love, brought about by a. Monti’s soaring, musical translation. At the very first line, we hear her: ‘Space, give me space—more space’. In other poets this may be read as a plea, but in Merini’s voice, it’s a demand. With this comes reminder of love’s lawlessness, that it gives us permission to pursue what we want, that it gives clarity to what we believe we deserve. Love makes one bold, she demonstrates, and even in its failures, you mourn boldly, expansively. And it is there, mostly in the devastations of love, where Merini exacts her power. The collection from which these pieces are taken, Vuoto d’amore, is a deeply painful one, full of unrequited affairs of the heart, grief, disappointments, madness. They are grand emotions, and the poet understands that their largesse is best met with simple diction—so it is in the syntactical that she renders her immersive, surprising language:
until the sea submerges
this feeble flesh of mine
and I lie exhausted
on you who becomes the beach
and I, becoming wave,
you strike and strike
with Love’s oar.
For someone who has suffered more than anyone’s fair share, and who has conjured that pain so vividly in verse, it feels tremendous here, then, to see Merini also write herself back to the surface, breaking through with a ferocity that re-plants the anchor of I back into certainty. One often fails to recognise the version of themselves that was hopelessly lost in the throes of wasted affection—but she assures us: that is the self, crazed and all. ‘I fell in love with myself / and my own torments.’
Often tangled up with love is loyalty, but the latter has its own distinctions. Whereas the former must allow for the lover’s ultimate unknowability, the latter’s is a purer faith—a conviction that you know someone wholly, for unwavering allegiance can only be built through complete understanding. In Yannis Palavos’s monologue, ‘To the Right of the Creek’, the noble but self-annihilating nature of loyalty is revealed through a redressing of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. Most have deemed it a play that facilitates its titular figure’s veneration, allowing him to die as a hero, but Palavos opts to interpret it as a testimony to Antigone’s enduring filial piety. Here, translated fluidly and mesmerisingly by Karen van Dyck, the suffering daughter speaks.
It is one of those long, Greek summer nights, and a woman is telling the story of her father, which is also the story of music and its sublimity, and a story about a disappeared way of life. Once a local musician of some fame—‘It was his playing that married people, not the church.’—her father would commit a crime of passion and be imprisoned for fifteen years. Upon his release, he finds himself shunned by the community, and it is a long, difficult task to rehumanise himself, to become respectable once again in the eyes of others, and to regain his hold on his instrument. Throughout it all, the woman accompanies him, wandering with him from town to town, from crowd to crowd, but for this man who had once conjured the most numinous of music, bringing out ‘secrets of his own that shook the unknown that hides in each of us’, his long exile had irrevocably changed his playing, which began to show ‘his weakness, and the years’.
But his daughter can still hear the truth of her father’s music, could sense: ‘. . . the hidden part inside thicken, rise and fall, dive down, dip here and there, searching, finding it, losing it, and finding it again, that secret something, spun out note by note in an arch. . .’. This is what continues to bind her to him, this clarity that only she possesses, a unilateral perception of her father’s being, as heard through the sonorous notes, as seen in his gripping of his clarinet in sleep. Aristides Quintilianus had written that music has the ‘capacity to yield the rations of that which men find hardest to understand, the soul, and not only the individual soul, but the soul of the universe as well’. This woman sees in her father a totalisation of humanity—so how could she leave him?
Throughout the monologue, Palavos demonstrates both the fragmentation of the self under its loyalties, as well as how the conviction of loyalty can rejoin the pieces together. Devotion is its own kind of lifeline, guiding one into the future as capably as self-interest, becoming as purposeful as any dream that one could’ve invented on one’s own. There’s only one trouble with it—and that is loss. ‘I will tell you his story, which is my story too’—this is how the woman begins in commemoration, for her father has died. When she has finished telling it, there is only her story left, though we are left with the sense that she has no idea of how to write it.
—Xiao Yue Shan
When I cast my mind back to one of the first moments which truly opened my eyes to the art that is translation, I am taken back to secondary school and the Russian Translation Workshops led by Robert Chandler at Pushkin. A particularly memorable session featured none other than Boris Dralyuk himself, who had managed to stop by during one of his brief sojourns in London. Nearly a decade has passed since our initial and fleeting meeting, yet I profoundly remember the indelible impression he made on me, both in his manner and speech as much as his innate talent and melodious translations.
Seeing an interview with him in Asymptote’s Summer 2025 Issue was certain to be a personal highlight, and it did not disappoint. Sarah Gear’s questions delve into many aspects of Dralyuk’s translation practice, centring especially around his most recent project—the poet and lyricist Vernon Duke’s (born Vladimir Dukelsky) memoir. In a temporal parallel which seems to transcend mere coincidence, both Dralyuk and Dukelsky’s paths of leaving their native Ukraine for LA engenders a sense of predestined symmetry between the pair, with their lives taking course almost exactly a century apart.
It is this commonality that facilitates the nostalgia in Dralyuk’s translations of Duke’s writings. Additionally, Dralyuk shares great insight on how the inherent musicality of an original text is critical in drawing his attention, inspiring him to imbue his own translations with its own music. Though this, naturally, applies to all translation projects, this discussion felt particularly apt in relation to Duke’s own irrefutable musical genius.
Gear also facilitated a provoking conversation on the ICE raids which began last month in Dralyuk’s hometown of LA, highlighting a critical moment in American and global history that marks the cruel and traumatic persecution of America’s immigrants. In a firm stance against these measures, Dralyuk reminds us of how ‘an attack on LA’s immigrant community is an attack on the city as a whole’. This interview, in no uncertain terms, highlights how not only is there strength in diversity, but that diversity inescapably breeds creative with impressive and enduring results.
Another personal standout in our latest issue was the nonfiction piece ‘When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend’, from Syrian political activist, Bassam Yousuf. It recounts the salient encounters between himself and an old friend, Abdullah—from their initial meeting and chance friendship following the latter’s illness, through to their adult years. Abdullah joins Rif’at al-Assad’s Defence Companies (the praetorian guard to the brother of the then-President Hafez al-Assad), before his transfer to the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and when Yousuf is arrested for his activism, it is Abdullah who is assigned as his torturer: ‘Finally he wheeled around and asked, his eyes full of tears: “Don’t you know me?”’
Despite this unprecedented reunion and the purity of their initial boyhood bond, they remain adrift because of their antithetical ideological beliefs: the official line of the regime’s subordinate versus the raw conviction of the oppressed. Abdullah’s tearful recognition, though piercing and sincere, remains as restrained and shackled by the pair’s irreconcilable political differences as by the physical bonds of Yousuf’s imprisonment.
When Yousuf is released, the two briefly meet without the tension of stringent policies and punishments, but their connection is nonetheless fragmented as a result of the regime which invariably permeates their discussions. Once Yousuf has left Syria, the favours they continue to exchange serve as a fine string, tying one to the other across oceans, political upheaval, and the test of time—yet the invasive nature of Syria’s oppressive reality ultimately comes out on top. Sadly, the sincerity of their bond is not strong enough, culminating in a powerful, poignant, and humanising portrayal of how people succumb to subjugation, in spite of one’s morals and guiding principles.
Alongside Katherine Van de Vate’s translation is a voice recording of an excerpt performed in Yousuf’s original Arabic. This marriage of media forms brings the words to life on an entirely different level; the characters of Yousuf and Abdullah no longer seem divorced from reality, with the added sensory layer rendering an already rich description still more vivid. MK’s recording breathes life into an this poignant and wrenching account, which is sure to leave an indelible and long-lasting impression.
—Sophie Benbelaid
I was lucky enough to take some courses devoted to Arabic and Persian poetry in translation in my undergrad, so the themes and motifs present in Ahmad Shamlou’s gorgeous poems from Elegies of the Earth are familiar to me, but no less striking. The lines are multi-sensory, evoking the heady bouquet of wine, the heat of fire, and sunshine. The lover begs for union with the beloved that transcends physical bodies and space, that stretches toward the divine: “Beyond the limits of our bodies / promise me union.” Shamlou’s poems bear the stamp of a long tradition of poetry with a contemporary twist. It’s such a pleasure to read his work in English: dense but also lilting and lyrical, reflections on death alongside evocations of the transformative gaze of a lover. I’m also a bit biased in choosing this highlight, because my middle name, Nilüfer, is the Turkish equivalent of the first name of the text’s brilliant translator, Niloufar Talebi.
One of the things I appreciate about Asymptote is its commitment to thinking about translation not just in written forms, but in visual media as well. I’m not overly familiar with the work of Mohamed Abdelkarim, but after reading his interview with Alex Tan, I’d like to change that. As someone who thinks a lot about mythologies in a classical reception and feminist context, I was fascinated to read Abdelkarim’s representation of myth as “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.” There is such a richness in this way of thinking, a dynamism that clearly animates his performance pieces. He offers valuable thoughts on the nature of performativity and fictionality, narrative, and power, and even though I couldn’t visualize the works being referenced, I felt edified reading his perspectives.
What a gift to have an essay by the prolific Daniel Saldaña París on translation and AI, a topic of great concern to those of us who work in the field. París is incredibly thoughtful here, refusing to either dismiss LLM technology outright or unreservedly sing its praises. He points out AI’s limitations but earnestly considers how it might help the translation process, not necessarily in terms of quality, but efficiency. While acknowledging that these technologies can make things easier for us, however, he goes on to emphasize that “it is in the process of struggling with difficulties, turning them over in one’s mind for days, that translators transcend the mechanical aspects of their work to become artists.” Having done a bit of translation work myself, I can attest that there is nothing more rewarding than slowing down and sitting with the challenges of a particular word or phrasing. Out of that lacuna can come an unexpected and surprising solution, and to translate is to create that conversation with the text and with the future reader.
—Hilary Ilkay
*****
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