Monthly Archives: April 2025

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 11, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, MARGENTO, and Zohra Salih

Literary updates from Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain, and India!

In this week of updates from around the world, our Editors-at-Large in Bulgaria, Ireland, and India cover events and awards around key figures in their countries’ respective literary traditions, from the legacies of monumental writers to the emergence of new and impassioned voices. 

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

I discovered Viktor Paskov, a Bulgarian writer and musician, in my early twenties. His books, which without fail reminded me of harmonically complex jazz compositions, left me enthralled and, unsurprisingly, with a wonderful melody stuck inside my head. Despite Paskov’s untimely passing at the age of 59 in 2009, his legacy is very much alive, and his work continues to inspire and stimulate the minds of his readers.

A recent example of his lingering influence is The Literature and Translation House’s announcement of the official launch of a new translation award under his name. The initiative has been made possible through a collaboration with Sofia University and, specifically, its Master’s degree program in translation and editing. According to the organizers, among them Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, a French translator specialized in the Bulgarian language, “the award’s goal is to honor texts that demonstrate an excellent command of the Bulgarian language in all of its expressive possibilities, coherence, and an ethical approach to the original text—to its rhythm, language(s), registers, historicity, images, and worlds.”

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Liberatory Neutrality: On For now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching

April 10, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by mk zariel

In Yau’s poetry, even the body and voice are contested territory, as is language and its intersection with culture. . .

for now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching, translated from the Chinese by Chenxin Jiang, Zephyr Press, 2025

In the poems of Yau Ching’s For now I am sitting here growing transparent, there is a longing, on the part of the poet, to engage with literature for its own sake. She declares that: “I’ve always liked the idea of reading in bed, a life spent / falling asleep reading waking up / and reading more . . . / I only ever write on assignment / my life is ten cents per word no pay no words.” Exemplifying how Yau uses softness and vulnerability in the stead of impassioned critique, readers are likely to find themselves entranced by these poems, their fiercely gentle existence outside of social hierarchy. The resulting text is both relatable and transformative.

Translated from Chinese and published by Zephyr Press, For now I am sitting here growing transparent is Yau’s fifteenth book, and her first to be translated into English. Gathering work from Yau’s other collections, this text is a kind of mid-career retrospective, making Yau’s work accessible to English-speaking audiences while also curating the most resonant and crafted poems from her corpus. These poems have been gathered and treated with great care by translator Chenxin Jiang, whose introduction foregrounds the reader in both the social and political context of Yau’s subtle poems, as well as their linguistic deftness and adventurousness, showcasing the enduring relationship between these two creatives. Admitting that Yau’s poetry provides a challenge due to its “wordplay and playfulness with form,” Jiang nevertheless comes up with solutions that match the idiosyncrasy of the originals. READ MORE…

Devoured, Like Snow Into Sea: Ye Lijun and Fiona Sze-Lorrain on Chinese Nature Poetry

April 9, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Art is from the same source as poetry, and what comes from the mind will eventually return to the mind, as long as one keeps exploring.

 In an interview from The Kenyon Review, the poet Ye Lijun (叶丽隽) confesses: “I feel and think of myself as a nature poet, not a contemporary Chinese pastoral poet,” perhaps revealing the specificities of genres in Chinese ecoliterature. Poetry within Chinese nature writing comes in loose nomenclatures: among others, there is shanshui shi (山水詩), the poetry of mountains, rivers, and landscape; tianyuan shi (田園詩), the poetry of fields, gardens, and farmstead; and shanshui tianyuan shi (山水田園詩), nature poetry. This latter category is brilliantly displayed in My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019), the first bilingual publication of Ye, a promising poet of the post-70s generation.

The book explores the visceral connections between the poet and the landscape she inhabits, with its poems taken from Ye’s three Chinese-language poetry collections and translated by her long-time translator, the award-winning writer, poet, and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain—named in Chinese Literature in the World: Dissemination and Translation Practices (2022) as one of the most prolific translators of modern Sinophone writings. In this conversation, kindly mediated by her translation, I spoke with both Ye (in Lishui) and Dr. Sze-Lorrain (in Paris) on this English-language debut, and how their book speaks to the larger body of Chinese nature poetry.

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Translation Tuesday: “Melonpan” by Sachiko Kishimoto

April 8, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Yui Kajita

Is everyone holding on to a piece of their dreams in secret, like this indigo ball of my dream that I’d kept for myself?

What if the price of a better world was the loss of your dreams? That’s the question that Japanese author Sachiko Kashimoto asks in this week’s Translation Tuesday, translated by Yui Kajita. In this spare, subtly plotted short story, an unnamed narrator goes for a short walk to pick dandelions, only to retreat to their apartment after experiencing sudden drowsiness. There, in conversation with their neighbor, the true nature of the narrator’s condition is revealed: their unremembered dreams are the physical substance from which their idyllic world is made. As they begin, once more, to dream, they find themself in an unexpected place, their elusive vision drawing a faint but powerful connection between their utopia and the altogether more painful world of the audience. Read on!

Today I’ll pick a hundred dandelions, I decided and walked out to the riverbank.

The sun was shining bright, the surface of the water glimmering in the warm breeze. It might’ve been a good day for picnicking by the river, too, I thought fleetingly.

All over the bank, green was shooting up from the ground, piercing through the round rocks, and there they were, blazing yellow dandelions, so vivid they almost stung my eyes, thriving everywhere. I would’ve felt sorry to pick five or six from the same clump, so I set a rule that I’d leave at least half of each cluster untouched, then started picking the flowers while counting each one in my head.

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European Literature Days 2024: The Twenty-First Century City and Countryside

April 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

City and countryside, war and peace, and the persistence of garbage.

Every year, European Literature Days transforms the Austrian city of Krens an der Donau into a lively, welcoming theatre for the celebration of contemporary writing, featuring readings, dialogues, workshops, and other cultural programming coordinated under a selected subject. The 2024 edition had the urban-rural complex as its central theme, and in the following dispatch, our editor-at-large MARGENTO reports on the events and conversations that took place.

Late last November, as I headed back to Krems-on-the-Danube to attend European Literature Days (Europäischen Literaturtage) for the second time, I realized that there was a need for me to both grasp the event’s larger context and to hone in on its details and nuances. This concurrence of conflicting scales requires starting this brief dispatch in media res, with a tour offered by the organizers on the third day of the festival. There, the guides Gregor Kremser and Max Dietrich took participants around town, unveiling multilayered histories and instances of reinscribing the past. The landmarks ranged from a park named for the anti-Nazi resistance fighter Therese Mahrer, to the only memorial (in Austria and Germany if not the world) dedicated to a WWII German military—ironically on the very eighty-sixth anniversary of the Reich’s genocidal pogrom.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 4, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Charlie Ng, and Sofija Popovska

A growing boycott movement in the Philippines, Macedonia's most prestigious poetry award, and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival!

This week, our editors bring you the latest on a prestigious poetry award in North Macedonia; a Filipino comics movement leading the boycott of the Frankfurt Book Fair; and Hong Kong’s ever-exciting and evolving international intersections in letters.

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Throughout the years, the main event in the Macedonian literary scene has been the Struga Poetry Evenings’ awarding of the prestigious Golden Wreath, which has gone to lauded writers such as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes. This year, the prize is given to the Slovak poet Ivan Štrpka; the decision to crown him as this year’s laureate was unanimous, for his “rich, authentic and significant poetic corpus created over six decades.”

Štrpka, born in 1944, has maintained an engaged approach to art from the beginning of his career, committing himself to both moral and aesthetic values and continually incorporating contemporaneous cultural themes. In the 1960s, together with the poets Ivan Laučík and Peter Repka, he founded the poetry group Osamelí bežci (Lonely Runners), and together they composed a manifesto celebrating “freedom of thought . . . individual responsibility and the rejection of communist dictatorship and censorship”—which  was subsequently banned. (For those interested in finding out more, a documentary titled Lonely Runners: Moving On!, directed by Martin Repka, was released in 2019 and focuses on the friendship of the three members.)

Štrpka’s priorities are embodied in his writing, which illuminates—in the words of poet and member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts Katica Kulavkova—“everyday life . . . fragments [of] interpersonal relationships, the relationships between man and woman . . . individual and society . . . the physical and the emotional.” Kulavkova also notes that the “intimate, meditative, communicative . . . dimension” of Štrpka’s work is in many ways achieved via his poetic style, which she describes as “unpretentious [and] subtle” and “filled with detail.” READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter III Earth

April 3, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

What does Earth know that Word does not?

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Earth is cracking along her fault lines. And most of these fault lines are now human.

 

*

[William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar-turned-detective:] “This is what we need: a way to get into the library at night, and a lamp. You get the lamp. Linger in the kitchen after dinner, and take one…”

[Adso of Melk, his protégé, a Benedictine novice:] “A theft?”

[William:] “A loan, in the name of the greater glory of the Lord.”

[Adso:] “If that is so, then count on me.”

– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

 

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The Movement of Language: Matt Reeck on the Best Unexpressed

April 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

But holding two languages ‘open’ at once is imperfect . . . you can get lost in between these two natures.

Matt Reeck’s rich, sonically layered translation of Olivier Domerg’s psychogeographic writing, from Portrait of the Puy de Manse, was published in Asymptote’s January 2025 issue as part of its special feature on new forms. In the piece, we leap from prose to verse, stepping with each new utterance from alignment to alignment, just as the puy becomes a stream becomes another mountain. “Collapse: debris,” writes Domerg in Reeck’s precise, pensive hand. Does translation depend on a similar, geological rhythm of change? In this interview, Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor of Fiction Michelle Chan Schmidt speaks with Reeck about his translative art, the sonic aura of language and space, and the process of decolonising knowledge.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): In an interview with Asymptote from 2014—eleven years ago!—you state that your translation philosophy is ‘best left unexpressed’. Yet in a brilliant 2019 essay for Public Books, ‘Translation’s Burden’, you highlight what you call the ‘Hermeneutic Truth’, deconstructing the cliché of ‘semantic invariance’, or the so-called untranslatable element—apparently intrinsic to each text—that causes their translations to wither. How would you express your translation philosophy today? What role might ‘unnecessary original language words’ play in translated texts?

Matt Reeck (MR): First, I have to say that while I know people use the word ‘philosophy’ in this context, I tend to avoid it; why does everything have to have a philosophy when ‘practice’ would do, when intelligence and sensitivity would do? That word also tends to make ‘practice’ appear uniform and to regularise what is naturally variable. Even if there are guidelines, choices are always particular and individual. I think that means translation is an art and not a philosophy (and is not governed by a philosophy).

These days, I think about the role editors take. (Patrick Hersant has a great essay forthcoming called ‘The Third Hand’, translated by me (!), that talks about the role editors play in the publication of translations.) I think about any book’s birth as a collaboration. So many people are involved, and the relationship with editors can be good or bad. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Voice of Sulina by Anneleen Van Offel

April 1, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Fiona Graham

The baby churns in a maelstrom, her heart rate is high, it’s high tide, high time to get her out.

Few people go through the all-obliterating pain of childbirth and retain enough presence of mind—or even the desire—to portray the experience. But that’s exactly what Belgian writer Anneleen Van Offel sets out to do in this excerpt from her novel The Voice of Sulina. Through prose that ripples, churns, and overflows, the reader is plunged into the narrator’s mind, which leaps wildly between the hospital room, Greek myths, her increasing pain, and the feeling of the nascent life inside her. Van Offel’s entrancing stream-of-consciousness style mirrors the fluidity and chaos of labor, dissolving the distinction between the female body and bodies of water. Fiona Graham‘s electrifying translation of the original Dutch adeptly captures the deepest transformation a person can undergo: a “primal dance of compression and resistance.”

Body of Water

Thinking back to that time, the walls are white, but of course they’re not white, they’re covered in grainy, pale yellow wallpaper, and on them are devices with wires poking out, papers full of procedures and guidelines and a poster showing various labour positions, and there’s an old armchair, and a tile hanging loose from the dropped ceiling, yet when I think of the room, it’s a white room, and it’s empty. Leon and I are standing in the middle of a plain, there’s no vegetation, and it’s silent.
      Utterly silent. For hours on end.

We sit on the bed and walk around a bit, read through all the procedures and guidelines, and from time to time someone comes in to ask if anything’s happening yet, but nothing’s happening, I took the tablets two hours ago with plenty of water, the tablets that will set off the labour pains – it’s better to call them waves, said the midwife on the course we took, they’ll hurt less then. I’m not far gone enough, I think, we’re not ready, and the course didn’t tell us anything about this, even though we studied and practised diligently, on an exercise ball and a yoga mat, and went through the various options, on five consecutive Saturday mornings. Naturally I highlighted passages in the course book and made notes and comments in the margins, because that’s the way I am, and now we’re running through the scenario from beginning to baby. But nothing’s happening.
      A few hours ago I found out that my body is poisoning itself. The gynaecologist rang with the results of my blood test; my liver’s failing and there’s protein in my urine, the HELLP syndrome, she said; you don’t want to hear your doctor utter a name like that, but it’s not a disaster, she added, your pregnancy is far enough advanced. It’s best to give birth as soon as possible.
      This has to do with Leon’s antigens, as I understand it, it’s an auto-immune reaction to his presence in my body. The blood vessels feeding into the placenta are constricted and my body has to pump more blood round, raising the pressure, like water behind a dam, while my own organs are drying out and slackening, meekly making a maternal sacrifice.
      For several days now, a band beneath my breasts has been gradually tightening, a phantom corset, and there’s a tingling in my fingers that I try to squeeze out, clenching my fists until my skin whitens with subcutaneous ink. Now, of all times, the baby is still, as if there were no tablets on their way to drag her by the scruff of her neck out of the bubbling primeval swamp.

But it’s inescapable.

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