What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.
Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.
Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.
Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.
Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.
—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico
I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.
I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.
Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”
One of my favourite aspects of Asymptote is its engagement with translators to understand their passions, processes, and projects. I am a great admirer of Robin Moger, who has done so much for and continues to do so much for, the world of Arabic literature in translation. I’ve loved his work, from his translation of Slipping by Mohamed Kheir to his collaboration with the equally dazzling Yasmine Seale, Agitated Air, and I’m looking forward to his translation of Iman Mersal’s Motherhood and its Ghosts for Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series. In this Alex Tan’s interview with Robin Moger, Moger is incredibly generous with his insights, providing commentary on his work with great specificity. There is such natural rapport and expansive dialogue between him and Tan.
—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor
I thought Long Shadows by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (in Jennifer Busch and Audrey Delphendahl’s brilliant translation) was fascinating and overwhelmingly captivating.
I found Michael Lavers’s translations of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin splendidly fresh and convincingly modern.
Junyi Zhou’s interview highlighted Federico Federici’s groundbreaking approach to the most intimate connections between mathematized physics (particularly quantum mechanics) and mathematically (per/de-)formed language. I often feel compelled to continue following the work of some of our contributors after they are featured in the journal, and this is one such case. The interview also speaks on multiple ways to Monica Ong’s interview as well. Heather Green’s work as interviewer and editor (as well as poet in her own right) is as always truly magical!
So good to welcome again Brother Anthony of Taizé and his infallible taste and mastery to our journal. With no less than two exquisite contributions (translations of Jeong Ho-seung and Shin Dalja) that could each be described best by his own rendition of two lines in Shin Dalja’s poetry: “A clear gem/ that has passed through thousand-degree flames.”
—MARGENTO, Editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova
I’m biased, obviously, but my favourite piece has to be the interview I did with Robin Moger. I’m a huge fan of his work, and his translations of Arabic literature have constituted a formative roadmap in my own reading life.
Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is a careful reading of poetic attention, metaphoricity, and the gift that puts me in mind of Yoko Tawada, who in her own wayward fashion engages with European literature and the monumental figure of Paul Celan. Her meditations on the translational, postal nature of writing also connects quite intricately with Jeong Ho-seung’s “Special Delivery” (tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé), where sorrow arrives without attribution, without a “sender’s name and address. There’s an incantatory bleakness here, pleading and plaintive, in search of sorrow’s “true face”. Repetition functions differently in Charlotte Warsen’s “Inside the vital fluids” and takes on a more playful, elastic, villanelle-like aspect, one thing sliding into the next, as “en passant” it “would disappear”, from throats to pills and fluids.
Finally, Jonathan C Chou’s “Hearth” tickles an itch I’ve been experiencing recently in my wanderings through poetic space and erasure. I’m reminded of Solmaz Sharif’s work with military documents and official lexicons, and M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong! The question marks stranded in the middle of the blank page and the “A”s contrast in their genericity with the weight of all that has been effaced, gesturing to the insufficiency of the archival.
—Alex Tan, Assistant Managing Editor
There is a delicate balance between vibrant, rich possibilities and a churning, heaving sorrow across Mary Ann Newman’s and Tanya Huntington’s translations of Judith Santopietro’s poetry. From the hurtling momentum and peculiar freedom of riding on the roof of a train to the time-worn and weary search for familiar gestures and heartbeats and bones in forests and off highways, these poems paint searing images of life in Mexico and for the Mexican diaspora.
“My transition from physics to visual art was not a departure but rather an expansion of inquiry.” In a world that is increasingly divided, this opening remark in Federico Federici’s interview is a perfect reminder that certain categorizations are artificial and can (perhaps should) be overcome to recognize and appreciate the resonances between them. I’m intrigued by the parallels and bridges that Federici finds and builds between the physical sciences, linguistics, and visual art.
—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant
Shin Dalja’s two poems (tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé) astounded me in their coarseness and straightforward eloquence. I appreciate her readiness to unflinchingly profess her point of view when such candor was discouraged in her literary milieu. Her poems, to me, burn with what Walter Pater calls the “hard, gemlike flame,” in the center of everything mutable.
Having long admired Lee Chang-dong’s cinema, I was thrilled to see one of his short stories, rendered into English, featured in Asymptote. I’m always in awe of Lee’s ability to probe into the depths of the human psyche and his sympathy for his characters; “Dance” (tr. Heinz Insu Fenkl and Yoosup Chang) is no exception. The way he traces Sangchul and his wife’s interiorities simultaneously works especially well.
Liu Ligan’s poetry (tr. Dong Li) stood out as something momentous—it sees the sublime in the mundane, the beauty in the filth. It reads like pieces of fragmented, condensed fiction. The bonus of reading his work in two languages is always a treat.
Heather Green’s interview with Monica Ong was a delight to read. I enjoyed learning more about Ong’s ties to medicine and astronomy and thinking through questions of hybridity, identity, and belonging. Reading this interview alongside the interview with Federico Federici was especially enlightening, as one could see the different approaches the two artists took to revise, challenge, and expand the forms of poetry and visual art.
Rosario Castellanos’s letter to her husband (tr. Nancy Ross Jean) is packed with love, humor, and earnestness. Even though I haven’t heard of her before, reading her words is tantamount to knowing her—and the world of which she is a part, on the brink of seismic change.
—Junyi Zhou, Assistant Editor (Visual)
The sheer force of the sticky, dense, overheated paragraphs and her pitch-perfect assumption of a narrative voice with the pose (not the diction) in “Long Shadows” by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (tr. Jennifer Busch and Audrey Delphendahl) had me tearing through this remarkable story that manages to place all its weight on a climactic moment of inaction, of silence.
Even though this Greek guy in the mid-twentieth century United States was made to sound like a working-class Brit, I was taken by his voice and the philosophical implications of Dimosthenis Papamarkos’s fiction (tr.Siân Valvis) as its linguistic and cultural shrouds are hypnotically unraveled from the stark naked act of bloodshed in its many forms.
It was a joy to read Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s submission and extremely gratifying to see it here in the issue. I loved it for its phenomenally energetic soundscape that gives entry to intricate questions of language, identity, self-fashioning, place, and family.
Another favorite of mine from slush pile was Marie Uguay’s work (tr. Lauren Peat), which are tenebrous, trembling carvings into the stone face of silence from a poet who died too young but left a record, in her work, of her work to fashion her soul before she passed‚ the Quebecois Keats.
I found Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) endlessly fascinating. An essay that cuts to the core of translation, transmission, reception, perception: all the different axes along which word, sense, beauty, and self are given and taken in the baffling but intuitive process of writing and reading.
—Daniel Yadin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)
Ever since the sourdough craze during the lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic and our renewed appreciation for essential workers, bread has undergone a significant transformation over the last five years. It has become a symbol of community, humility, necessity, and slow growth. Raquel Delgado’s “Men and Bread” (tr. Alice Banks) captured all these qualities that I associate with bread-making, especially as a bread lover myself. Additionally, it reflected certain similarities to my relationship with my father as I read this piece.
“Despondent oleanders,” “lolling bagmoth,” and “acid rain pouring on an iris,” riveted me to Liu Ligan’s poem “Smoke” (tr. Dong Li). It was a pleasure to listen to his poems in Chinese, which felt almost meditative, despite my lack of understanding of the language. The poems appeared as montages of various personal histories woven into a beautiful tapestry of vivid and breathless continuity.
Heather Green’s interview with Monica Ong was my favorite piece from the entire issue. It was a delight to see Caroline Herschel celebrated in a manner that combines the tangibility and abstraction of science with the beauty of poetry. I immediately looked up the volvelle of “The Star Gazer” on Ong’s press site, and I hope to hold it in my hands someday and appreciate its beauty.
I loved the interview with Federico Federici so much that I printed and annotated the text for inspiration. The phrase “Ding an Sich” visually reminded me of Ramón y Cajal’s work but approaching them from a linguistic perspective was truly eye-opening.
Azariele Matšela Sekese’s The Blind Man, The Lame Man and the Antelope (tr. Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle) was the first work originally written in the Sesotho that I encountered. I especially enjoyed reading the translator’s note and realized that much like the seed vault at Svalbard, our journal serves as a collection of lesser-known languages and dialects.
—Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large for India
The list of nouns (types of bread) that begins Raquel Delgado’s “Men and Bread” (tr. Alice Banks) draws me into the narrative with its immediacy and specificity; I can smell and taste these wares while reading their names. I’m struck by the use of bread as a metaphor for the basic needs of familial love and care and the poignancy of expression when such love is lacking.
I love the potential for multilayered meaning in contrapuntal poetry, and Frédéric Forte’s Pocket Elementary Morality (tr. Chris Clarke) is a beautiful example of the form. Again, it constitutes a series of nouns that evoke a timelessness for me, that bring me into the ever-present moment. I read the poem as a reflection on awareness in the face of obstacle or hardship, as if this poet is chronicling the quotidian dichotomy of mindfulness and suffering. And the translator has done a fantastic job of conveying both the rhyme and meaning of the source.
I found Sonia Lima Morais’s “Black Gaze” (tr. Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen) an extraordinarily valuable read for its astute reminder that racist microaggression has both a personal and a universal impact and that the means of survival of such racism depends on relationships to power and privilege mediated by such factors as gender and age. I was struck by the glaring resemblance between the instances of racism recounted by the author and those that I’ve witnessed, heard, and read about in the United States.
I’m impressed by the economy of words, the emblematic form, and the juxtaposition of poetry and official historical documentation and imagery that Jonathan C Hou’s “Hearth” uses to convey an immigration story of confusion, loss of home, and cultural and linguistic clashes. As an interpreter working with migrant populations under the current xenophobic and autocratic US regime, these expressions of alienation and rupture really hit home for me.
—Sauvryn Linn, Copy Editor
Read more from the Blog:
- Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2025
- Our Spring 2025 Issue Has Landed!
- Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team