I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.
—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor
Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.
In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.
Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.
Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.
Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.
—Julia Maria, Digital Editor
The overarching theme of my favorites in this issue is simplicity. Despite being a maximalist who enjoys crowded artworks and long, intricate sentences, I recognize that there are some things that can only be said in a few words.
In “You can walk I” (tr. Karen Van Dyck from the Greek), Katerina Iliopoulou shows how the transcendence enabled by osmotic interspecies encounters is best captured with simple words that leave space for uncertainties, vagueness, and the blurring together of different subjectivities.
The simplicity of “77” (tr. James Womack from the Russian) by Yan Satunovsky and “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) by Faruk Šehić is of a different kind. Here, simplicity simultaneously embodies both the reduction of human life to mere survival and the unspeakable element in suffering, atrocity, and death.
“The Day the Snow Finds You” (tr. Moonsoon Kim and Eujin Han from the Korean) by Noh Cheonmyeong is simple in a way that is both devastating and enchanting. The massive weight accorded to the word snow—through its recurrence in a miniature poem—conveys both the emptiness of the imprisoned speaker’s life (and thus their fascination with snow) and the magnitude of small joys in a bleak moment.
Finally, in “Untitled” (tr. Jovanka Kalaba from the Serbian) by Uroš Bojanović, simplicity lends the speaker a casualness that, combined with his black humor and flashes of absurd wisdom, creates a uniquely Balkan sensibility that reminds me of home.
—Sofija Popovska, Assistant Managing Editor and Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia
Shinobu Urata’s “The Stone Garden” is my number one piece of this issue. The poetics of this short story are so beautifully crafted. I always know a piece of writing is particularly good when the only way to tell someone else about the experience it gave you is through your own metaphor. For me, it evoked the sounds of a running stream of water, or the delicate motion of folding an envelope, and the image of air bubbles from fish disappearing on the water’s surface. It encapsulates the special feature’s theme “On Attention” perfectly, in my opinion.
Jen Calleja’s interview (skillfully conducted by Sarah Gear) is one that I really enjoyed—not only because I’m already familiar with and interested in Calleja’s work, but also because it has the local (to me) setting of Edinburgh. While I love the internationalism of Asymptote, being able to connect with an article that was created locally has, I’d bet, been a shining feature for many readers of the magazine.
—Caitlin Mckie, Copy Editor
In Estabraq Ahmad’s “Layla’s Wolf” (tr. Fatima ElKalay from the Arabic), healing is not portrayed as a solitary act but as a collaborative rewriting of one’s story—an effort guided by the loving, argumentative voices of those who saved you. It’s a haunting and tender reminder that recovery is often a chorus rather than a monologue.
In Nakanishi Morina’s “Dried Seaweed at Midnight” (tr. Heidi Clark from the Japanese), the ordinary becomes sacred: a piano stool by the stove, a pot of miso soup, quiet gestures that elevate daily life into ritual. Through these small, deliberate acts, memory and self-reclamation are performed not abstractly but with the narrator’s own two, moving hands.
Noh Cheonmyeong’s “Gazing at the Stars” (tr. Moonsoon Kim and Eugene Thacker from the Korean) distills grief and beauty into the simplest imagery—“Falling flowers / The shape of a tomb.” The poem’s brevity feels like breath held between sorrow and transcendence, proof that even the smallest arrangement of words can hold entire worlds.
In Steven G. Kellman’s interview with Tim Brookes, I was fascinated by Brookes’s dedication to art and education as twin avenues for realizing his vision: that saving endangered scripts is not merely about preserving writing systems, but about safeguarding the diverse ways humanity thinks, remembers, and defines itself. His work made me long to see one of his carved alphabets or exhibitions in person.
Finally, Sarah Gear’s interview with Jen Calleja radiates energy and optimism. Calleja’s empowering “yes, I can!” approach to producing and translating experimental, hybrid, and wonderfully strange literature offers inspiration to anyone who has ever doubted their creative path. She is, in every sense, a role model.
—Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large for China
I found Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak” (tr. Thiri Zune from the Burmese) a moving, heartbreaking work that honors languages at risk of disappearing—and the anguish of losing one’s tongue and voice. With brutal transparency and touching honesty, its stanzas flow harmoniously while exposing hard truths, never slipping into sentimentality or cliché. Given how little-known Burmese remains globally, Asymptote’s decision to feature Nay Thit’s poetry perfectly embodies its mission: celebrating marginal voices, liminal experiences, disappearing languages, and the intersection of personal sorrow and collective history.
Naoko Fujimoto’s and Danielle Pieratti’s conversation in “trans.sensory and trans.vocal” is thrilling, profound, and deeply mind-expanding. Fujimoto’s reflections on transvocality, translanguaging, translation, and transfer are extraordinary. The materiality of her visual poems renders visible what literary scholars, translators, and poets often only discuss abstractly. Reading this exchange between such a visionary artist and our former Poetry Editor, Danielle Pieratti, felt like an unexpected gift—to the intellect and to the conscience alike.
Monika Vreçar’s “Does Poetry Exist, or Not” (which she translated from the Slovenian) offers an astonishing self-examination of one of the most difficult questions to pose: Does poetry exist—or not? As a poetry lover, editor, and lifelong reader, I found Vreçar’s shift from the universal to the personal—framing the question as a matter of responsibility in keeping the art alive—profoundly moving. Her essay refuses abstraction, insisting that poetry must be continuously reawakened through awareness and attention. It is, quite simply, an act of saving poetry from oblivion and elitism.
Andrea Gentile’s “Apparitions” (tr. Scott Belluz from the Italian) is an evocative, mesmerizing exploration of perception and presence. Perfectly aligned with the issue’s On Attention theme, Gentile’s writing examines the nature of seeing and being seen with such subtlety that reading it feels like undergoing an enchantment. The essay becomes, in its own right, an apparition—fusing content, form, and reality into a single, haunting meditation.
Finally, Steven G. Kellman’s interview with Tim Brookes stands out as an exceptional and deeply moving dialogue about the Endangered Alphabets Project, which merges linguistics, anthropology, and art into a mission to preserve the beauty and diversity of human scripts. The conversation between Brookes and the interviewer is exquisite: clear, insightful, and tender, balancing lived experience with linguistic reflection and artistic vision. It is an inspiring reminder that the act of preservation is, at its core, an act of love.
—Chiara Gilberti, Senior Assistant Editor (Poetry)
In Nakanishi Morina’s “Dried Seaweed at Midnight” (tr. Heidi Clark from the Japanese), I loved the careful description tracing the detailed movements of the narrator’s body throughout the piece. The image of the hand takes on layered significance as Morina explores ceremony, self-care, artistic practice, memory, and familial relationships. Her writing carries a meditative quality, where tangible acts assume an almost spiritual resonance—but instead of transcending the material, Morina insists upon its importance, finding meaning in the mundane repetitions that amount to “the evidence of a life.”
Barbara Köhler’s “No One’s Woman” (tr. from the German) dazzles with its linguistic experimentation, giving haunting, distinct voices to the women of The Odyssey. Köhler reimagines these mythic figures in all their complexity, monstrosity, multiplicity, and cunning—subverting the storytelling traditions that once reduced them to victims or villains. These poems invite readers to reconsider the function of persona poetry in complicating inherited myths and folktales—an approach that also inspired the lesson plan I contributed to this quarter’s educator’s guide.
In Olivia Elias’s “at wit’s end” (tr. Jérémy Victor Robert from the French), fragments and phrases drawn from Western media coverage of the genocide in Gaza coalesce into a chilling reflection on the limits of language to contain devastation. Yet even amid that failure, Elias calls for liberation with whatever tools remain available to a poet. I was reminded of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land and the way surrealism and irony can become weapons against colonial violence—though here, what ought to be surreal or grotesque is rendered heartbreakingly literal.
The bhakti poet Manikkavasagar’s “Sacred Utterances” (tr. Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Shobhana Kumar from the Tamil) pulse with the energy of dialogue. In these poems, devotion takes on multifaceted forms—the divine is not a distant figure but an interlocutor, sometimes even a sparring partner, as the translators observe. Beyond reverence, there is teasing, play, and even moments when the devotee levels a threat against god. Their concision conceals riddling complexity, yet what I found most delightful were the humble images—a jackfruit, a gooseberry—grounding godliness in the material world.
Shinobu Urita’s “The Stone Garden” felt like the perfect addition to the Special Feature on attention. Urita meditates on rituals of care, exploring how the body can tend to others with precision and grace. This kind of attention is portrayed as a skill to be cultivated, a duty to be carried out, a circle the narrator keeps unbroken. The piece resonates deeply with Nakanishi Morina’s essay in its focus on the hands—the small gestures and routines that, piece by piece, make up a life.
—Devi Sastry, Educational Arm Assistant
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