Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable Translator: Nicholas Glastonbury on Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories

December 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

. . . if we can unmake or destabilize the novel, we might similarly destabilize the nation, which warrants or conscripts the novel.

The Competition of Unfinished Stories is one of those texts that would be classified as “untranslatable” by the more cynical amongst us. Aside from addressing the intricate language politics of Turkey—namely the oppression and marginalization of Kurdish—Sener Ozmen’s text is full of jokes, narrative tangles, loose ends, shapeshifting characters, and suspicious translators. As such, the English edition of the novel is a triumph, not only in Nicholas Glastonbury’s fluid and adventurous prose, but also in his own interjections that celebrate the original’s chaos and multiplicity. In this interview, he speaks on the challenges of translating the book, authorial authority, and language’s resistance to containment.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Hilary Ilkay (HI): This is a challenging and strange book! How did you find out about it? Did you pitch it to a publisher, or was it pitched to you?

Nicholas Glastonbury (NG): I met Sener maybe six years ago. I was in Diyarbakır doing research for my PhD, and there was an organization trying to build an online platform for Kurdish literature, given all of the obstacles that it has in accessing foreign language audiences, and I did some work for them. I was aware of Sener’s work a little bit, but when I met him, I became really interested in it. He’s also a visual artist, so I became really interested in how he saw the world. He’s also written quite a few books; The Competition of Unfinished Stories is his second novel, and the title is what drew me in. After I read it, I thought, what is going on here? This is a crazy book. Then I began pitching it around, and it landed with Sandorf Passage, which I’m very happy about.

HI: I was delighted to discover Sener’s prolific artistic practice when I was reviewing the book. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you see his practice as a visual artist influencing his writing. Do you see an interplay between his art and the way that he constructs stories and narratives?

NG: I think he’s really interested in the absurd. For example, there’s one photograph of his that comes to mind; it’s a group of men hoisting a flag up a flagpole, and they’re all wearing neck braces, and they’re unable to look up at the flag. There’s a tension between violence and nation, and the obligation to nation is very much an aspect of this novel.

He has another piece, a sequence of photographs of himself dressed as Superman. He takes off his cape and uses it as a prayer rug, and the title of the work is “Supermuslim.” He’s got a real sense of humor about things that are so heavy and serious.

There was another piece he did called “Road to Tate Modern,” which is him and another artist trying to make their way to London, to the museum. They do a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza act, riding a horse and a donkey, asking shepherds around the Kurdish countryside where the Tate Modern is. And the shepherds say things like, oh, it’s just over the hill. . . So there’s a sense of the distance that Kurdish cultural production has to surmount in order to reach international audiences—of course conditioned by the violences of the nation-state—that comes through in both his writing and his visual work. I think the way that his approach to writing is shaped by his visual work is how he captures images. For example, in The Competition of Unfinished Stories, the image of Neil Armstrong on the prayer mat dying stands out to me, or all the scenes of Sertac masturbating. There’s a real sense of creating these absurd tableaus, and I think that’s probably influenced by how he sees and visualizes the world through his art.

HI: You have such an impressive and interesting portfolio of translations under your belt and I’m curious, given the scope of your work, what made Ozmen’s writing unique, or what stood out about the way that he wrote? And related to that, what was the biggest challenge in trying to render this unwieldy text into English? READ MORE…

Władysław Reymont: Poland’s Chronicler of the Profane

December 17, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Bowden

Reymont’s work had become so particularly Polish . . . that it once again became universal.

These days, the reading world eagerly anticipates the Swedish Academy’s annual awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature, placing bets and preparing stacks of shiny gold stickers, ready to be stamped on newly reprinted books. Yet the Prize, now over one hundred years old, has had many of its laureates fall into obscurity, either due to a seeming lack of contemporary resonance, or the changing priorities of the Academy itself. In this essay, we look towards the works of one such writer, whose pivotal titles perhaps deserve a revisit for their stylistic commitment, persistent human themes, and documentation of the times.

Władysław Reymont, Poland’s second Nobel Laureate, was born to the family Rejment in 1867; in 1892, when he was first published, he insisted on changing his name’s spelling (if not its pronunciation), in part, as Polish academic Kazimierz Wyka speculated, because of its closeness to the verb rejmentować: “to cuss” in certain Polish dialects. For some authors, this would be a humorous footnote in their biographies, but for Reymont, it proves an apt metaphor for his oeuvre. His major works—including, most famously, Ziema obiecana (The Promised Land) and Chłopi (The Peasants)—are beautiful and distinct depictions of nasty, earthy lives. Like curses disguised with respelling, they reconfigure their surprising, sometimes shocking base material, deriving elegant representations from the inelegant. Despite being drawn, like so many Polish intellectuals of his era, towards a vision of Polish nationhood that literature had to help create, Reymont opted to render Poland as a grimy, smoky, bloody place—but where he becomes intriguing, and what perhaps most compelled the Nobel Committee to award him the 1924 Prize in Literature, is when that focus on the bodily and the brutish becomes celebratory and even liberatory, for both its subjects and their nation.

Reymont was born into a Poland that was, by then, absent for decades. By 1867, the nation had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia for nearly seventy years. Seemingly mirroring this fragmentary state, Reymont was a shoemaker, then an actor, then a linesman on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway, then a prospective candidate at a monastery, before he made his way to writing. Nonetheless (or perhaps because of his aimless decades), Reymont had established himself as a major figure in the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement by the end of the nineteenth century, primarily through his short fiction and travel narratives. The Young Poles—working across literature, music, and art—were neo-romantics, skeptics of the old world order that seemed to edge closer to collapse with each toppled European monarchy or imperial clash, and Reymont’s best-known works are no different. In Ziema obiecana, modernity is simply decried; in Chłopi, Reymont seeks a solution by turning inwards to Poland’s rural culture, timelessly isolated from modern concerns. In both works, we meet plenty of violence, gory detail, and literary profanity, but Reymont’s choice of subject for the latter novel reframes the grit in terms that the Nobel Committee registered as transcendental and universalist. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Seven Seconds of Air by Luca Mael Milsch

December 16, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Han Smith

When I hear the keys, I have to be quick.

Do you remember your childhood fondly? Selah doesn’t. In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the nonbinary protagonist of Luca Mael Milsch’s novel Seven Seconds of Air reflects on their childhood, on the inadequacy and guilt fostered by their constant separation from their working-class mother, on their inability to communicate with a parent whose ability to care for them is limited as much by the economic necessity of constant work as it is by moments of plausibly deniable cruelty.  Brilliantly translated from the German by Han Smith, these sections, written only in the present tense, capture the mind of a child forced to grow up too quickly yet nevertheless committed to a sense of optimism. Writes Han Smith, “The word that I feel is central to Selah’s voice in this section is eigentlich, or actually / really, as in: ‘everything’s actually quite okay’ – it is an attempt at self-reassurance that surely things are fine, with the ‘but’ that follows often only implied.” Read on.

1995

She’s almost never there when I get home: she’s nearly always working late. So today I heated up a frozen lasagna and I sat with my apple juice and watched TV. The little bottles are really only for going on trips, and I’m not supposed to drink them at home. But still, I just like those bottles, and it means I don’t have to wash an extra glass. I sink right into the sofa sometimes. My mother says: melt into it. If I’m still hungry I go and check in the kitchen to see what else we have to eat, and today there was an open pack of crisps and ice-cream too, but my mother can always tell if something’s missing so it’s better to wait and see what she says. In the fridge there was a yoghurt, and I thought she might be fine with that. That was what I hoped, that it wouldn’t be too bad. Then I headed back to the living room.

Sometimes I like to touch the screen with my fingers, even if I know it isn’t allowed. I’m really not meant to go near it at all, because it isn’t safe and I might also somehow break it. But when I touch the surface, when it’s on, that is, it crackles out and I jump back with the shock. Even though I know it’s going to happen – somehow I just forget every time. I’ve actually thought quite a lot about falling through time or even disappearing completely, and I wish something could maybe pull me into the TV, into the programme I’m watching, and then I’d just be gone.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2025

December 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Dan Shurley, Hilary Ilkay, Kaelie Giffel, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Japan, Peru, Germany, Austria, Czechia, South Korea, Brazil, and Hungary!

In our final round-up of the year, we present a thrilling novel capturing the margins of Germany as the nation begins to veer into fascism, a collection gathering the voices of powerful Hungarian women poets, a Brazilian novel testifying to the colonial erasure of indigenous language and being, a series of essays considering the act of reading as an oppositional force against capitalism, and more!

kappa

Kappa by Ryonosuke Akutagawa, translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Bownas, Pushkin Press, 2025

Review by Kaelie Giffel

Even if one is unfamiliar with his work, English readers will recognize the name Ryonosuke Akutagawa from the prestigious Japanese literary prize, named after him posthumously by a friend. Kappa is a novella published in the final year of the author’s life. Pushkin Press’s reissue of Geoffrey Bownas’s 1970 translation comes on the heels of a 2023 retranslation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell, published by New Directions in 2023. Multiple, competing translations indicate the continued importance of Akutagawa’s work, which has a renewed urgency in our time.

Kappa is a philosophical meditation on whether difference can be encountered without violence and how we might meet others in the strange in-between spaces. Structured as a frame narrative, its inciting incident is the testimony of a patient in an unnamed mental institution. The patient speaks about meeting strange creatures with tummy pouches called Kappas. The Kappas have their own cultural, historical, and philosophical institutions and orientations to life, and the narrator lives among them for a while, alternately admiring, baffled, or repulsed as he learns more about their existence. They oppose birth control for silly reasons; sacrifice workers who have been laid off by literally eating them; prohibit artistic performance because they believe the general public to be hopelessly stupid; and are generally misogynist—female Kappas are cast as libidinous huntresses that oppress male Kappas. The narrator is bewildered by the similarities and differences between himself (Japanese) and the Kappanese. Hence, the mental institution.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 12, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Sayani Sarkar

Literary updates from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and India!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on the latest in literary news from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and India. From an open submission call for Filipino literature in translation, to a controversial AI-focused poetry competition in Bulgaria and a series of award-winning Indian titles, read on to learn more.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Kritika Kultura, a scholarly journal of literary, language, and cultural studies published semi-annually by Ateneo de Manila University is now welcoming submissions for a Special Literary Section on Filipino Literature in Translation. Placing particular emphasis on literary translations from nearly two hundred Philippine languages into English, this special literary section will cast a critical light on the often-unseen compromises and negotiations involved in bringing these works to the Anglosphere.

Guest-edited by translator, poet, and scholar Dr Christian Jil Benitez, the folio seeks to offer more than translation. ‘The special literary section aims to show the variety of ways translators from Philippine languages mediate Filipino literature with the Anglophone world linguistically, culturally, and even institutionally,’ he said.

READ MORE…

Honouring Amílcar Cabral

December 11, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Bethlehem Attfield

. . . the issues Cabral championed throughout his life . . . remain as relevant today and resonate with other social movements.

Poet, revolutionary, scientist, politician: Amílcar Cabral took many roles throughout his extraordinary life, including leading the nationalist movements of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Admired for his staunch ideals and his uncompromising vision of pan-Africanism, many of his ideas continue to be found in anti-oppression rhetorics and movements all over the world. In this essay, Bethlehem Attfield takes a look at his legacy—one that has spread far beyond the African continent—fifty years after his nation’s independence.

This year, Cape Verde is celebrating a special milestone: the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s independence. Yet, the celebrations actually began the year before, in honour of what would have been the hundredth birthday of the country’s founding hero, Amílcar Cabral (1924–73). Cabral was a political leader who founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), and led an armed struggle to free both nations from Portuguese colonial rule. While he is best remembered as a prominent anticolonial figure across Africa, Cabral also left a powerful legacy through his writing, poetry, and cultural ideas, many of which are collected in the volume Resistance and Decolonization, translated by Dan Wood.

Particularly intriguing are his theories concerning culture; he regarded the promotion of national spirit among the rural peasantry, whose lives remained unaffected by imperialism, as vital to national liberation. However, in terms of language use, he differed from most anticolonial leaders who condemn the destructive impact of colonial language on the cultural fabric and psyche of the colonised people. Instead, Cabral argued that the colonial suppression of cultural life in Africa was ineffective, writing:

Except for cases of genocide or the violent reduction of native populations to cultural and social insignificance, the epoch of colonization was not sufficient, at least in Africa, to bring about any significant destruction or degradation of the essential elements of the culture and traditions of the colonized peoples.

READ MORE…

Visual Spotlight: Mahwish Chishty on Challenging the Reality of Modern Warfare

December 10, 2025  |  in Visual Art  |  by Mahwish Chishty

Art is not detached from reality; it is reality, often dark and violent, that impels artists to create work that may address that reality.

As 2025 draws towards its close and we begin to reflect on the year, one unescapable fact is that it was another year of the world at war, when the terrors wrought by modern weaponry and those who deploy it has become only too clear. In this context, we would like to revisit our feature on the work of Mahwish Chishty from our Summer 2014 issue. In War Machines, Chishty painted traditional Pakistani ‘truck art’ over photos of military drones, calling attention to the terror of the modern war machine by contrasting it with a representation of beauty. Chishty’s work feels as resonant and relevant today as it did then, both as a way of giving voice to horror and of resisting it.

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Q&A with Mahwish Chishty

For those of our readers unfamiliar with Pakistani ‘truck art,’ can you explain what it is?

‘Truck art,’ sometimes referred to as ‘jingle art,’ has recently become a cultural phenomenon in Pakistan. In ‘truck art,’ trucks (but also rickshaws and buses) are painted inside out, in elaborate colors. The decoration of vehicles is, of course, common practice in many countries but Pakistani (and Afghani) truck art is unique because of the pervasiveness of its decoration. Virtually all privately owned trucks in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) are decorated in a way that varies from region to region. I was introduced to this cultural practice back in 1999 while I was attending the National College of Arts in Lahore and this phenomenon of myriad colors and styles superimposed over dull grey metal has always intrigued me.

Elsewhere you have mentioned that culturally loaded text sometimes accompanies the colorful ‘truck art’ and you appropriate both text and ‘truck art’ in your miniature paintings of military drones. Firstly, can you tell us more about this text, and secondly, what do you hope to achieve by appropriating ‘truck art’ in your depiction of war machines?

In the ‘truck art’ genre, certain texts are repeatedly written and, because of the beautiful way in which they are repeatedly written, aestheticized for the viewer. Content-wise, these texts may express the truck owner’s political or religious leanings; they may also be poetry, or movie trivia. In my paintings, I either borrow the imagery and texts wholesale, or improvise.

By presenting the colorful iconography and texts within the silhouette of a drone, I hope to open up a conversation about omnipresent ‘truck art’ and the not-so-visible presence of drones in that region. ‘Truck art’ originated in Afghanistan and spread across the border into Pakistan—the same Pakistan/Afghanistan border that is now a war zone. Truck drivers use their mode of transportation as a colorful form of self-expression; drone operators, however, are invested in remaining anonymous. In nature, bright colors attract attention; in art, they also serve the practical purpose of drawing viewers into the work. And just as in nature, where certain combinations of bright colors index an animal’s deadliness, here the coded visual language, upon closer examination, reveals sinister elements such as snakes, guns, swords, spears, grenades, and dead fish, among others.

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What is the significance, if any, of tea stains on many of these works?

Tea staining has been used in traditional miniature painting for thousands of years as a way to start a painting with a neutral background instead of stark white. For these pieces, it works insofar as the texture and color of the tea stains depict well the aerial landscape of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, i.e. the view that drone operators would see on their computer monitors 10,000 kilometers away from the war zone.

As recently as a month ago, Pakistani fighter jets carried out raids on suspected militant hideouts in the tribal North Waziristan region, killing 80 militants. What do you think art can hope to achieve, against reality?

Art is not detached from reality; it is reality, often dark and violent, that impels artists to create work that may address that reality. In fact, many artists from this region have altered their artistic practice to express their concern and dissatisfaction about the bloodshed in that region. As a Pakistani living in the US, I’ve found it even more necessary to create work about issues that concern my people and me.

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Revisit the feature on Chishty and the portfolio of her work here.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “Priest without Judgment” by Sara Munizaga

December 9, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Sara Munizaga

Reconciling Jessica with the faith was perhaps the task God had entrusted to me in this life, the reason I had been preparing for years in silence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a short story by Chilean writer Sara Munizaga, translated from Spanish by the author herself. In it, a Catholic priest reflects on the frustrations of his vocation, recounting numerous examples of so-called believers whose behavior belies their professed faith. His suppressed anger conflicts with his desire to embody God’s all-encompassing forgiveness. This all comes to a head when he is asked to officiate the wedding of Jessica, a former object of infatuation who, in his telling, led him on and then cruelly rejected him. Munizaga’s story is a cynical and clever exploration of religion, gender relations, and above all, the self-deceptions that control our lives.

This vocation makes you indolent: deaths, births, and people in general cease to matter, because nothing is more demoralizing to the soul than speaking of God’s love to those who are not listening. We know they come here, to the church, as a last resort—without hope and without any genuine desire to hear the Lord’s message.

They convert to religion at the last minute, under pressure, for on their deathbeds they have no salvation plan other than the one I can give them. I feel their trembling hands clutch at my cassock, trying to keep the fate of a hell they so carelessly secured for themselves from swallowing them whole. Now they fear facing the devil when death is imminent, but when they were healthy they felt immortal and could not be bothered to live virtuously or serve others.

For that reason I spare no one in my funeral sermons. It is the only time I obtain an audience held captive by grief, and I lecture them with tedious catechism texts as a punishment for their superficial and agnostic lives. I am unmoved by the widow’s inconsolable weeping or the mourners’ emotional speeches. I know they are hypocrisy; and I will not worship any god but the God of truth, my Lord Jesus Christ. It is so simple to understand: one need only look at the life of Doña Patricia. Five children, twenty-five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and every day she arrived alone at the noon mass, accompanied only by a nurse hired by the family—who preferred to pay a stranger to take charge of the woman who gave them everything. The Christmas before last, Doña Patricia confessed to me that she had kept all her relatives’ gifts, still wrapped, there at the nursing home where she lived; her family never came to see her, and she was left alone during the holidays. And yet, a year later, at her funeral, the church was overflowing—not a single seat left empty. Then she achieved the full attendance she would have desired. I wanted to have the nerve to throw those still-wrapped gifts at their faces from the very altar, but that is not the Lord’s way. He is almighty and teaches us to find forgiveness. A greater crisis will come to that family that will rouse them from the selfish stupor in which they conduct their lives.

READ MORE…

More Than a Witness: A Review of The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo and Jay Boss Rubin

December 8, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Rebecca Suzuki

Across the collection, these stories are unforgiving and gut-wrenching, a reminder that reality is often the same.

The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo, translated from the Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin, Hanging Loose Press, 2025

Each story in Esther Karin Mngodo‘s short story collection, The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories, work together to compose an intricate web, with ongoing threads of entrancement cocooning readers from beginning to end. Beautifully translated from Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin, the prose grips and refuses to let go, revealing the rawest truths of the human condition.

The collection is a mixture of realism, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction. In one of the stories, a woman and man are on a date at the theater, and one quickly realizes, in a meta turn, that the play they are watching is actually an apocalyptic story from earlier in the collection. In the middle of the play, a scream emblematizes the center of the interconnected narrative and terrifies the protagonist in the story: “I nearly went into shock. My whole body snapped to attention. I wrapped my arms around myself so I wouldn’t have to run away or hide under my seat.” Contained in this bloodcurdling scream are all the themes explored in The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories: betrayal, jealousy, negligence, violence, powerlessness, loss—feelings that so many of us suffer through alone and in silence.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 5, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Shatha Abdellatif

The latest from Nigeria and Palestine!

In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors report on the winners of the Palestine Book Awards and a worrying change of policy in Nigerian language education. Read on for more.

Shatha Abdellatif, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Palestine

On November 15, the Palestine Book Awards announced this year’s winners in Central London, honouring “the spirit of Palestine” amidst a critically transformative period. Hosted by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), the Palestine Book Awards welcomes nominations for writing on Palestine in English from publishers and authors, with no restrictions on their geographic or national backgrounds—thus worldling the literature of/on Palestine onto the global map of literary production.

Among the supremely intelligent works from this year’s winning titles was Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, making him a two-time winner of the PBA after Against Erasure took home the award in the creative category last year. Nasser Abourahme’s The Time Beneath the Concrete—an unflinching, rigorous monograph that positions refugee camps as the key to fathom the larger question of Palestine, and by extension, the spatio-temporal struggle in the larger context of Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine—won in the academic category.  Abourahme astutely writes in his introduction: “All [Palestinians] live in the permanent temporariness of camptime, with varying degrees of extraterritorial dislocation and extralegal vulnerability.” READ MORE…

No One All the Way Down: A Review of One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello

December 4, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

. . . in One, None, and a Hundred Grand that Pirandello turns inward, eyeing the abundant fragments that compose each of us.

One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello, translated from the Italian by Sean Wilsey, Archipelago Books, 2025

Luigi Pirandello’s final novel, One, None, and a Hundred Grand, begins with a nose; the slight tilt of it, casually noted by a wife, sets off one of the most vertiginous descents into selfhood in all of literature. For Vitangelo Moscarda (meaning maggot, one of the many signifying names in this book), this offhand observation shatters a presumed unity: if his wife sees him differently from how he sees himself, who—or what—is he? What follows is a tragicomic unraveling of identity that, nearly a century later, reads with the vitality of a modern parable. In Sean Wilsey’s supple and stylish new translation, published by Archipelago Books, Pirandello’s masterpiece finds new life in an era that is just as fragmented as Moscarda’s mirror.

Though best known in the Anglophone world for his revolutionary plays—especially Six Characters in Search of an Author, which famously broke the fourth wall and dismantled the illusion of coherent identity onstage—Pirandello began his career as a philologist and prose writer, and this training in dialect and etymology shaped his understanding of identity as both an artifact of language and a performance of speech. In the theater, he would go on to stage this view with uncanny force: characters who refuse their scripts, actors who rebel against the author, spectators forced to confront their own role in meaning-making. But it is in One, None, and a Hundred Grand that Pirandello turns inward, eyeing the abundant fragments that compose each of us. READ MORE…

To Become an Afterlife: An Interview with Christian Jil Benitez on Filipino Literature in Translation

December 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

After all, with all the languages and cultures of the country, one can only speak of the ‘Philippine’ in partials. . .

Named Poet of the Year in 2018 by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language), Christian Jil Benitez is a queer Filipino poet, scholar, and translator. His debut book, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (A Theory of Time, 2022), was awarded the Best Book of Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies at the National Book Awards in the Philippines, substantiating his important work in codifying the cultural formation of ‘Filipino time’ via the material, the poetic, and the tropical, in addition to finding an equilibrium between Western critical theory and indigenous epistemologies.

Beyond his scholarship, from positioning the bugtong (or the Tagalog riddle) as ecopoetry to recasting vernacular oral traditions as matrices of queer world-making, Benitez’s translations maintain that their critical role is not merely linguistic, but also results in a creative rebirth, of ‘translation that acknowledges, and relishes even, the transfiguration of the material as it is carried over from one containing language to another’.

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Benitez, traversing Bangkok and Manila, about the pressures and prospects of translation in neocolonial, multilingual Philippines, as well as the ethics of barkadahan, especially when familiarity and friendship become central to the labour and logics of literary translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (A Theory of Time), excavates the construct of time through Philippine-language dictionaries, poetry, historico-colonial texts, metaphors, and indigenous orality, revealing it as ecological, discursive, and material. How does ‘Filipino time’, as you’ve theorised it, diverge from Western, capitalist temporality?

Christian Jil Benitez (CJB): We commonly use ‘Filipino time’ to refer to the tendency of Filipinos to be late: to start an event in ‘Filipino time’ means to actually start one hour after the initially agreed time. The term was supposedly coined by the Americans during their occupation in the country to shame Filipinos for this behavior, but this habit has also been observed in many Southeast Asian (as well as other non-Eurowestern) contexts, and can be understood as the persistence of polychronic sensibility in these cultures despite the imposition of Eurowestern, capitalist, and patriarchal monochronicity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Cicada Green” by Ju Donzelli

December 2, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Grace Penry

The giant cicadas came and went, hurling themselves at Iturbe. He kept waving his arms, trying to scare the bugs off.

A languid summer vacation takes a distressing turn in this short story by Argentine writer Ju Donzelli, translated from the Spanish by Grace Penry. A group of high school friends abscond to a nearby town to swim, drink, and hang out, but the relaxed atmosphere slowly grows more tense, leading to an altercation between two boys—one of them being the slender, soft-spoken Flaco Luna, an anomaly among the guys and beloved by the girls. The sudden outbreak of violence reveals the unspoken tensions of adolescence, when masculinity must be achieved through publicly dominating others, including your own friends. Between the electrifying fascination of otherness and the terrorizing brutality of conformity, the boys’ fragile ecosystem is fiercely shaken by the incident.

I don’t go on vacation with the guys from high school anymore, but with Flaco, I’d go again. The last time we were all together we went to Guayamba, one of those towns where we Santiagueños will spend a couple of days because it’s nearby, because there’s a river, because it’s cool and cheap.

In the evening, the giant cicadas started getting on our nerves. It’s always like this, but on this day in particular they screeched and screeched. They look like other cicadas, only much bigger and rounder, the area around Santiago is full of them because of the carob trees. They’d zoom past us and hit things like projectiles, making a dry sound when they slammed into the wall. That’s what’s so funny about them: they sound empty when they bang into something and they’re always acting like they want to kill themselves. If there’s a pool, the first thing they do is head straight into the water and buzz their wings until they drown and die. And if you take them out, they’ll jump right back in. It’s an infinite loop lasting half the summer. 

Whenever we’d go to Guayamba, we’d stay in Manso’s parents’ house because it’s pretty big and has a pool. Us guys had taken our clothes off, it wasn’t that hot out, but we were drunk, the humidity made the air dense, and during the siesta we’d sunbathed at the river. Plus, the power kept cutting out because it had rained, and the fans kept turning off. The girls were still in their shorts and bikinis, with their feet in the pool and hair dripping with the smell of chlorine. 

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Feminism & Imagination in Fifty-Two Stories: A Review of The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda

December 1, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Grace En-Yi Ting

Matsuda's collection also continually surprises the reader with playfulness, randomness, and pleasure. . .

The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Europa Editions, 2025

Within the new wave of openly feminist Japanese literature, Aoko Matsuda is well-known for her fierce, sharply funny critique of sexism in contemporary Japan. Her work has previously appeared in English with publications like “The Girl Who Is Getting Married” (translated by Angus Turvill) and Where the Wild Ladies Are (translated by Polly Barton), and now, with the appearance of The Woman Dies—also translated by Barton—Matsuda continues her incisive vision with fifty-two short stories that jump from the mockery of gender roles to subtler reflections on girlhood, often interspliced with delightfully whimsical commentary on the everyday.

As sexism and anti-LGBTQ stances persist in Japan, the increasing number of talented Japanese writers translated into English nonetheless reveal literary discourses that dissect and challenge the limits of how gender and sexuality are established in mainstream society. Feminist discourses in Japan are also growingly transnational, with readers eagerly devouring feminist fiction translated from English, Korean, and other languages. Matsuda herself is not only an accomplished fiction writer and essayist, but also a translator of English, bringing out Japanese iterations of works by Karen Russell and Amelia Gray, among others. The Woman Dies is a unique addition to Japanese literature in English translation—which does not include much flash fiction—and certainly introduces fresh, lively feminist perspectives. At the same time, despite how the collection is advertised, it is too limiting to suggest that all of its stories can fall under “feminism,” as many of Matsuda’s pieces—sometimes only one or two pages in length—are charming snippets of everyday life, resisting any kind of categorization. READ MORE…