Posts by Lee Yew Leong

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

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

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Our Fall 2025 Issue Is Here!

October 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Nay Thit, Jen Calleja, Patrick Autréaux, and Johanna Drucker in our Special Feature on Attention

The world rewrites itself daily, unable to leave the past alone. As Trump’s relentless theatre once more monopolizes our gaze—proof, perhaps, of what Johanna Drucker, in her timely essay “Attention as Predation,” diagnoses as a civilization that is consumed even as it consumes—the question becomes what still endures beneath the smudged text of the present. Palimpsest, our Fall 2025 issue illustrated hauntingly by UK-based visual artist Jayoon Choi, turns to those deeper inscriptions: the faint, resistant traces that refuse to fade, the ghosts of meaning that survive the next rewrite.

In Amanda Michalopoulou’s “Desert,” Athens emerges as a manuscript of light and stone, its ruins glowing like marginalia of time. Carla Mühlhaus overlays the Black Dahlia murder and Andersen’s mermaid over Venice’s 2019 acqua alta, letting myth and crime shimmer beneath the rising waterline. Likewise, Barbara Köhler gives Homer’s Penelope her overdue monologue—both weaver and mermaid surfacing from the sediment of male authorship to reclaim their narratives. From Kazakhstan, Marat Uali laments the vanishing of minority tongues, an anxiety echoed in Tim Brookes’s interview on his Endangered Alphabets Project, where each carved script becomes an act of remembrance. In William Heath’s sparkling update, Herodas gives us drama composed on papyri—reminding us that even the most fragile art can defy oblivion.

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This issue’s wildcard Special Feature, “On Attention,” brings together thinkers and storytellers who resist the culture of erasure. Monika Vrečar asks whether poetry can still exist amid the static while Farah Ahamed, in an astute piece of film criticism on the Bollywood classic “Lagaan,” notes that the monsoon is also a season in the body. Elsewhere, Korean artists Koi and Hyungmee Shin—hailing from opposite sides of the 38th parallel—make masterful use of fabric to create radiant topographies of encounter, while Ecuadorian master Pablo Palacio’s “The Double and Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor) anatomizes the fractured identity of a pair of conjoined twins with a proto-modernist precision that feels radical in our own fragmented age. To read these works together is to experience literature’s own layered materiality.

If this issue has a thesis, it is that world literature does not replace; it accrues. Help us write the next layer: submit to the second installment of our “On Attention” Special Feature (as well as to our regular categories) and apply to join the team (deadline: November 1st)—we especially welcome applicants to the Assistant Editor (Fiction) role. A final note for the record: László Krasznahorkai, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, appeared in our pages twice—long before Stockholm called. If this kind of early, global advocacy matters to you, please become a sustaining or masthead member today—the vital margin note that keeps this palimpsest legible, and gloriously alive.

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Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

August 4, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our bountiful Summer 2025 edition is filled with gems—as these highlights from our team show!

I have complicated feelings about Carolina Brown’s “Anthropocene” (tr. Jessica Powell). The brevity it accords its narrator’s transness is alternately touching and maddening, the fatphobia is at once completely spot-on for such a self-loathing narrator and at the same time it is pretty dehumanizing‚ but, ultimately, all that falls away in the ravaged face of a one-armed zombie jogging across the post climate-change Antarctic wasteland. A wonderful sci-fi tale.

I’d love Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of an Ocean (tr. Darryl Sterk) for the title alone, but fortunately, Rapongan seems like a strong contender for the title of the actual most-interesting-man-in-the-world. His play with words, his treatment of colonization and indigeneity, the kindness with which he talks about younger generations. I really needed to read something like this, after all the ugliness that’s been going on in my own country.

I love the gender-bender secret agent in Valentinas Klimašauskas’s Polygon (tr. Erika Lastovskytė) so freaking much. The concluding discussion of airplane spotters is a particular stand-out for its treatment of how individuals become conscious of their political power.

Refugees are human beings. Where Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’ “La Venezolana” (tr. Shaina Brassard) shines is in its steadfast refusal either to vilify or idealize them, to present them in all their messy humanity, and in its willingness to show how shameful the narrator’s behavior towards them.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Emmanuelle Sapin’s story “A Child Is Stolen” (tr. Michelle Kiefer) starts off with a swift, telling punch to the gut and builds from there.

Ahmad Shamlou’s poems in Niloufar Talebi’s lilting translation hover in waves of emotion and radiance: “Give me mirrors and eager moths, / light and wine…”

With playfulness and insight, Katia Grubisic sharpens the discussion about AI and translation by focusing on error in her piece “The Authority of Error”: “My argument is that AI makes the wrong kind of mistakes.  Mistakes breed resilience, and, most importantly, humility.”

Fawwaz Taboulsi, in Yasmine Zohdi’s translation, steers us directly into the sadness of Lebanon, 1982, and the time of the Siege of Beirut. His grief speaks with lucidity: “And, ever so slowly, the departing fighters peel away from the grasping, waving hands and from the embracing arms. Like skin peeling off its own flesh. They peel away from the farewells. From the prayers. From the promises.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers build characters. Jana Putrle Srdić’s poem “End of the world, beginning” in Katia Zakrajšek’s translation, does this in striking ways: ” Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind, / you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air, / spots of flickering light”

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

Our Summer 2025 Edition Has Landed!

July 24, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Alda Merini, Bassam Yousuf, Carolina Brown, and Daniel Saldaña París in our AI-themed Feature

Do other people have inner lives? Or are they just NPCs with no consciousness, no soul? We can’t know for sure! Philosophers call this “the zombie problem,” which also happens to be the tagline of our Summer 2025 issue. Not least because there is an actual zombie featured for the first time in our pages via Carolina Brown’s biting cli-fi; the “zombie problem” is also at the heart of any discussion about AI—the theme of this edition’s wildcard Special Feature. Alongside MARGENTO’s extraordinary hybrid human-AI work, we are proud to bring you an exclusive interview with acclaimed translator Boris Dralyuk, a dossier of poems by the beloved Italian master Alda Merini, an excerpt from Lithuanian novelist Valentinas Klimašauskas’s genre-bending Polygon, a pair of pieces by Anna Tsouhlarakis and Syaman Rapongan centering their indigenous worldviews, and our first article from the Azerbaijani amid new work from 32 countries—all of it movingly illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Xin Lui Ng.

The question of consciousness takes center stage in our Special Feature on AI—not the ersatz sentience of AI itself, but rather the uneasy cognizance, among members of the literary community, of its disruptive potential this side of singularity—hence the Feature’s title, “What AI Can’t Do.” From Daniel Saldaña París’s incisive meditation on AI in translation to S. K. Birk’s tale of a fiction-generating chatbot forced into the role of a lonely girl’s eternal yes-man, these pieces highlight the limits of AI as a tool for transforming the more fundamental problems of a society that too often turns a blind eye to hegemony and suffering.

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Elsewhere, “the zombie problem” becomes grotesquely literal, from the undead trudging across post-climate change Antarctica in Brown’s “Anthropocene” to the humanoid fungi encountered by the hikikomori in Luis Carlos Barragán Castro’s intense mind trip of a story “Cephalomorphs.” One might turn into a zombie too, carrying out inhuman orders on behalf of an authoritarian regime as we see in Syrian writer Bassam Yousuf’s devastating real-life account of a childhood friend-turned-torturer. Even in more idyllic circumstances, one can suddenly discover that one is “no longer there,” that one has become “a suspended, emptied image, merged with its surroundings,” as Slovenian poet Jana Putrle Srdić puts it in “End Of The World, Beginning”; indeed, social norms can disfigure a person until they lead a life that is more performance than living. In Drama, Yannis Palavos gives us the story of a man dogged by crime and a daughter dogged in turn by his memory, her searching monologue part exorcism, part attempt to restore humanity to them both. Appearing in English for the very first time in our fourth Special Feature themed on outsiders, Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’s encounters with Venezuelan refugees unfold across a gamut of misadventures—but through it all he never lets us forget their humanity or his.

In light of the recent flurry of announcements surrounding AI-powered literary translation services, this seems as good a moment as any to gently remind our readers that Asymptote has, for the past fifteen years, been a painstakingly human endeavor. Nothing about our work—from the meticulous curation of each issue to the minutiae of holding together a far-flung, 100-strong virtual team—has ever been generated by machine or delivered at algorithmic speed. If the growing encroachment of AI into daily life has deepened your appreciation for human creativity and labor, we warmly invite you to support us by becoming a sustaining or masthead member. Long live human-powered literature!

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Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

April 17, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What’s the antidote to a world of trade wars and closed borders? Quite possibly our Spring issue, celebrating the free circulation of ideas!

What do we need from each other? What do we gain if we give? At the dawn of a new age of tariffs, the dominant mode of exchange has become a kind of brute transactionalism—before one hands over anything, one must demand something of equal value in return. But what if simply giving is the better way to flourish—the way to a richer commons? It is in this spirit that we proudly unveil “The Gift.” Gathering new work from as far afield as Paraguay, Lesotho, Senegal, and Guyana, our Spring 2025 edition centers the generosity of translation—an act that Youn Kyung Hee, invoking Paul Celan, rightly compares to a gift: “For Celan, the event of poesis goes beyond receiving a gift from some unnamed sender; it also comprises the work of sending it out once more, a transmission bottled in glass.” How fitting, then, that our interview section, which usually features major authors in the world literature canon (such as the recently deceased Mario Vargas Llosa, in our Spring 2018 issue), cedes the floor to two of the most prominent practitioners of the art working today: Robin Moger, acclaimed translator of contemporary and classical Arabic literature, and Anton Hur, who went from debuting as a translator in these pages nine years ago to becoming the Booker International Prize-nominated voice in English of Korean authors like Sang Young Park. Hur’s interview pairs perfectly with our Korean Literature Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, whose many highlights include Jeong Ho-seung’s bittersweet “sorrow by special delivery” and talented director-writer Lee Chang-dong’s absurd comedy in which a scrounging couple on vacation return to find their house burgled.

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Elsewhere in this edition beautifully illustrated by South Korean guest artist GLOO / Yejin Lee, the theme of gifts—often passed down from the generation prior—persists. The opening trio of pieces (Men and Bread, Long Shadows, and Taxidermy) each consider the tendrils of paternal legacy, but the title of most dad-haunted narrator might be a contest between Pierric Bailly tracing the real-life events leading up to his father’s death in the woods and Song Seung Eon’s imaginary fisherman addressing his macabre haul (“Skull, are you my father? Are you something that was my father?”). In Christopher Carter Sanderson’s sparkling update of Anton Chekhov’s drama The Gull, by contrast, Treplev wrestles with having a celebrity for a mother. (“On her own, she’s a sexy young actress. When I’m near, she looks like a soccer mom.”) Monica Ong—whose visual poems drawing on astronomy have been featured in  Scientific American, among other places—likens her parents to intrepid “cosmonauts” for migrating from their native Philippines to a new home in the US. Finally, against the backdrop of brutal deportations from the US, poet Judith Santopietro calls attention to the gifts inherent even in the most dangerous of international journeys, juxtaposing a glimpse of black orchids from atop a freight train with the eventual hardship of “distributing food and christmas gifts” in a foreign land. Too often portrayed as mere victims, Santopietro’s poem reminds us of the agency of immigrants, inviting us to recognize their journeys as choices they have made, and to consider that these, too, may be gifts, if we allow that possibility.

If Asymptote has been a gift to you, consider helping us stick around so that it may be a gift to others down the road. Remember: the best way to support us is to join us as a sustaining or masthead member (and signing up only takes three minutes, but the good it does reverberates through time).

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Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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Do You Like Adventures?

December 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

“The space between two languages is not between mirrors, but curves along the great wall of error, a refined form of adventure.” —Rosmarie Waldrop

Is it that time of the year already?

Yes! Today marks the start of our annual two-week closure (during which our entire 100-strong virtual but very human team enters hibernation—so we hope you understand if we only respond to your emails in the New Year).  But, before we go off the grid completely, let’s take a look at the rear-view. In 2024, we gave you:

Ahead of us, we have plans to:

  • Revamp our website, which has been overdue for an update for some time now;
  • Launch a Substack—with even more thoughtful coverage and greater depth!; and
  • Bring back our international translation contest for emerging translators.

But to do any of the above, we have to be sustainable first—an uphill task given that Asymptote is incorporated outside of the US and Europe, where most of English-language literary arts funding lies. Sadly, despite a full 14 years of hard work behind the scenes and a London Book Fair award under our belt, the revenue that currently comes in each year is still not yet enough to support one full-time member’s involvement.

Which is why we just have to ask during this season of giving: Can you spare us five bucks a month?

Because that’s all it takes to sustain this platform—that we use to advocate for a more inclusive world literature and to amplify underrepresented voices like H.W. Burg’s—if enough of you stand with us. Tempted to sign on as a patron or even a masthead member? We’d be overjoyed and shower you with perks—including newly unveiled ones like literary care packages I’ll personally assemble. We just want to make sure that those of you who value our work have the chance to support it before it’s too late. So, if you can afford it, please take a few minutes to sign up via the link below:

Our Fall 2024 Edition Is Here!

October 24, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Jon Fosse, Mikhail Shishkin, Natascha Wodin, Bothayna Al-Essa, and Nebojša Lujanović in our Special Feature themed on outsiders

You and I, self and the other—it is the oldest, simplest difference we know. At a time of flooding across the world, from India to the US, the writers of our Fall 2024 issue call attention to physical and social separation, to the rushing waters that pull us apart, rendering us #Outsiders to one another. In exploration of this theme, we proudly bring you new work from 32 countries, including drama from Norwegian Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, an interview with exiled Russian author Mikhail Shishkin, a review of French icon Simone de Beauvoir’s latest English publication, nonfiction by Omani writer Hamoud Saud, a spotlight on Brazilian artist André Griffo, and, for our final Brave New World Literature entry, a moving essay by the recently announced US National Book Award nominee the Kuwaiti author Bothayna Al-Essa. One year on from October 7th, Al-Essa confronts the limits of literary activism as she reflects on her video calls with a Gazan colleague: “Did I expect a person besieged in an open prison since 2006 to rejoice at the sight of a shelf of books?” In another highlight, German-Ukrainian writer Natascha Wodin’s narrator resuscitates her drowned mother, trying to fathom her across the gulf of time even as she pictures the Regnitz river washing her away. Meanwhile, Swiss poet Prisca Agustoni and Moroccan author Khalid Lyamlahy confront another kind of drowning—that of modern day migrants in search of a better life—in particular, the 269 lives lost to the sea around Lampedusa in a shipwreck, the news of which lights up Agustoni’s phone, and the death of a Gambian Lyamlahy never got to know: “I dream of a book that would contain all the words refused you, all the silences imposed on you. A book where the word ‘help’ is constantly repeated, in which the author would fade from each line, each fragment, to give you back the space denied you in life.”

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Lyamlahy’s feat of empathetic imagination leads off this edition’s wildcard Special Feature, first announced on August 15th. By the time submissions closed one month later, anti-migrant rhetoric in the US had hit a new low with Trump repeating baseless claims of Haitians “eating cats and dogs” in his presidential debate. So, although we received more than one hundred manuscripts spotlighting every stripe of outsider, we decided to carve out space for the racial/national “other” so often denigrated in politics. From Cuban author Odette Casamayor-Cisnero drawing courage from her great-great-grandmother and taking a fiery stand against racism (“I’m done with running away”) to Croatian writer Nebojša Lujanović’s nuanced portrayal of a migrant who cannot bring himself to enunciate his full name for fear of outing himself to other members of his newly chosen community, the myriad voices showcased in this Feature are resounding proof of the struggle and humanity of those we as a society are so eager to condemn to the margins. All of this is illustrated by Spain-based guest artist Anastassia Tretiakova’s haunting photography.

As a magazine that does not receive ongoing institutional support because of our own outsider status—as elaborated in the Fall 2022 issue’s Editor’s Note—Asymptote counts on readers to sustain its mission more than most. If you think this “global literary miracle” (according to Dubravka Ugrešić) deserves to continue, please take a few minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member today. (Interested in joining us behind the scenes instead? Our final recruitment drive of the year closes in four days!) Thank you for your readership and support. We can’t wait to see what 2025 brings!

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The Making of Rude Girl

July 27, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Priscilla Layne’s story, Birgit Weyhe’s graphic novel, an unexpected collaboration – and an English translation

Imagine translating a book based on your own life… That’s exactly what Priscilla Layne did with Birgit Weyhe’s German graphic novel Rude Girl, published in English by V&Q Books.

 Faced with accusations of cultural appropriation for her comics depicting Black characters’ stories, Weyhe was looking for a new approach when she met Priscilla Layne. A Chapel Hill professor of German and African Diaspora Studies, Layne grew up in Chicago with Bajan and Jamaican parents and learned German after watching Indiana Jones as a child – that’s what she’d need to fight Nazis, after all. Later, a fascination with Kafka and May Ayim fueled that enthusiasm even more.

 This time around, the author and her subject collaborated closely. First Priscilla told her life story, then Birgit drew a chapter and sent it to her. Priscilla gave feedback – “not using skin color in the drawings implies a ‘post-racial’ society; I prefer it when you combine two colors, like in your earlier comics,” for instance – and Birgit picked that up and adapted the way she worked as she went along. Each chapter is followed by a separate section detailing Priscilla’s comments and explanations.

 The book came out in German in 2022 and was promptly shortlisted for the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize – the first graphic novel ever to be nominated. Berlin-based imprint V&Q Books had previously published Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes, a comic about Mozambican contract workers in the GDR. And publisher Katy Derbyshire not only shares Priscilla Layne’s love of German literature… they’re also both big fans of punk, ska and reggae. In fact, their paths presumably crossed at gigs in Berlin during Priscilla’s time as an exchange student there. It’s the rude girl culture of the title that provided her with a sense of community among anti-racist skinheads, and the book features great stylized drawings of album covers that shaped her life at various stages – something Derbyshire very much related to.

 So it was a no-brainer to publish Rude Girl in English, and it was clear who’d have to translate it. Priscilla Layne had previously worked on writing by Feridun Zaimoglu and Olivia Wenzel, but Rude Girl posed new challenges. As she writes in her translator’s note, “having your life displayed on the page requires a degree of vulnerability.” The graphic novel explores personal and political hurdles she has faced and doesn’t shy away from depictions of difficult experiences, though they’re not always literal; Birgit Weyhe has a special gift for apt metaphors in illustration form.

In the end, the book is a beacon for a great many readers. As Priscilla Layne writes: “If you are a Black nerd, any other nerd of Color, or even just a femme-identifying nerd, you don’t necessarily see any (positive) representation of yourself. I’m glad Rude Girl is helping to contribute to these representations and that it is now available in English.”

Find out more about Rude Girl here.

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Our Summer 2024 Edition Has Landed!

July 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Georgi Gospodinov, Patrick Autréaux, Ali Wajeeh, and Brigitte Giraud in a Special Feature themed on collectives

What stops a cancer from killing its host? What might have prevented a grandmother from dying in a refugee camp? What allows a Deliveroo rider to keep his dignity through itinerant gig-work? Perhaps it’s care: “the connections we have with others and the everyday actions we engage in for each other” (Micaela Brinsley). Care is a vital #lifesupport—a necessity up there with shelter and air. The problem is that it’s scarce, as attested to by our brand-new Summer edition spanning 35 countries and featuring an exclusive interview with 2023 Booker International Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s debut in English, as well as new translations of Paul Éluard and Hamid Ismailov. In settings that take us from hospital to hospital and even one assisted suicide facility, few find it, while others seek it with increasing desperation. Patrick Autréaux’s exquisite memoir of chemotherapy, for example, describes cancer as a “cold octopus . . . groping at me as though I were some bizarre object . . . embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.” In Inga Iwasiów’s startling novel, on the other hand, the dead moon jellyfish forming a “gelatinous strip between the water and the land” becomes a buffer between the cancer-stricken narrator and intentional death (which in Pooya Monshizadeh’s devastating Red Meadow is canceled without even a refund). Against absolute loss, Honora Spicer, in this issue’s poignant Brave New World Literature entry, opened the very text that she had requested to translate one week after her grandmother died—to the wide field of “se fue.”


The hospital is also the setting for fifty percent of this issue’s Criticism section. While Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom paints a portrait of intimate life at a psychiatric hospital, Vanessa Springora’s Consent begins with a teenager being hospitalized for rheumatism, only to receive not one but two additional diagnoses during her stay. Though it’s the second of these (by a predatory gynecologist) that sets off a nationwide scandal with legal consequences, the first diagnosis very much deserves pause as well: according to the psychologist who sees her, our protagonist is “disengaged from her peers . . . isolated and vulnerable”; she struggles to “join” with others in society. This malaise is directly echoed in the trio of pieces (from Switzerland, Denmark, and South Korea) heading off the entire issue. All three are heart-wrenching portraits of alienation that speak to the current epidemic of loneliness.

If this edition or in fact any issue of this magazine has alleviated your loneliness, I hope you’ll take just three minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member. Subscribing to our Book Club is a great way to take your support for world literature to the next level. If you’re interested in joining our team, good news: In addition to social media managers and marketing managers to join us on the frontlines of a more inclusive world literature, we’re inviting talented illustrators to come onboard as our guest artists—send us a link to your portfolio if you might be interested!

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Our Spring 2024 Edition Is Here!

April 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Andrey Kurkov, Michela Murgia, Katie Holten, and a spotlight on literature from the Faroe Islands

When we fall asleep, where do we go? Why, of course, to a #midnightgarden‚ filled with exciting discoveries from 32 countries, including interviews with Andrey Kurkov and Diamela Eltit, fiction by Michela Murgia and Khrystia Vengryniuk, apocalyptic drama from Honduras, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Ludovico Ariosto—specifically, of his Orlando Furioso, the bestselling book of the sixteenth century—as well as a Special Feature on Literature from the Faroe Islands, sponsored by FarLit and headlined by Kim Simonsen and Rannvá Holm Mortensen. Ahead of the 60th Venice Biennale opening this weekend, we are proud to unveil our own international showcase—illustrated with elan by Korean guest artist Joon Yoon—still the most ambitious of any literary periodical.

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Among the highlights in this edition is visual artist Katie Holten—herself a veteran of the Venice Biennale—who returns to our pages to discuss her rustling, arresting Language of Trees, a response to ecological catastrophe. Michelle Chan Schmidt reviews a similar attempt to capture new language, crisis language, when extremes brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called for A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War. Interviewing young Somali refugees for a dictionary entry, “Partire” or leave, Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah discovers how disasters—in this case, civil war and genocide—“reveal the limit of language.” In Fiction, a “great flood” forms the backdrop of Khrystia Vengryniuk’s mordantly funny but ultimately heartbreaking story about two star-crossed lovers. By contrast, LGBTQ+ rights activist Michela Murgia’s relatively uneventful piece centers a soon-to-be empty nester and the solution to her ennui that she tucks away in her wardrobe: a life-sized cutout of BTS boyband member Park Jimin.

Just this past week, the Financial Times reported that “rising nationalism and falling funding is reshaping the Venice Biennale;” at Asymptote, we find ourselves running up against the same constraints that keep the art world from fully realizing its potential (as a matter of fact, just carrying on remains a challenge because we are incorporated outside of the US and Europe, where most of literary arts funding lies). If you have benefitted from our work these past thirteen years, consider helping us grow this #midnightgarden as a sustaining or masthead member. Together, we can keep it alive.

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Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

January 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 edition—Asymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

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If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

You’re Invited: Join our 2024 Reading Challenge!

January 1, 2024  |  in Book Club  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Is reading adventurously one of your New Year’s resolutions? We can help with that!

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Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

December 18, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

For our final post of the year, we decided to compile a list of opportunities for all you translators out there to apply to. Onward and upward!

Opportunities abound for the emerging translator!  Just in time for the year-end break—this will be our final post of the year—we sifted through the latest ones and compiled the best and timeliest for our new one-stop hub, “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation.” See you on the other side of the New Year!

AWARDS

SARAH MAGUIRE PRIZE

The 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation is now open for submissions. This international prize is awarded every two years to a translated book of poetry by a “poet living beyond Europe”. The winners will receive £3000, to be divided between the poet and their translator, and will be included in a Poetry Book Society promotion alongside up to seven other shortlisted titles. Past winners include Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and Chinese poet Yang Lian.

Founded in 2020, the Prize commemorates the Poetry Translation Center’s founder, renowned poet Sarah Maguire, and seeks to celebrate the art of poetry in translation, which the PTC calls “the lifeblood of poetry”. Applications close on Monday, January 1st, 2024.

Apply here.

WORLD LITERATURE  TODAY – STUDENT TRANSLATION PRIZE

World Literature Today offers an annual competition for students enrolled in translation studies programs worldwide, and applications are open! Consistent with WLT’s commitment to serving international and university communities alike, the Student Translation Prize seeks to recognize the work of emerging translators from anywhere in the world.

Entries should include a piece of translated prose (up to 1,000 words) or three pieces of poetry, along with a cover letter. $200 will be awarded to one prose translation and one poetry translation. Both will also be published online in the summer.

Applications are due January 11th, 2024.

Apply here.

MO HABIB TRANSLATION PRIZE IN PERSIAN LITERATURE

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UW is thrilled to announce that the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature is open for submissions for its second cycle. In partnership with the Mo Habib Memorial Foundation and Deep Vellum Publishing, this prize aims to commemorate the life of Mohammed Habib through the celebration of Persian literary works.

This cycle will focus on Persian poetry from the 10th century CE to the present day. Bi- or multilingual projects are more than welcome, as are collections of poems from more than one author. Applicants should submit a cover letter, a CV, and a sample of the proposed translation by March 1st, 2024. The winning translation will be awarded $10,000 and will be published by Deep Vellum.

Apply here. READ MORE…