Posts by Lee Yew Leong

Section Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2021

July 26, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Summer 2021 issue!

The brand-new Summer 2021 edition of Asymptote is barely ten days old and we are still enjoying the diverse offerings from thirty-five countries gathered therein. Last week, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Allison Braden, and Shawn Hoo shared their favorites. Today, section editors Lee Yew Leong, Bassam Sidiki, and Caridad Svich distill their highlights for us:

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

Why do so few men read fiction by women? lamented MA Sieghart as recently as seventeen days ago in The Guardian. With female authors taking five out of six slots, the Summer fiction lineup, published just in time for #WomeninTranslation month, offers parochial-minded readers a taste of what they are missing out on. These stories are also deeply centered on the female experience: Gabriel Payares and Maša Kolanović deliver unsettling takes on pregnancy and new motherhood, while the aging protagonists of Kathrin Schmidt’s and Can Xue’s stories go on mushroom-fueled head trips that seem to set the universe right again. A third set explores the corrosive effects of work on identity (in particular, Joanna Chen’s superb translation of mechanical engineer Tehila Hakimi’s Company recalled for me Amelie Nothomb’s masterpiece Fear and Trembling).

When you don’t go by a Judeo-Christian name, the constant bracing against mispronunciation can result in estrangement from your own identity, as Xiao Yue Shan explored in her recent essay on linguistic exile. I can relate. That’s why I found the ending of Abdushukur Muhammet’s “My Name” deeply moving. Translator Munawwar Abdulla not only does an excellent job nailing Muhammet’s melancholic voice, but also provides much needed contextualization in her translator’s note that imbues the poem with a sharp political layer. READ MORE…

Announcing our Summer 2021 Issue Featuring Hoda Barakat, Can Xue, and Bruno Latour

July 15, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Did you miss us? After a hiatus, we’re back with a blockbuster Summer edition, brimming with new work from 35 countries!

It’s here! The first issue of Asymptote’s second decade, featuring Hoda Barakat, Can Xue, Bruno Latour, and Lêdo Ivo, alongside new work from 35 countries, confirming “we all live in a beautifully round world.” More than any other issue in recent memory, “Age of Division,” our Summer 2021 edition, also speaks to the current divisiveness of our times.

In Ethiopian writer Mulugeta Alebachew’s short story, childhood memories are betrayed when the narrator returns home after a long time away only to find his friends “intently drawing family trees and working out ethnic background of people as if they worked for the cartography agency, and it was their task to draw boundaries.” Meanwhile, at a “time of infinite sadness,” diasporic Palestinian poet Olivia Elias speaks to us of “a life in the eye of the hurricane” and of “a country / engulfed in a fault of history.”
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Good News: We’re Expanding!

June 17, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Come join us behind the scenes!

The sentiment with which he studied the maps came from his ambition to travel: He opened them with careful longing, as though he were unfolding the writings of a personal religion.

In his short story “The Foreigner” (first published in our Spring 2019 edition), Sergio Chejfec gives us an unforgettable portrait of a man who dedicates his whole life to anticipating his travels abroad—but, consumed by maps, never even succeeds in leaving the city before he dies.

At Asymptote, we take it for granted that there are no known lands, for even the familiar—let alone the vast expanse of underrepresented countries and languages—deserves to be explored with fresh eyes! Now you too can join our team of intrepid explorers without leaving your home: Just apply to our mid-year recruitment drive.

Read the testimonials by some former staff below, before checking out our newly advertised openings ranging from social media manager and marketing manager to copy editor and editor-at-large! But hurry! The deadline to send in an application is two Thursdays from now, July 1st. 

“Asymptote is the only literary magazine I’ve ever worked for or heard about that has the editorial brain-power and resource of generous and highly-talented translators to pull off a 20-language project in 10 days. This is what we did with our Mexican poetry project, which, thanks to the on-hand blog, graphic and social media team, caught the wave of worldwide solidarity for the victims of the Ayotzinapa massacre in September 2014 and the subsequent protests. It was shared in its thousands, including retweets by organizations like English PEN, Words Without Borders and Granta Magazine. I put the call out for translators for the project on a Wednesday and that same day received an offer of an introduction from NY-based Mexican author Valeria Luiselli and 9 offers of translators. One of the first messages came from our Israel editor-at-large, saying: “We all do our tiny little part in the world: mine is translating.” Asymptote does not only have impeccable taste in global literature (from ancient to contemporary), it also continues to prove, in a very tangible way, that translation is not tiny; it is a vital force for good in the world. I’m very proud to be editor-at-large for Mexico and can’t wait to see what we at Asymptote do next.”

—Sophie Hughes, former Editor-at-Large, Mexico

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2021)

May 6, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From getting shortlisted for (or winning!) prestigious prizes to publications and performances, we were busy making waves this quarter!

Contributing editor Adrian Nathan West’s translation of Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize.

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi’s Italian translation of a poem by Anna Akhmatova won the 2020 All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature & The Institute for Literary Translation’s “Writers of the Silver Age about War” translation contest.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki was awarded a Graduate Nonfiction Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan for two essays, one of which is forthcoming in Wordgathering. The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, will be giving on June 11 for the third year in a row a computational performance titled #GraphPoem at the world’s most important digital humanities event, DHSI 2021.

Editor-at-Large for Japan David Boyd’s new co-translation with Sam Bett of Mieko Kawakami’s novel Heaven will be published later this month on May 25.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short story in Arts & Letters and a short craft essay on Tobias Wolff in Fiction Writers Review.

Chief Executive Assistant Rachel Farmer‘s translation from the German of an extract of We Have Lived Here Since We Were Born by Andreas Moster appeared in the anthology Elemental, published in March by Two Lines Press.

Interested in joining the team? Watch this page next week for a very important announcement!

How Are You Celebrating World Book Day?

April 7, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

If you love books and world literature, consider taking it to the next level by signing up to our Book Club!

Did you know? World Book Day may be still a while away on April 23—but the deadline to join our Book Club and start receiving titles this very month is this coming Monday, April 12! If you love books and world literature, how about taking it to the next level by signing up for a subscription? Here is a testimonial by fan Wendy Whidden, who is just one of more than four hundred subscribers to have received our handpicked titles, drawn from world literature’s latest offerings, in their mailboxes since our Book Club’s inception in 2017:111

Or take it from Life of Pi author Yann Martel, who is himself a fervent believer in reading widely: “There’s a whole universe of stories out there that we, in the English-speaking world, hardly know about because our dominance is so crushing and our publishers lack ambition. Asymptote is the cure for this wasting disease. Bravely, intoxicatingly, it brings us stories and perspectives from beyond our narrow borders. Count me in for the Asymptote Book Club!” To give or receive your first book in April from as little as USD15 a month, go here. Group discounts are available too! Enquire within if interested. We can’t wait to welcome you to the Book Club!

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What’s New with the Crew? (February 2021)

February 18, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

From writing columns to publishing translations, we’ve been keeping busy!

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Andreea Scridon will have a poetry pamphlet published in 2022 with Broken Sleep Books; in addition, she will be featured in Art and Letters’ anthology 14 International Younger Poets‚ forthcoming this summer.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi has begun writing a monthly column on children’s literature in translation for Italian kid lit blog Scaffale Basso.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki published a poem in Counterlock Journal.

Chamini Kulathunga, Editor-at-Large for Sri Lanka, published her interview with Liyanage Amarakeerthi on Hopscotch Translation on February 9, 2021.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, has joined Cicada, a new literary magazine featuring nuanced and inclusive writing; it also welcomes translations.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, has initiated an internationally funded project on digital literacy, DigiLiBeRo, spearheaded together with Ana Iolanda Voda and Roxana Patras.  READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 8, 2021  |  in News  |  by Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, and Sam Carter

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

“Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…

We’re Reached Our Milestone Tenth Anniversary! 🎉

January 28, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

And we’re celebrating with a new issue (and some very big names in world literature)!

Dear reader,

I’m thrilled to present “Brave New World Literature,” our special milestone edition marking ten full years of curating the very best in contemporary letters. Highlights include an exclusive last interview with James Salter conducted before he died in 2015, new translations of Alfred Döblin and Alain Mabanckou, as well as a trio of essays by intellectual heavyweight Eliot Weinberger, former Granta editor John Freeman, and frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang—all suggesting a “culturally multidirectional” way forward for the next decade.

In addition to featuring a “writer’s writer” (the aforementioned James Salter), we’re proud to debut in English a “true poet’s poet” (the Mexican Max Rojas) in a roster that also includes poet superstars Najwan Darwish and Carlos de Assumpção. Elsewhere, fellow Brazilian writer Adelice Souza and Hungarian author Anna Mécs give us a pair of stunning fictions in which women perform (or postpone) their deaths, while our first nonfiction lineup under new Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki sees a fascinating pseudo-scientific colonial document answered with a modern memoir of Egyptian politics. In light of the recent protests by Navalny supporters all across Russia, Artur Solomonov’s drama—also about enacting death, while portraying the machinery of state propaganda—could not be more timely: The play was in fact considered so politically inflammatory that it has only ever been staged underground. All of this is illustrated by talented guest artist the Australia-based Naomi Segal. READ MORE…

Call for Submissions: Brave New World Literature

December 17, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Don’t miss this chance to be a part of our tenth anniversary issue!

For our upcoming issue, we seek critical or even celebratory essays from readers, critics, authors, publishers, and of course translators discussing and problematizing the ways in which non-English texts reach Anglophone readers, perhaps envisioning a “brave new world literature” for the next decade. Details here. Deadline: 10 January, 2021. ⁠

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Watered Foxtails: Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk

December 5, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Points of view alternate in Hwang’s brilliantly executed novella nesting story within story—each with the perfect amount of exposition.

Watered Foxtails: A review of Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk (tr. Sora Kim-Russell)

Set against the backdrop of South Korea’s rapid rise in the second half of the twentieth century, At Dusk follows the divergent fates of two children from the same slum, Moon Hollow. One (Park Minwoo) manages to fight his way out of poverty; the other (Cha Soona) never leaves it behind. Committed to our current technologized reality, novelist Hwang Sok-yong pieces together his protagonists’ past and present through text messages, phone calls, emails, and video fragments. At one point, pierced with sudden yearning for a childhood the memories of which he has long suppressed, Park even does a Google search of “urban redevelopment.” It is supposed to be a sign of Park’s prominence and success as an architect that such a generic term readily yields photos of his own large-scale residential redevelopment projects that paved the way for South Korea’s ruthless modernization. (Just as compelling if much subtler is the suggestion that Moon Hollow isn’t searchable on the Internet directly by name—so utterly has it been obliterated.) Now, fifty years after he has left Moon Hollow and at the dusk of his life, Park is haunted by what he has bulldozed to get to where he is today.

Points of view alternate in Hwang’s brilliantly executed novella nesting story within story—each with the perfect amount of exposition topped with vivid specificity—and whose translation in Sora Kim-Russell’s poised English was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. A less imaginative writer would have made Cha narrator along with Park; but, instead of Park’s crush, Hwang arranges for another female character (Jung Woohee) to take the reins of even-numbered chapters. A young struggling artist who barely makes ends meet by working night shifts in a convenience store when not putting up plays, the milieu Jung occupies is worlds away from the other narrator Park’s.

At first, the two narrative strands that make up At Dusk’s rags-to-not-quite-riches story seem unrelated. It’s only when a fourth pivotal character, Black Shirt, a male co-worker, appears in Jung’s life that pieces of the puzzle start to shift into place. READ MORE…

A Special Message from our Editor-in-Chief

December 1, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Would you take a few moments to lend support to what Dubravka Ugrešić calls the “global literary miracle”?

Dear reader,

Can we be frank with you this #GivingTuesday? We had high hopes entering this final year of one full decade in world literature, but 2020 has been terrible. Not only did a key team member contract the coronavirus with symptoms persisting till this very day, a record number of staff left because of pandemic-related reasons. Although we had long planned for another edition of our translation contest to mark our tenth anniversary, we couldn’t go through with it in the end. For a while, our future was more uncertain than it had ever been since December 2014, when I sent out a teamwide memo telling my editors not to accept any more new work.

But rally we did, adding thirty-five new team members in August. We showcased literary responses to the coronavirus outbreak at the blog and in our Summer 2020 issue. We brought you a Dutch Literature Feature guest-edited by International Booker Prize-winning Michele Hutchison. We rebooted our podcast and video trailer, launched not one but two Instagram feeds, and even conducted our first live Q&A over Zoom with the translator of our October Book Club selection. We hope to do many more.

For the most part of our ten years, we’ve been happy to stay in the background while lifting others up. But, because it’s been a challenging year and we are not lucky enough to be incorporated in the US and the UK and so didn’t receive any of the relief grants that so many like organizations got, we have to ask: Can you spare us five bucks a month? READ MORE…

A Very Important Announcement

November 12, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

No stranger to new frontiers, Asymptote’s now on Instagram!

Months in the making, we’re thrilled to unveil not one but two new Instagram presences: one for Asymptote Journal at @asymptotejrnl and another for our Book Club at @asymptotebookclub.

If you have enjoyed our award-winning  curation, you’ll definitely dig the exclusive behind-the-scenes content, a new Untranslatable Words column, and much more. Hope to see you all there, and please spread the word!

What’s New with the Crew? (November 2020)

November 12, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our staff members have been up to when we’re not editing your favorite literary journal!

Editor-at-Large for Vietnam Thuy Dinh was recently a writer-in-residence at the Woodlawn Plantation/Pope-Leighey House in Alexandria, Virginia—a National Trust historic site featuring a 18th century Georgian Mansion and a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Her essay, “Schrödinger Catwalk, or A Tour in Opposites” on the meaning of hyphens, butler mirrors, Wright’s corridors, and her own refugee experience was published on September 11 here.

Assistant Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new essays up in Pidgeonholes and Critical Read.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, contributed (jointly with his international academic team) an article on “A-poetic Technology. #GraphPoem and the Social Function of Computational Performance” to the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Digital Humanities Benelux.

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood’s recent co-translation with Peter Sherwood of Czech writer Alena Mornštajnová’s Hana was released by Parthian Books on October 1. She recently spoke with Trafika Europe Radio on this latest publication.

Read more news from the staff:

Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2020

October 26, 2020  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Garrett Phelps, Lee Yew Leong, Michele Hutchison, and Sam Carter

Our Section Editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2020 issue!

This year’s events have made us all a little rusty in the art of travel, so hopping across our fortieth issue’s thirty-two countries may feel equal parts thrilling and daunting. Luckily, our section editors (including our Dutch Literature Special Feature curator, International Booker Prize co-winner Michele Hutchison) are happy to lay out a road map. Read on for literary duos on life and love in the Netherlands, a Norwegian’s popular fury, a Mexican novelist’s elusive but lasting influence, and a German author’s and Iranian poet’s exquisite study of silence.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor:

Not quite as stunningly “out there” as The Haunting of Bly Manor’s episode five, Paweł Sołtys’s deeply moving “The Kiev Sea” (translated with great aplomb by Eliza Marciniak) nevertheless reminded me of it: we are in such close third-person mode that even the reading material that the protagonist uses to while away time seems to be directly absorbed as consciousness while operating as pivotal mise en abyme. Memories and regret flit through this consciousness, “maintain(ing) the other me within the present me,” even as everything is “already slipping towards an invisible edge.” In truth—as we follow the protagonist down the rabbit hole of nostalgia—the slippage began much earlier: “it seemed that since he’d turned forty, he could only discard things. Friends, women, memories even.” What is the sum of life then? How much can we hold on to? On this fateful October day of reckoning, this fictional protagonist is reminded, via fiction, as we all are perhaps, of how removed and frightfully impersonal existence finally is: “It really happened, all of it, but it’s as if it were a story, told not to me but to someone nearby, in the noise of a bar or during a fight, a proper one, when the sound of the blows drowns out the wailing.”

From Michele Hutchison, Guest Editor of Dutch Literature Special Feature:

Good fortune would have it that I was working on the selection of Asymptote’s Dutch special when my translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Booker Prize. Perfect timing for sharing these stunning new Dutch voices with you, coinciding with the spike in interest in our national literature. (I wrote ‘our’ without thinking: I’m a defected Brit, resident in Amsterdam.)

To be honest, Dutch literature has long had plenty to offer, and there have been other recent successes. Think of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (translated by David Colmer) winning the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ten years ago, and think of the great reception Gerard Reve’s classic The Evenings (translated by Sam Garrett) and Tonke Dragt’s The Letter for the King (translated by Laura Watkinson, recently a Netflix series) have had in English. We haven’t exactly been hiding our light under a bushel. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to put together this selection of Dutch talent to entice you to read further. READ MORE…