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:
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!
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 14International Younger Poets‚ forthcoming this summer.
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…
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 authorAdelice Souza’sfever-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 inJohn 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.
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 heavyweightEliot Weinberger, former Granta editor John Freeman, and frequent contributorJeremy 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 andCarlos 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…
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.
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…
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 LiteratureFeature guest-edited by International Booker Prize-winning Michele Hutchison. We rebooted our podcast and video trailer, launched not one but two Instagramfeeds, 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…
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!
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.
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…
Feat. Andrés Neuman, Ariana Harwicz, and Rabindranath Tagore amid new work from 32 countries, including a Dutch Special Feature
We are proud to present theFall 2020 issue of Asymptote, debuting new work from 32 countries:.
This cornucopia of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, reviews, and more includes such treats as a sparkling new translation of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s century-old fiction, an exclusive interview with rising star Andrés Neuman, and Elisabeth S. Clark’s polyphonic book concertos.
Perfectly timed to coincide with Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison winning the 2020 International Booker Prize, our Dutch Literature Feature, guest curated by Hutchison, zooms in on the emerging and established voices of a small but mighty country. Here you can sample the English debuts of Curaçao-born Radna Fabias, whose first collection swept up an unprecedented number of major poetry prizes, and of Sinan Çankaya, whose best-selling memoir My Innumerable Identities recounts his efforts to combat racism in the Dutch police from the inside—only to be othered for his Turkish origins.
Elsewhere, Ali Lateef’s bittersweet “The Belle and Gazelle Statue” uses a public monument to illustrate the changing face of Tripoli after the 2011 Libyan Civil War. The unease of our current moment is captured in Ariana Harwicz’s “Longevity,” a cathartic tale about the effects of a pandemic-caused lockdown on a small rural community in France. Somewhere between nature writing and memoir stands Itō Hiromi’s essay on migratory plants and how the concept of “the Other” manifests in different cultures. The lure of the foreign propels both Vadim Muratkhanov’s dispatch from Tashkent’s labyrinthine Tezikova market and Hungarian essayist Noémi Kiss’s travel into the remote wonders of Azerbaijan.
Wherever we are, we find comfort in the global literary voices of our time, for even when they reveal harsh truths about our world, they give us hope, inspire mutual understanding and heal divisions. Please help us spread the word about Asymptote’s latest issue by downloading and distributing our Fall 2020 flyer/postcard, or by posting about it onFacebook orTwitter.
To promote this brand-new issue, we’re holding another giveaway contest: Share any of our #Fall2020 posts on social media to stand a chance of winning an Asymptote Book Club subscription. Every retweet or share will be counted, and there’s no limit to the number of entries you can enter. We’ll announce the lucky winner on Monday, November 2!
Get ready to spread word of the wonderful work of translators—and win an Asymptote Book Club subscription!
Dear reader,
Happy International Translation Day!
As David Mitchell put it, “Translators are jugglers, diplomats, nuance-ticklers, magistrates, word-nerds, self-testing lie detectors, and poets. Translators rock.” At Asymptote, every day is a good time to celebrate not only translators but also the editors and publishers who help move ideas across languages and cultural borders—but we suppose one official day will do for now.
Even so, you can make it a big day by joining us on Facebook and Twitter as we revisit our best articles about translation from our archive. From the why
“Translating beauty is an act of counterterror in this murderous world” (Nancy Kline)
and the how
“It takes courage to venture into that empty space” (Frederika Randall)
to the whom
“The best ones are accidents of migration and biography, who’ve come through the trauma of bilingualism” (Michael Hofmann)
we hope to use this occasion to advocate for the wonderful but often maligned art that is translation. To encourage as many of you as possible to join us on Twitter and Facebook, we’re giving away a three-month Asymptote Book Club subscription to one lucky winner who shares one of our #ITD2020 posts, sent out every hour today on social media.
Goethe once remarked that the work of translation “is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.” In our close to ten years, we’ve given away $13,500 in prizes to emerging translators, and advocated for a more inclusive world literature by seeking out and publishing the best work from 120 countries and 100 languages in our massive quarterly issues. But there’s more we can do—with your support.
If you would like to help us champion the art of translation, please consider making a one-time gift to Asymptote or becoming a sustaining member from as little as $5 USD/month. For a limited time only, new donors and subscribers will receive the above print-ready digital poster designed by Thai-Taiwanese artist Michael Laungjessadakun commissioned especially for Asymptote—a perfect gift for all your translator friends.
Thank you for being a vital member of our community!
Want to promote your latest release, translation contest or program or residency—and support Asymptote at the same time? Now you can!
How would you like to see your ad here at this very blog, on the pages of our quarterly issues, or in our newsletters—connecting with discerning audiences worldwide? Well, now you can! In our nine-plus years of curating the best in world literature, we have carved out a genuinely international readership that reaches well beyond pockets of literary translators and world literature enthusiasts. Browse through our 2020 media kitfor advertisers to learn how you can leverage our impressive global reach to promote your new book releases, contests, writers festivals, workshops, residencies, graduate programs, open submission windows, journals, podcasts, and more. Your patronage will enable us to continue to advocate for under-represented voices and a more inclusive canon.
"A brilliant idea and a great way to get into translated fiction!"—Stav Sherez
Dear reader,
If you seek powerful, new reading material that can recharge your mind and spirit, consider yourself in good company. Current global events have upended almost all areas of public life, and have also caused us to reconsider many of our personal habits, like what we eat, how we work, and what we read.
In these anxious times, we’re reminded of the great Toni Morrison, who once said “All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’” If all writing is political, then our reading routines surely indicate some political aspect of ourselves.
A membership to the Asymptote BookClub is a surefire way to broaden your literary horizons and increase your cross-cultural awareness—one unforgettable book at a time. Each month, we partner with top publishers like New Directions, Archipelago, and & Other Stories to deliver newly-released titles from around the world to readers just like you. From as little as USD15/a month, a subscription includes:
A print copy of each month’s (surprise) selection in your mailbox;
Access to an online discussion forum for members;
Asymptote e-books with exclusive content not featured anywhere else; and
A stylish 2020 edition AsympTOTE (for yearlong subscriptions only)
Are you ready to give yourself (or someone you love) the gift of literature? If so, be sure to sign up by 18 August—next Tuesday—to start your subscription this very month! We also offer a discount for group subscriptions; send all queries to bookclub@asymptotejournal.com.
