Essays

Our 48hr Liveblogging Continues With Hungary EaL Ágnes Orzóy!

January 29, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Ágnes Orzóy

230 donors have now stepped forward. Won't you join them in support of world literature, with just 24 hours and $3,000 to go?

Ágnes Orzóy (editor-at-large, Hungary): Looking to the past: when Borbély’s voice was recorded for the July 2013 issue of Asymptote, we couldn’t know that the 50-year-old poet would be dead within a few months. Except that the demons of death had been hovering around him for a long time—as Gábor Schein put it so eloquently in his obituary on Asymptote blog. Readers may get a glimpse into the unique world of Borbély (whose oeuvre was just beginning to be appreciated outside Hungary when he committed suicide) from an interview in our forthcoming January issue. There are not many interviews in which the gory details of a brutal murder stand together with well-reasoned and sensitive ideas on evil and the human condition, as well as on how ancient literary traditions may become proper vehicles for the account of modern experience.

And looking forward: The Stuffed Barbarian by Gergely Péterfy was hailed by critics and readers alike as the best Hungarian novel of 2014. Told by the wife of Ferenc Kazinczy, the leading figure of the Hungarian-language reform of the 18th century, the novel is centered around the figure of Angelo Soliman, a black slave who rose to become a prominent member of Viennese society. An extremely erudite person and a high-ranking freemason, Soliman was skinned and stuffed after his death and exhibited in a museum. The motifs of Kazinczy’s own story are echoed in that of his friend Soliman: both strived to transcend their circumstances by adhering to high ideals, and both failed because, no matter what they achieved, they always remained strangers and outcasts. A fascinating and well-crafted story, Péterfy’s novel sheds a new light on some of the harrowing dilemmas and suppressed conflicts at the root of modern Western civilization.

So that we can continue beyond our January 2015 issue and introduce Gergely Péterfy and other Hungarian writers in our pages one day, please consider joining 230 donors in support of our Indiegogo campaign now! With 24 hours left to close the remaining gap of $3,000, the situation is urgent. Thank you so much!

Our 48hr Liveblogging Continues With Cuba EaL Ezio Neyra

January 28, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Ezio Neyra

Getting closer and closer...with just 36 hours and less than $4,000 to go!

Ezio Neyra (editor-at-large, Cuba): Reina María Rodríguez—whose brilliant work was featured in our April 2011 issue—is a Cuban poet, narrator and editor who, although well known and recognized within Cuban (literary) territory, is only just beginning to gain an international audience. Thanks in part to receiving the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda—one of the most important literary prizes in the Spanish language—as well as to the exposure afforded by Asymptote‘s own international reach, Rodríguez’s sensitivity, which frequently focuses on the Centro Habana area where she lives, is now reaching readers all around the world.

READ MORE…

Our 48hr Liveblogging Continues With Romanian EaL MARGENTO

January 28, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by MARGENTO

We now have 42hrs left to raise $7,669 and hit our goal! Please keep your fingers crossed for it to happen.

MARGENTO (editor-at-large, Romania): “Eutychia,” from our July 2012 issue, has been identified by Simona Popescu—poet, critic, and the foremost authority on Romanian poet Gellu Naum’s (1915 – 2001) work and life—as the Naumian poem par excellence, not in the sense that the rest of his huge oeuvre is contained in it, but because it stands out as one of the most comprehensive and emblematic expressions of the poet’s creed and poetics. And, more importantly, it highlights the unmistakable way in which his work was not only an art but a mode of existence.

A visionary, a great shaman—le grand chaman de Roumanie, as a French critic once called him—whose poems have always worked as Pythic oracles, Naum was also an incredibly shrewd and inclusive craftsman. The very personable and humorously playful person that he was in everyday life was the same as the artist who integrated biographical details, political critique, and popular culture (along with erudite and alchemically-oneiric intertexts) into his mesmerizing rhythms, expansive diction, and enthralling imagery. Although—or rather particularly because—he was a true poeta vates, a poet-prophet, he did not look down on the trivialities of common existence. His corrosive ironies never settled upon postmodern detachment, and, instead of rendering the verse flat, his absorption of the ‘insignificant’ actually turned the everyday into something magical, miraculous, and overwhelming.

READ MORE…

Our 48hr Liveblogging Begins NOW!

January 28, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Sophie Hughes

We now have 48hrs left to raise $7,799 and hit our goal! Please keep your fingers crossed for it to happen. First up, let's hear from Mexico editor-at-large, Sophie Hughes.

-3

Sophie Hughes (editor-at-large, Mexico): The grim truth is that most auto-fiction written by contemporary writers who have grown up and live in Mexico is likely to disturb international readers who haven’t themselves experienced endemic violence at a local level. But Julián Herbert’s Tomb Song (a remembered and fictionalized account of his childhood spent drifting through Mexico with his prostitute mother), excerpted in our 2014 Latin American special feature, possesses a warmth, wicked sense of humour and acuity which rightly upends the reductive association of narcolit with purely harrowing-lit.

READ MORE…

How Asymptote Can Teach You

January 27, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by K.T. Billey

Teachers of literature, culture and writing: rejoice! Asymptote will soon offer free lesson plans

“If there were any journal that should have an educational branch, Asymptote would be it.”

So said a fellow poet, teacher, editor and friend, when I mentioned that we at Asymptote are launching an online bank of teaching plans and materials. For anyone to use, for free.

Why Asymptote? Because of its quality, depth, and range. As a truly global literary journal—we’ve featured work from 95 countries and 67 languages, at last count—that also publishes writing of many genres, Asymptote is already a veritable goldmine for teachers of literature. World literature (not to mention translation, creative writing, composition, cultural studies, and multimedia). Online, at no cost, students and teachers can read (and often listen) to both the original work and the translation, then explore links about the writer/translator(s) and their work.

Now, it’s even easier. Members of the Asymptote educational team (themselves teachers and professors) have compiled themed ‘units,’ complete with readings and assignments. Designed with both high school and post-secondary students in mind, these resources can easily be adapted to the needs of each classroom and instructor. Writing prompts, discussion questions, and small group activities are meant to stimulate discussion and debate by comparing and contrasting readings, questioning their place in global contexts, and recognizing the role of language and translation throughout.

READ MORE…

The Men in My Life

January 26, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Luisa Zielinski

A dispatch from our "Writers on Writers" editor Luisa Zielinski

One sad summer—possibly in 2010—I came across Vivian Gornick’s The Men in my Life. The book’s premise is simple. Gornick’s essays, written with characteristic clarity and poise, profile writers such as such as H.G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, and James Baldwin. From works and lives so very diverse, Gornick discerns one common thread: loathing, especially of the self, was often a potent inspiration. Loneliness, too.

The book’s title is less playful—and more literal—than one might think. Gornick’s men here are not just any men, nor just any literary men. They are, indeed, the men in her life. Each of her essays resounds as a conversation between two minds; the kind of conversation that doesn’t so much blur the distinction between life and letters as it nullifies the need for it. The book, for me, sparked a lasting fascination with essays by writers on writers—the very best of which open up the conversation to a third party, a sort of kindly voyeur: the reader.

And then a friend introduced me to Asymptote, an online journal with a whole section devoted to precisely that format. What better way to introduce writers little known in the Anglophone world than through the unique voice of another? However intimate the relationship between a writer and their mentor, colleague, rival, or translator, and however close or far apart they may be in age or geography—publishing these essays in English exposes these networks of admiration and craft, revealing tantalizing lines of further inquiry and further reading.  READ MORE…

Why Asymptote Matters Today

January 23, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Adrian Nathan West

Every time a new journal or small press launches, it is a major event for literature; every time one closes, it is a disaster.

It is a rare person who will affirm that things in English-language publishing are exactly as they should be. The #readwomen 2014 campaign emphasized the scandalous gender bias in publishing, promotion, and reviewing; the translation database at Three Percent tracks abysmal figures for foreign fiction in translation; and anecdotally, anyone who has dealt with large publishers cannot help but lose heart at their willingness to lose millions on lavish advances for famous has-beens while refusing the relatively minor risk of publishing foreign writers of great stature.

The situation is hardly better with journals and magazines. While a cornucopia of poorly funded, university-based journals offers prospective writers and translators next-to-no visibility, more famous outlets, many of which state in their masthead a willingness to publish the new, the daring, and the uncategorizable, go on cranking out one mind-numbing workshop story after another. Then, up in the ether, are the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and their ilk, at the gates of which the translator clamors like poor K. before the portal of Kafka’s castle.     READ MORE…

Spotlight on Asymptote‘s Partner: Hong Kong’s Fleurs des Lettres

January 22, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Asymptote, Charlie Ng, and Daniel Aristi

Testimonials from Asymptote's global literary partnership in Hong Kong, with journal "Fleurs des Lettres"

One thing that Asymptote certainly delivers is fresh literature. That is, we don’t just sit back and wait for submissions to ping! in our inbox, and make do with whatever we get. In fact, submissions—which we do take seriously, with five dedicated slushpile readers sifting through works that come in over the transom throughout the year—probably make up less than 20% of our published content, if we go by wordcount. Some sections, such as Drama, Interviews, Visual, Criticism, and Writers on Writers are heavily commissioned/solicited sections. These need very resourceful/persistent section editors, who can convert the most tenuous of leads into actual contributions. An entire blog post or probably even a book could be written about how we wooed author X or publisher Y or translator Z or guest artist A to come on board.

Even with very resourceful section editors, however, given our mission of diversity, no one editor can cover his or her section for too long and still do his or her job well. That’s where our supporting cast comes in:  we have a jet-setting commissioning editor who is able to network on our behalf at writers’ festivals, we have contributing editors to pitch and contribute content, and as mentioned previously, we have an assistant editor researching hitherto unpublished languages, as well as editors-at-large with their fingers on the pulse of their regions’  literary scenes. Today we’ll talk about one facet of editorial work undertaken by editors-at-large that few of our readers may be privy to: journal partnerships.

It makes sense to partner with journals because as the first gatekeepers of literature everywhere, journals publish the freshest and most cutting-edge literature being produced in its region. As for how the partnership works: we take an article or a set of articles from a foreign language (i.e. non English-language) print journal and translate it into English to present in our quarterly issues. In return, the foreign language print journal then takes an article that we have published and commissions a translation of that article to be presented in its pages. All rights are cleared with the author of the article before proceeding. This is a model that stimulates the transmission of literature (in both languages) and benefits magazines, readers, authors, and translators alike.

A list of our journal partners to date can be found on our map here—two more slated for 2015 are Steaua in Romania and Writer in Thailand—but today we’ll only feature testimonials that shed light on one journal partner, the very stylish 《字花》from Hong Kong (also Fleurs des Lettres).

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

READ MORE…

From Ahtna to Zapotec: Celebrating Four Years of Literature from Rare and Underrepresented Languages

January 21, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Daniel Goulden

Assistant Editor Daniel Goulden on rare and underrepresented languages in translation and Asymptote

All too often, ‘World Literature’ gets reduced to European literature.

I jumped at the chance to help Asymptote buck that trend. When I came on board as assistant editor, Yew Leong (our editor-in-chief) asked me to research languages that Asymptote hadn’t yet featured in translation. This was—predictably—a challenging assignment.

For authors in the West, getting a novel published in translation is already an exceedingly difficult task. For authors elsewhere, the hurdles are exponentially greater. Regional instability and economic underdevelopment can stand in the way. Finding a talented translator—someone who not only speaks your language but also has the skill to make it come alive in English—or being found by one can be nearly impossible. Without passionate, skilled translators, many writers abroad who want their voices to be heard in other countries ultimately resort to writing in English (if they can) and thus set aside both their native language and its unique literary vocabulary. I found myself tracking down leads for hours, emailing contacts from around the world in search of an author or translator with work to submit. READ MORE…

Close Approximations Winners: Where Are They Now?

January 20, 2015  |  in Essays, News  |  by Asymptote and Lee Yew Leong

Our very first contest honored emerging translators. Now, a year later, our winners reflect on just what this contest means today

To witness the broad reach of Asymptote, one need look no further than Close Approximations, Asymptote’s first-ever international translation contest targeting fledgling translators and awarding $3,000 in prize money for two categories: poetry and fiction. (That’s $3,000 from your generous donations going directly into the pockets of these literary practitioners, but don’t forget that running a contest also requires heavy promotion—both paid and unpaid—, Asymptote‘s own editorial brainpower—in this case, to screen for the 20 best prose entries—, unseen but substantial administrative work—organizing contest entries and fielding queries from prospective contestants.)

Judged by no less than acclaimed translators Eliot Weinberger (in the poetry category) and Howard Goldblatt (in fiction), this contest received close to 200 submissions. Those who emerged victorious were lauded for their ability to “successfully cross the linguistic boundary,” and render translations that “zip along.” (Here are the complete judges’ citations.) Read on to see where these gifted newcomers find themselves now, a year after winning. If you would like to help us run a second contest (that will include a new nonfiction category!), give us some love—especially now that we’re entering the final stretch of our fundraising campaign, with TEN NERVE-WRACKING DAYS left!

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

READ MORE…

Worlds-Within-Worlds: A Testimonial

January 19, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Tiffany Tsao

Indonesia Editor-at-Large Tiffany Tsao on Indonesian writing—and how Asymptote fits in a new, more nuanced "World Literature"

Asymptote’s mission is to introduce not only literary voices from a wide range of countries, but a greater number of voices from within each country. That’s where our twenty over editors-at-large, from Cuba to China, come in. Their goal? To seek out the worlds nestled within worlds that may be invisible from the outside. With their fingers on the pulse of their regions’ literary scenes, our editors-at-large act as extra eyes and ears for our section editors, ensuring a stream of the freshest content from the world over. Often this work is commissioned from scratch (see Mui Poopoksakul on Contemporary Thai Fiction or Yardenne Greenspan on Contemporary Israeli Literature). Editors-at-large also organize outreach events, partner with local journals, and send us literary dispatches for the blog. Our Indonesian editor-at-large, Tiffany Tsao, who gave us this dispatch from the 2014 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, wrote the following blog post to commemorate our fourth birthday.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

World literature is a loaded word with a lot at stake. The term makes a grand promise: access to literatures, in foreign tongues, about unfamiliar peoples, in far-flung places. “World Literature” promises to reveal the astounding diversity of the globe through letters.

But its execution risks the exact opposite effect: in place of diversification, simplification; in place of multiplication, diminishment. A handful of writers behave as spokespeople for an entire nation, ethnic group, even continent; a single novel purports to function as representative of a variegated and ever-varying literary and popular culture of any given context. This prospect of oversimplification alarms both skeptics and advocates of world literature alike, and (unfortunately) even the most good-intentioned of attempts to avoid this plight may count for naught. READ MORE…

This is Asymptote: Say Ayotzinapa

January 16, 2015  |  in Essays  |  by Sophie Hughes

A look back at Asymptote, Ayotzinapa, and solidarity through poetry & translation

Asymptote is the only literary magazine I’ve ever worked for (or even heard about) that has the editorial and translatorial brainpower and resources to pull off a 20-language project in 10 days.

Because that is just what we pulled off with Say Ayotztinapa, which—thanks to the intrepid blog, design, and social media teams—surged on the wave of worldwide solidarity with the victims of the Ayotzinapa massacre in September 2014 and with the subsequent protests. And it’s wasn’t only a translatorial feat, the post was shared in the thousands, including retweets by organizations like English PEN, Words Without Borders, and Granta.

333

READ MORE…

Au Marché, with Emile Zola

January 14, 2015  |  in Essays, Food and Literature  |  by Nina Sparling

Nina Sparling finds Emile Zola's Les Halles in an NYC farmer's market. Part 3 in a series on food, literature, and translation

Runners zipped down the bike lane, out to beat the rising temperatures. We arrived at Skillman Avenue, just west of 43rd Street, a little after 7am. The sun was rising, the sky still lit with the glow reserved for early-risers and weekend revelers. It was opening weekend at the Greenmarket in Sunnyside, Queens. Ron parked the truck with a jolt and I almost spilled my coffee. The cider, oversized apple turnover, and apple farmers had not arrived yet. Patrick pulled up behind us, honking. He would unload crates of integrated pest management apples and tomatoes, challenging the expectations of seasonal produce. He works with Jesus and together they take home thousands, I’m sure. READ MORE…

Drinking with Boris Vian

January 8, 2015  |  in Essays, Food and Literature  |  by Nina Sparling

Part II in a series on food, literature, and translation—this time featuring Boris Vian and his classic "L'ecume des jours"

There is a way a room full of people drinking cocktails feels. It is distinct from the stale fog that spills from a fridge packed with six packs, and it is altogether different from the rosy-cheeked stupor induced by a case of wine. There is a severe and attentive atmosphere to the room. The alchemy of balancing sweetness, bitterness, and bite in a few ounces is mysterious and tempting. There is a self-awareness that comes with drinking an old fashioned, an edge to the precarious glass that a Manhattan arrives in. There is also enormous satisfaction in drinking a good one. The pleasure doesn’t last long—the drinks are always short and expensive. READ MORE…