Language: Arabic

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from Palestine, North Macedonia, and Greece!

This week, our editors bring news of new publications continuing long-running literary genealogies, notable awardees of the PEN Translates grants, and the process of turning a lauded Greek writer’s home into an exhibition space. 

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Going back to one’s roots can be an exercise of remembering what moves us. In her novel Tri Marii (The Three Marias), published recently by Ars Lamina Press, Macedonian author Olivera Kjorveziroska examines multiple iterations of the origin concept: as literary influence, as folk practice, and as the force from and towards which all human life is drawn—love.

Originally from Kumanovo, Kjorveziroska (b. 1965) now lives and works in Skopje. Her writing has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Hungarian, and Albanian, among others, and she also works as an editor and literary critic. Being someone who reads for a living is a crucial aspect of Kjorveziroska’s life; in her own words: “If . . . I had to choose between doing something else and writing a lot more, or working in publishing and not writing at all, I would probably choose the latter, because this is the only industry I feel at home in.” This love of and proficiency in reading finds its embodiment in her writing, including in Tri Marii, which is intertextual and allusive both literarily and culturally. READ MORE…

Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

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…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2025

Some of our favourites from the latest issue!

With thirty-two countries and eighteen languages represented, our Summer 2025 issue is one of adventure, witness, intelligence, capaciousness, drama, mystery, and more. . . We are more dedicated than ever to this fundamentally compassionate work of building a truly global work of letters, which always starts with admiration and awe—so let our editors be your guide as they share the texts that most moved them from this rich compendium.

In what was deemed by both as a ‘never-ending conversation’, Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Alda Merini if she had any unrealised projects. ‘Yes, of course,’ she responded, ‘I never made love to whomever I wanted to, those are projects that went wrong. Those are real projects. We don’t care about the rest.’ Flippant as this may sound, Merini has only spoken what she has proved in a lifetime of tumultuous, searing, and unbounded poems—that love is her occupation. Love as carnal as it is psychic, as perverse as it is sublime, as unconscious as it is sensational, as much worship as it is despair—in her corpus one finds thoughts racing across topographies in search of adequate metaphor, insanity driving a pin through the core of idea, or the erotic body tingling to the point of immolation. . . To throw the self into love, it seems Merini knew what that truly means; she wasn’t afraid of being taken over by ardor because, after all, it could only have come from her. Love was her fuel, her flesh.

As it is in these poems from Emptied of Love, brought about by a. Monti’s soaring, musical translation. At the very first line, we hear her: ‘Space, give me space—more space’. In other poets this may be read as a plea, but in Merini’s voice, it’s a demand. And with it comes reminder of love’s lawlessness, that it gives us permission to pursue what we want, that it gives clarity to what we believe we deserve. Love makes one bold, she demonstrates, and even in its failures, you mourn boldly, expansively. And it is there, mostly in the devastations of love, where Merini exacts her power. The collection from which these pieces are taken, Vuoto d’amore, is a deeply painful one, full of unrequited affairs of the heart, grief, disappointments, madness. They are grand emotions, and the poet understands that their largesse is best met with simple diction—so it is in the syntactical that she renders her immersive, surprising language:

until the sea submerges
this feeble flesh of mine
and I lie exhausted
on you who becomes the beach
and I, becoming wave,
you strike and strike
with Love’s oar.

READ MORE…

Our Summer 2025 Edition Has Landed!

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 DramaYannis 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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What’s New in Translation: July 2025

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Palestine, Kenya, and Romania!

This week, our editors-at-large take us from memorial ceremonies in Kenya to a colloquium in Brussels, exploring the life and legacy of celebrated literary figures, exciting prize nominations, and cross-cultural events. Read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Palestinian writer and poet Ibrahim Nasrallah has been nominated to the longlist for the 2026 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, better known as the “American Nobel” for its global reputation and the extent of its sway in the world of literature. Nasrallah’s much-acclaimed novel, Time of White Horses, stands as the only Arabic-language novel among this year’s nine distinguished finalists, another significant achievement for Arabic literature in the international arena.

Presented biannially by the University of Oklahoma’s World Literature Today, the Neustadt Prize recognizes outstanding literary achievement in all genres and languages. The winner, who will receive a $50,000 award, will be announced at the Neustadt Lit Fest in October 2025.

Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses is a sweeping narrative charting the course of Palestine from the twilight of Ottoman rule to the earth-shattering convulsions of the 1948 Nakba, all refracted through the lens of an imaginary village. The book, celebrated for its blend of documentary realism and imaginative storytelling, has previously been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and is celebrated for its nuanced analysis of collective memory and identity. READ MORE…

The 2025 Turin International Book Fair: Going the Distance

Turin’s International Book Fair made some tentative but promising progress to outline an expanded conception of Europe. . .

Now in its thirty-seventh edition, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, continues to be a vital occasion for the literary community, gathering a diverse and lauded array of writers from around the globe to speak about their craft and its reflection of the world. This year, the theme “Le parole tra noi leggere/ Words fall lightly between us” gestured towards the need for literature to create connections and compassions; in the following dispatch, Veronica Gisondi reports on the illuminations to be found in this “between,” capturing the intersections and collisions that marked this year’s Fair.

This year, the Turin International Book Fair gathered a constellation of voices that, like a compass, revealed multiple paths to traverse the conflicts of the present and the complexities that await us, prefiguring a future expectant with the consequences of increasing inequality, oppression, and unbridled political violence. In these crossings, the fair also bridged a distance—the one that separates Europe from the rest of the Mediterranean, its ancient cradle—which has, for too long, appeared bigger than it actually is.

Some of the speakers that enlivened the fair’s thirty-seventh edition—held on May 15 to 19 in Lingotto, a former Fiat car factory—dissected the impact of being subjected to settler-colonial violence and the potential of literature in resistance. A dialogue between the Palestinian short-story writer Ziad Khaddash and Palestinian-Syrian writer and journalist Raed Wahesh took place on the anniversary of the Nakba (a day that signals the start of a long process of occupation and expropriation); in observance, Grazia Dell’Oro, Wahesh’s Italian publisher, remarked that “for us Westerners, anniversaries are often a way to clean our conscience. But we believe that the lively literary life of the Palestinian world needs to be remembered and promoted here at the fair,” and further stressed the risks of “the victimization that comes with an Orientalist gaze.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us into the inner workings of the literary scenes in Palestine and Kenya. From the debut of Gaza Publications, a publication dedicated to the promotion and protection of Palestinian stories, to the rich and discursive literary salons of Nairobi, read on to learn more.

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

A new publishing house, Gaza Publications (manshurat gazza), has been launched by Palestinian writer and editor Husam Maarouf, aiming to safeguard Palestinian narratives threatened by erasure amid ongoing conflict. Maarouf, speaking from Gaza, emphasized that the project was born out of “the fear of obliteration and the erasures that threaten the Palestinian story,” particularly the untold testimonies of those who lived through the 1948 Nakba and subsequent wars.

The Gaza Publications team includes Maarouf as founder and director, visual artist Lamis Al Sharif as consultant and coordinator, and Yemeni designer Nina Amer. Despite severe challenges—including war, frequent internet outages, and communication barriers—the team remains committed to amplifying Palestinian voices, especially those shaped by the harsh realities of Gaza.

READ MORE…

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the Art of Bearing Witness

These six translated works . . . demonstrate the formal innovation, thematic depth, and beauty of contemporary Arabic literature.

Since its conception nearly twenty years ago, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has sought to bring a wider scope of attention and celebration to works translated into English from the Arabic, resulting in a plethora of incredible titles being honored over the years, from the 2008 awarding of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah, to the 2019 awarding of Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work, translated by Leri Price. In this essay, Ibrahim Fawzy takes us across the most recent shortlist and its six works, discussing their distinct contributions to the Arab world’s abundant archive.

Contemporary Arabic literature offers rich, varied responses to the shared human experiences of displacement, conflict, and the weight of history. With its compelling and diverse array, the shortlist of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation presents a brilliant selection of such works each year, spanning genres from memoir to thriller, and reflecting the vitality and range of modern Arabic literary expression. In the 2024 prize, the six works on the shortlist—brought into English by dedicated translators—offer profound insights into the complexities of identity, memory, and resilience. While the judges ultimately awarded the prize to Katharine Halls’s translation of Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence early this year, every shortlisted text invited comparative reflection on how these distinct narratives converge around the very act of bearing witness.

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What’s New in Translation: May 2025

New publications from Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, South Korea, Greece, and Poland!

This month, we’re introducing thirteen new publications from eleven different countries. A strange and visceral collection of poems that distort and reimagine the body; a contemporary, perambulating study of the contemporary city; a novel that forsakes linearity for a complex exploration of chance and coincidence; a series that splits the act of storytelling—and the storyteller—into kaleidoscopic puzzle-pieces; an intimate and unflinching look at motherhood and its disappearance of boundaries; and more. . .

Transparencies 2025 PROMO COVER

Transparencies by Maria Borio, translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2025

    Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Italian poet Maria Borio’s English debut, Transparencies, transports us to an Italy defined as much by glass, screens, and holograms as it is by history and landscape. Divided into three sections—“Distances,” “Videos, Fables,” and “Transparence”—Borio presents a world where past, present, and future converge toward an audible silence, where the self presents itself as genderless, morphable—the I becomes you becomes we becomes they—and the poet plays not a character nor a confessionalist but an airy, elegant observer, as illustrated in “Letter, 00:00 AM”:

At the end of the video, soundless voices,
hollowed-out faces scroll like the ground stumps
of legend: even people with desires

emptied like furrows in tar can carry
a fable. The screams are timbers, old water
they turn to bark, white knots, even.

Danielle Pieratti’s translations preserve the glassiness inherent in the Italian originals; she has strived for accuracy of voice and image, as evident in “Green and Scarlet” (“Verde e rosa”), an eight-part poem that considers natural, national, and human borders: “Between the trees there’s the border’s furrow / the heavy sign that stopped them / all around shapes spring up like nations.” In an interview at Words Without Borders, Borio recalls how she and Pieratti chose to use “scarlet” instead of “pink” when translating “rosa”: “ . . . in English it’s literally ‘pink,’ but . . . the color referred to the luminous atmosphere of a sunset in the woods, so ‘pink’ would have given too sharp an impression . . . Danielle came up with the word ‘scarlet,’ which . . . feels softer, more delicate, with a gradual outpouring . . . .” Such close attention to diction permeates the collection.

Although the book examines the modern world and its technology—recordings, photos, videos, cellphones—Borio refuses to be glitzy (she’s no Twitter-verse poet). Describing the London Aquatic Centre, she pens lines like, “The transparent organs overhead open / become a soft line chasing itself, / cleansing the breath’s dark colors . . .” and “Life is everywhere, in the curved line / we inhabit as though thinking.” Simultaneously detailed and abstract, her verse brings to mind Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, two influences that Pieratti mentions in her illuminating translator’s note—although there’s some European surrealism rolling through her veins, too: “The cactus spines clench their vertebra of water.” Such accents only add to her poetry’s dreamlike magnetism, its cultured mystique. READ MORE…

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

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Elementalia: Chapter IV Air

There was more to the word than Indra thought. There was more in the air.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Inspire, from the Latin inspirare, in- + spirare, to breathe.

 

* READ MORE…

Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

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 ParaguayLesothoSenegal, 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.

blog_Spring_2025_issue-announcement

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 BreadLong 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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What’s New In Translation: April 2025

New titles from Brazil, Portugal, Switzerland, Colombia, Norway, Italy, Palestine, Cuba, Peru, Japan, Afghanistan, and Germany!

The brevity of a transcendent ecopoetics, a fierce diagnosis of the contemporary art world, the psychological torture of a toxic relationship, a gathering of formidable Afro-Brazilian voices. . . This month, we are delighted to introduce fifteen new works from around the world, from the intimate to the twisted, the reverent to the radical, of healing and breaking, of what goes on within us and between us.

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 Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández, translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia, World Poetry Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Rhythm in poetry, Yeats told us, serves to “prolong the moment of contemplation—the moment when we are both asleep and awake” by balancing a monotonous formula of language with the surprise of new images, ideas. In his metered perfection, he reminded us that we are innately rhythmic creatures, alive by the steady pace of breath and heartbeat, habit-forming and fond of repetition, and every interruption to this enduring pattern is a miniature shock, a fracture, a revival.

The hundred poems in Gastón Fernández’s Apparent Breviary are full of interruptions: huge, gasping chasms of silence throwing poetic rhythm into some archaic past. A few pages in, I understood why their translator, KM Cascia, had admitted that the poems made them “squirm.” They unsettled me too. With no guiding cadence to the words, no comfort of the steady pulse, with language disorientating in its skeleton arrangement, there is a sense of learning how to read again, examining each word set firmly on its own—rare stars in the page’s matte sky. Max Picard had once brought up the idea that language is too self-conscious: “each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front than to the silence.” In Fernández, this isn’t so; here, language is conscious of its origin and reverent of its silent surroundings, and as soon as one acknowledges this fact, the vacancy of the negative spaces on the page begin to seem inviting. Instead of being read as simply text, there is something of Apparent Breviary that demands to be interpreted as score, in which the nothingness is full of measures, divisions, momentum. The poet demands we notice that the emptiness is alive: it breathes. READ MORE…