Language: Azerbaijani

Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

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

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

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

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

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

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

Our Summer 2025 Edition Has Landed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Translation Tuesday: “The Unruly Grass” by Nermin Kamal

July 22, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova

It was child’s play for him to do what many people had tried to do and failed—bring a smile to the face of the deeply grieving woman.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by decorated Azerbaijani author Nermin Kamal, translated from the Azerbaijani by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova. In it, a man and a woman—both married, but not to each other—commiserate about their respective marital woes.  His wife can’t seem to recover from grief; her husband is lost in the interminable throes of depression. Meanwhile, the machinery of the city churns on. As the couple take solace in their clandestine connection, the man’s wife finds her own comfort in an unexpected animal visitor. Kamal playfully jumps between various perspectives among the city’s residents to depict their entanglements with a broad vision.

Late one afternoon a man and woman were sitting talking in George Enescu Park in the Eighth Residential District. ‘Cover your ears. Don’t listen to them,’ an old street vendor on a nearby bench told her granddaughter. The man was complaining about his wife and the woman about her husband. Tedious though the conversation was, they were listening intently to each other.

‘How long can this go on? How much longer can we live like this?’ the man grumbled. ‘I come home exhausted from work and find her sitting there crying. She put her father’s pictures on the wall and I didn’t say a word. Now she’s wearing her father’s clothes. I tell her, you shouldn’t keep a dead man’s clothes in the house, take them to the charity. Your father was a big strapping bloke, you’re a petite woman, how can you wear the dead man’s jumper in front of your husband? But does she listen? She’s been crying for six months. I could understand it then—her father had just died, but what can I say to her now?’

‘Mine’s the same,’ the woman grumbled. ‘The house is falling apart. All the cupboard doors are hanging off their hinges. Whatever you touch, it’s broken. He doesn’t fix anything or get anyone else to fix things, he just sleeps all day. Not that his father has died. He says, I’m tired, really tired. You might be fed up of life—that’s up to you, but I’m not. Life is wonderful.’ 

Though he was just a statue, George Enescu couldn’t bear it. He swept his bow over the strings of his violin. When the man was speaking, the noble instrument growled like a bear, but when the woman was speaking it twittered incessantly like a nightingale. But no one except the violinist could hear it.

‘At least there’s a grave. We gave him a proper burial, laid flowers. I said to her, the world is heading for hell in a handcart. By the time we die we might envy those who are already dead!’

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The Queen’s Argot: The Language of Chess Around the World

January 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Allison Braden

Players worldwide understand the pieces . . . but our understanding . . . depends in part on what we call them.

Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit illustrated the international culture of chess. As it turns out, the game’s spread around the globe is a story of translation. In this brisk and brainy rundown, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden tackles its evolution through time and space, setting up a board in which pawns can be farmers, bishops can be fools, and queens can be counselors.

In December of last year, Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit smashed viewership records for a limited-run series on the site. In the show’s first month of streaming, over 62 million people around the world tuned in to the story of a young woman who overcomes several challenges in her quest to become a world chess champion in the 1960s. The series was based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, and like readers before them, viewers rooted for plucky chess prodigy Beth Harmon. Her eventual triumph was, for many, a bright spot at the end of a long and difficult year.

You won’t become a grandmaster by watching the series. (In fact, one of the only aspects of the show that pro chess players took issue with was the speed of the games. In a concession to viewers, they were faster paced than matches at real tournaments.) But The Queen’s Gambit is a crash course in the culture of chess. It’s fiercely competitive, requires visual and strategic intelligence, and remains extremely male dominated (despite studies showing men aren’t inherently better at the game). Chess is also truly universal—and where there’s an international pastime, there are translators.

In the show, Harmon travels to Mexico, France, and the USSR. As her skill grows, her competitors increasingly hail from foreign countries, and as it becomes clear that the ultimate test of her ability will come in Moscow, she begins to study Russian. In the heady final scenes, commentators relay her moves in a variety of languages for listeners around the world. After The Queen’s Gambit was released, interest in chess boomed. One of the most popular ways to play is online. Chess.com boasts users from dozens of countries, and they can all play one other. Like many sports, chess transcends language; in a way, it is its own language. Players worldwide understand the pieces: the king’s hesitance, the queen’s might. The bishop, which can only move diagonally, speaks his own sideways tongue. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Gogol” by Musa Effendi

January 5, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Musa Effendi

Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a disabled youth’s love of football is hindered by his supposed friends in Musa Efendi’s short story “Gogol.” Though our narrator attempts to convince us (or perhaps himself) of his empathy for his friend Gogol, it’s not long before the petty worries of children mirror the cruel pragmatism of the adult world, all at the expense of their friend’s wishes. Through deceptively simple prose, we’re taken through a string of childhood vignettes chronicling the titular character’s ostracization. The narrator’s excuses, deflected upon the reader (“You would do the same thing, too”) segues into a haunting and almost surreal final image, a scene tinged by the narrator’s remorse and subdued sense of awe.

“Turtles can fly.”
–Bahman Ghobadi

I do not like Balzac-style narratives; I do want to know a lot, yet I never dreamed of seeing everything. So I choose to talk about the near side of the Moon.

 

*

We talked about this with the guys during the nights before the actual play. Despite the name of the game, hands play an important role in football; it is the hands that help you speed up when you are running. It is the hands that help you to keep your rival away when you have the ball. It is the hands that help the goalkeeper to not let the ball pass through the door. In football, you get penalized because of a hand, but you can’t play without it either. Elchin was the one who told us all this. This was the reason we didn’t let Gogol play and assigned him as commentator of the game instead. We called him Gogol because while commentating the game, he used to get excited when a goal was scored and would make a noise like this: Go-go-go-gooooal!

He wasn’t stammering. It is just that he didn’t have hands. Try to understand his situation by this single explanation—he couldn’t hug anyone.

*

Our yard was surrounded by the neighborhood of strong football teams. There was Boka’s team on the opposite street (I don’t remember the name of it); they used to play very well. Nemeczek, Csónakos played in his team as well. Timur and his team were another bunch of strong players. So we didn’t have a chance to actually let Gogol join us in the game. You would do the same thing, too; for us, our games were more like training. But it would be waste of time to try him out by giving him a chance to play. True, his loss was greater than ours, but it is not worth sacrificing or compromising in such matters. Grown-ups do this, too—they prefer to save time and money rather than noticing other people’s losses. Necessity of life—my father would say.

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What’s New in Translation: November 2018

November 5, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Garrett Phelps, Lou Sarabadzic, Nicolás Llano, and Poupeh Missaghi

Need recommendations for what to read next? Let our staff help with their reviews of four new titles.

Join us on this edition of What’s New in Translation to find out more about four new novels, from Amsterdam, Colombia, Russia, and Azerbaijan.

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Childhood by Gerard Reve, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, Pushkin Press, 2018

Reviewed by Garrett Phelps, Assistant Editor

The narrators in Gerard Reve’s Childhood are at that credulous stage of youth where hazy moral lines are easily trespassed, where curiosity and cruelty often intersect. All of Reve’s usual themes are here: taboo sexualities, the illusion of moral categories, the delicate balancing acts that prevent erotic love from teetering into violence. But the two novellas in Childhood transgress in unexpected ways, insofar as children’s very inexperience puts them outside the sphere of sin.

The first novella, Werther Nieland, is told by a boy named Elmer, who bounces between friends’ houses and other neighborhood locales, and whose longing to form a secret club is less a wish than an absolute necessity. After feeling an affinity for local boy Werther Nieland, he decides: “There will be a club. Important messages have been sent already. If anybody wants to ruin it, he will be punished. On Sunday, Werther Nieland is going to join.” Why exactly Elmer is attracted to Werther never really gets explained. More confusing is the fact that as early as their first meeting Elmer feels the urge to abuse him.

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A Conversation with Norwegian-to-Azerbaijani Translator Anar Rahimov

December 4, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by David Smith

There was not a single moment when I said to myself, “Stop”—even when I spent 10 to 15 minutes on one sentence!

As a translator of Norwegian, I travelled to the Gothenburg Book Fair in September to meet with Scandinavian authors, publishers, and fellow translators. One of the translators I met there was Anar Rahimov, a translator of contemporary Norwegian prose into Azerbaijani.

I was intrigued by Anar’s story as one of only two translators of Norwegian in Azerbaijan. I translate into English, probably the world’s most dominant language, and I was curious about the exchange between two relatively small languages, Norwegian and Azerbaijani. I wanted to ask Anar a little more about his work as a translator and how it fits into the literary culture of Azerbaijan. 

David Smith (DS): How did you come to learn Norwegian and what inspired you to translate literature?

Anar Rahimov (AR): Well . . . it was quite accidental, I have to admit. I was working at the University of Languages in Baku as an English language teacher. Then an event took place that changed my whole career, priorities, and future standing in life. In 2010, I heard about an interview that included financing two and half years’ study in Oslo. Ever since childhood, Norway has appealed to me as a northern, far away, and very cold land. Besides, studying in the prestigious universities of Europe was tempting in itself. After a little hesitation, I applied and was selected.

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