Language: German

Blog Editor Highlights: Spring 2025

April 21, 2025  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper dive into Rosario Castellanos, Liu Ligan, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in our latest issue.

There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.

A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”

As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

April 17, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

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 Paraguay, Lesotho, Senegal, 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.

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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 Bread, Long 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

April 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Dan Shurley, Eric Bies, Liliana Torpey, and Xiao Yue Shan

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…

European Literature Days 2024: The Twenty-First Century City and Countryside

April 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by MARGENTO

City and countryside, war and peace, and the persistence of garbage.

Every year, European Literature Days transforms the Austrian city of Krens an der Donau into a lively, welcoming theatre for the celebration of contemporary writing, featuring readings, dialogues, workshops, and other cultural programming coordinated under a selected subject. The 2024 edition had the urban-rural complex as its central theme, and in the following dispatch, our editor-at-large MARGENTO reports on the events and conversations that took place.

Late last November, as I headed back to Krems-on-the-Danube to attend European Literature Days (Europäischen Literaturtage) for the second time, I realized that there was a need for me to both grasp the event’s larger context and to hone in on its details and nuances. This concurrence of conflicting scales requires starting this brief dispatch in media res, with a tour offered by the organizers on the third day of the festival. There, the guides Gregor Kremser and Max Dietrich took participants around town, unveiling multilayered histories and instances of reinscribing the past. The landmarks ranged from a park named for the anti-Nazi resistance fighter Therese Mahrer, to the only memorial (in Austria and Germany if not the world) dedicated to a WWII German military—ironically on the very eighty-sixth anniversary of the Reich’s genocidal pogrom.

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Ordered Chaos: Katy Derbyshire on Translating Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish

March 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Matthew Redman

[M]ountains implicitly divide . . . the way we speak, so that people on different sides of the mountain will have a different words for ‘brother’.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a folding of dreamscape into landscape—a study of some of earth’s most majestic topographies through the discursive, vivid wanderings of a mind led by its own fascinations. Made up of just over five hundred notes, this compilation of observations, narratives, fantasies, and contemplations track a journey through the Alps in colours, in flanks and peaks, hearsay and memories, macabre moments of comedy, and a continual rumination on the crafting of writing and composing. These deft workings of language have been rendered into a fluid and chimeric English by Katy Derbyshire, and she speaks here of Mountainish’s scepticism of mountains, the beauty and comedic tone of the prose, and ‘little narrative islands’.  

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Matthew Redman (MR): One of my favourite aspects of Mountainish is when the narrator talks about the mountains and her fear of them; there is a kind of a mistrust of the mountains poking through a lot of the time, expressing itself in a lack of awe, a lack of overwhelm. When she’s faced with these mountains, it’s more like she’s peering at them, or stealing glances.

Katy Derbyshire (KD): Well, the narrator gives us that in the very first of her notes, when she starts off with this drive through the Alps and is terrified that they’re going to collapse onto her—and I think that continues all the way through. It really endeared me to the book, her scepticism. We, the two of us, between ourselves, we called ourselves ‘mountain sceptics,’ because Zsuzsanna doesn’t just accept this Swiss myth of the mountains’ magnificence. She sees the beauty, very much so, but she also sees the insularism—which she calls racism sometimes—and she sees the expectations and the narrow-mindedness that comes along with the landscape. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2025

March 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Eamon McGrath, Jonathon Atkinson, Matilda Nevin, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviews of eleven newly published books from Argentina, India, Austria, France, Japan, Chile, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Denmark!

This month, our selection of noteworthy titles include a collection of revolutionary Hindi poetry, an erotic thriller from an extraordinary Chilean modernist, an incisive novel concerning the disabled body in contemporary Japan, an intimate socio-philosophical contemplation of a loved one’s life and death by one of France’s foremost intellectuals, and more. 

bazterrica

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Scribner, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

There’s something seductive about the nightmare, perhaps because fear is the most vivifying sensation, perhaps because beauty and horror are so finely intertwined. In Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy, the night-terror has never looked so exquisite, so shimmering. With an eye for the luminous and ear for the otherworldly, familiar gothic tropes are here relieved from their muted gloom; a chimeric language sings the shadows awake, and in this chorus even the most basic signifiers of darkness regain their fearsomeness, mysticism, sensual enthrallment. The cockroach has a gleam, a crunch; a derelict cathedral is as diaphanous as a dragonfly’s wing. There are the recognisable plot-pieces—violent sacraments, echoing halls, and a wasted world—but those who command fear’s aesthetic know that the most disturbing capacity of pain and transgression lies not in their repellence, but their strange and unpronounceable allure. It is not the torturous that Bazterrica is adept at bringing to life, but the smile that slowly creeps across the face of the tortured, when they are somewhere we can no longer reach.

The Unworthy is a post-apocalyptic convent story, wherein the only known patch of livable land is occupied by the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a cult that is at once spiritually vacuous and deeply devotional, with its faith reserved more for the House’s singular rites, rituals, and rules than any principle or entity. As is the standard for any secluded sect that positions oblivion as the only alternative to obeyance, the Sisterhood’s hierarchy is strict and immovable, the leaders are mysterious and merciless, the eroticism is violent, the violence is erotic, and the practices are senseless but methodical. The founder and head of the House is a man, but in the name of Sisterhood, all his acolytes are woman: some are servants, some are the Unworthy, some are Chosen, some are Enlightened—and only this latter group is given contact with the one known only as He. One guess as to what that means. Our nameless narrator wants to rise through the ranks, but stubborn fragments of selfhood prevent her from completely assimilating into the Sisterhood’s processions. She still has memories, desires—though they are but frayed remains. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Kenya, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

This week, our editors-at-large report on clashes between writers and politics, recent awards, and exciting events. From Pippi Longstocking’s 80th birthday to a brand-new book fair, read on to find out more!

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

Venko Andonovski was recently named the most influential writer and educator of 2024 by TRI, the renowned, Skopje-based publishing house. Andonovski, whose novels and plays have been translated into twelve languages, is known as “the most widely read Macedonian writer and the most performed Macedonian novelist in the last twenty years.” Despite his fame, he is generous with both the public and his colleagues: he taught six writing workshops in 2024 and made a statement congratulating fellow Macedonian author Rumena Bužarovska on being named TRI’s most-read author of 2024, and condemning the “culture of silence” surrounding the accomplishments of domestic authors in the same breath. Andonovski termed the disinterest demonstrated by Macedonian politicians towards the literary scene “an embarrassment”, adding that the situation is exacerbated by authors who are equally silent about their colleagues’ attainments, and whose “bodies are 80% water and souls are 80% vanity.” Adding that “if we remain a culture of silence, our culture is bound to remain in silence [on the world stage]”, Andonovski posed a question that is both incisive and (unfortunately) relevant: “If we do not appreciate ourselves, who will appreciate us?” READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse

February 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

One of the pleasures of Mountainish is how its fragments flow together according to an obscure, free-associative logic.

Wandering, dizzying, echoing, gorgeous—spending time with Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is not unlike being four thousand metres above sea level; the book conjures both the vastness and the minute details of the Alps with lyrical intuition, while constantly introducing surprising insights into the peaks’ social presentation. Through both a study of mountains and a poetic testament of the mind inside all that landscape, Gahse takes us across what it means to look, listen, feel, and think—with all the awe, fear, beauty, and inequity that is inseparable from our regard of worldly wonders. We are delighted to introduce Mountainish as our Book Club selection for the month, and to be travelling together along the excursions and perceptions of this singular work’s pursuit.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, Prototype, 2025

At some point while reading this strange, moreish book, one is likely to suddenly snap out of the trance it has induced, prompting a question into what this work does, and how it exerts its mesmerising effects.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a series of numbered notes, 515 in total. Certain sections appear to have come from a diary, while other parts resemble the scrambled embryo of a more substantial literary project—a travelogue, perhaps, or a parody of one. But very often, the notes never coalesce into anything; Mountainish might be best understood as the miscellaneous lint of a compulsive writer, a hodge-podge of scenes, sketches, proddings and testings of turns of phrase. This is not to say, however, that the book is lost to chaos. The numbers appended to the notes provide a semblance of order, and oblique patterns slowly emerge and disperse along the reading. Brief, slight, and faintly whimsical, the notes float by like cloud puffs, and if you look at them for long enough, they take on vaguely recognisable shapes. Within its diaphanous structure, the usual anchors to time and place—chronology, for instance—are done away with completely, leaving the book hovering ambiguously over its subject. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

Our editors bring you the latest from India, Mexico, and Romanian letters.

A vital new project to resurrect the works of a great Romanian poet in the English language, a slew of ambitious and global-minded book festivals in India, and a fair to highlight Oaxacan writing and languages in Mexico—our editors are bringing you the latest from a literary landscape that continues to expand in richness, variety, and intercultural exange.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

In 1889, Mihai Eminescu—the iconic late romantic/early modernist Romanian poet—died at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind only one published collection but tens of thousands of unreleased manuscripts. As they were gradually unearthed and released over the decades following his death, the posthumous publications only increased Eminescu’s fame and critical acclaim. Despite this unparalleled stature in Romanian literary history, however, the poet is relatively unknown to English-language readers—an issue that paradoxically has nothing to do with a lack of translations. In fact, a sizeable portion of Romanian and Anglophone translators and writers have tried their hand at this hugely demanding task, but they’ve all largely failed in two essential respects (to smaller or larger extents): first, in rendering the oceanic vastness and depth of the oeuvre, and, second, in capturing the exquisite euphony to an extent by which a non-Romanian reader could sense the original’s inescapable fascination.

One of the most important recent events in Romanian letters has now set out to address both those shortcomings in a spectacular fashion; K.V. Twain (Diana Cârligeanu’s pen-name), a young poet, writer, and translator educated in the US and Japan, has undertaken the task of translating Eminescu’s collected poems in an eight-volume series to be published by Eikon Press, and the first instalment was launched in January under the aegis of the Romanian Literary Translators Association in Bucharest. The association’s director, multilingual poet and performer Peter Sragher, was the event’s enthusiastic host, while literary critics Christian Crăciun and Vianu Mureșan contributed generous praise for the project.  READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter I Fire

February 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.

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. 

Fire blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.

/

*

Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”

The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१

agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01

– The Ṛgveda

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*

Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.

Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.

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Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

February 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Carissa Coane, Daniel Yadin, Devi Sastry, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sayani Sarkar

Dive into our new issue with these choice recommendations from our amazing intercontinental team!

Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.

I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.

Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”

When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.

Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”

—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.

In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.

Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.

In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.

With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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What’s New in Translation: January 2025

January 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Christopher Higgs, Henry Gifford, Jordan Silversmith, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…