Language: Persian

What’s New in Translation: September 2025

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

1

From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.”

By bringing the notion of hospitality into the translational exchange, Diagne coopts the innate generosity and charity of the act, but evades the pitfalls of gift-related debt by noting that both languages gain equally from the exchange, as “to translate is to create human community with the speaker of the language that one is translating.” Even when the resulting text is reductive, appropriative, or produced for colonial purposes, Diagne suggest that the undertaking of the translation—what takes the mediating individual from being a “vehicle” to being a translator—is a sense of hospitality, of taking in two languages into the mind and moving, shifting them against one another in the pursuit of knowledge and elucidation. It is not necessarily the human being—with all of our various motives, prejudices, and desires—who can accomplish what Derrida had called a pure gift, but the languages themselves are open to each other, that cultivates within the translator a “cross-pollination.” They lead us to curiosity, wonder, and finally the recognition of a common humanity as we realize what all language is meant to do: to make us real to one another.

Where Diagne does face the real failures of cross-cultural exchange, such as the regard of ‘primitive’ African art that gained so much traction in the Western world, he distinguishes these instances as projection, not translation. The simplification and repurposing of foreign expressions can only be categorized as an intellectual and imaginative failure, one that completely neglects the necessary reciprocity of translation. In this, From Language to Language is less a guide to the ethics of postcolonial interaction, and more an ode and an appraisement of translation’s generosity, compassion, and grace—which in fact forces us to first acknowledge, then see beyond our limits. When we dehumanize ourselves by devaluing or reducing one another, it is our most human invention—language—that urges us back towards coexistence, that opens the door of our little rooms and ushers us back into our common world.

2

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev by Maxim Gorky, translated from the Russian by Bryan Karetnyk, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The earliest complete edition of Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev first appeared in English in 1934; now, in Bryan Karetnyk’s sensitive new translation, Gorky’s sketches of his tumultuous friendships with these three titans of Russian literature have once again come alive with a scintillating play of memory and imagination, tenderness and criticism.

In these anecdotal portraits, born of meticulous observation and sympathetic reflection, Gorky defies the self-enclosed perspective that Leo Tolstoy saw in him, having groused: “This is why [your stories] have no characters.” On the contrary, these novelistic descriptions fortify real-life specifics into the aura of fictional characters, and Karetnyk’s translation renders Gorky’s keen attunement with graceful clarity; in Anton Chekhov’s “sad and gentle smile,” for instance, “. . . you could feel the subtle scepticism of a man who knew the value of words, the value of dreams.” Among their wide-ranging meanderings, the writers’ musings on aspects of the literary life—story ideas, interactions with fans, stylistic choices, words like “wishy-washy”—are particularly fascinating.

Not only do the three men themselves get under the skin of Gorky’s writing, so also does their work, causing shifts in perspective that inspire stylistic transpositions and modulations on all levels of his prose. In a montage of carefully numbered notes, he recalls Tolstoy as godlike and diminutive, lofty and earthy—as if the great author had personified one of his own larger-than-life, paradoxically intimate novels. Chekhov, in contrast, Gorky remembers with affectionate vignettes which, complete with rural schoolteachers and other Chekhovian characters, protest the “banal,” ubiquitous, socially accepted forms of violence that Chekhov lamented throughout his life. Turning to the morbidly flamboyant Leonid Andreev, Gorky’s concise formulations suddenly give way to a prolix digression on lying down between train tracks, reminiscent of Andreev’s gruesome sensationalism.

In this edition, J.M. Coetzee provides a valuable introduction to Gorky’s life and work, describing how, as a student of Tolstoy, admirer of Chekhov, and mentor to Andreev, Gorky rocketed to worldwide fame with his novel Mother. He was imprisoned for anti-monarchist activity but, horrified by the violence of the October 1917 Revolution, was eventually sidelined by Lenin. So deep was Gorky’s faith in communist ideals, however, that he allowed himself to be taken in by Stalin’s flattery, ascending to the greatest heights of the Soviet nomenklatura and publicly endorsing the gulags to preserve his lucrative reputation. Yet, throughout his life, he used his considerable influence and resources to support writers who faced persecution and starvation under the repressive regime. Reminiscences reasserts the value of what Gorky is best known for today: his remarkable ability to relate to someone with generosity, vivacity, and precision.

3

Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2025

Review by Regan Mies

“Do you remember the sound of my voice inside my head?” Aline asks the part of herself sitting across the table. “What does I mean when you say it?”

In Jacqueline Harpman’s Orlanda, the 35-year-old university lecturer has long been uninspired, worn down, forlorn for what seems like forever—or at least since she was twelve, when her mother began demanding the modesty and restraint of young womanhood. Then one day, everything changes in an instant: Aline is reading Woolf’s Orlando when she spots a young man at a train station café. Inexplicably, a part of herself, of her soul, zeroes in on him, departs from her body, and occupies his. As she invades, Aline senses only a tremor, a strange sorrow that matches her melancholy stasis, the “perpetual feeling of emptiness” she’s never been able to shake. The body-hopping part of her, which our narrator christens Orlanda, revels in her—his—new form. The consciousness of twenty-year-old music journalist Lucien Lèfrene has put up no resistance whatsoever.

What follow, in Ros Schwartz’s lively translation, are Orlanda’s ecstatic exploits with men; his gradual unearthing and worming out of the responsibilities of Lucien’s former life; and eventually, his trickster’s impulse to confront the repressed Aline and shock her with his intimate knowledge of her life and desires. He is, somehow, that buoyant, unrestrained, twelve-year-old part of her, become flesh.

Having first published Orlanda in 1996, Harpman is best known for the enormously successful I Who Have Never Known Men, a dystopic story of thirty-nine women and one girl who find themselves trapped in a bunker without explanation. Its main character is a singular girl in this makeshift society of women, facing a coming-of-age within the rigid confines of their prison, and through her, the author poses the question: What could it mean to transform from girl into woman in a world without freedom or possibility? In Orlanda, too, Harpman lingers in the territory of puberty and adolescence through Aline, who feels trapped by her mother’s expectation of charm and femininity and stifled by her mother’s insistence that energy, anger, and vigor has no place in a woman’s life. But where I Who Have Never Known Men never strays from its weighty solemnity, Orlanda shows Harpman at her wittiest and most delightful. The narrator—presumably a fourth wall-breaking stand-in for the author—frequently exclaims in surprise when her characters act unexpectedly, and on every page, the sheer pleasure Harpman seems to derive from exploration and imagination is clear, though the gravity of her characters’ very real dilemmas never seems to fall far out of reach.

After Aline and Orlanda first meet, a cosmic magnetism pulls them back to one another time and time again. Together, they’re relaxed and confident; they give each other strength. Orlanda brings out in Aline abilities she no longer realized she possessed, whether an unabashed attraction to her longtime partner or the ability to confront an obnoxious dinner party host. How would your ego and id interact were they distinct entities? Who might have the upper hand? Aline and Orlanda’s clashes and codependences help pave Harpman’s way toward an answer: What could we learn from ourselves, about ourselves, when confronted head-on by ourselves?

4

At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality by Andrea Pinotti, translated from the Italian by John Eaglesham, Zone Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

“Imagination has turned into hallucination,” the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once warned, in response to our collective hypnosis after the advent of the image: “They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens. Instead of representing the world, they obscure it. . .” It’s a familiar line of thought within the study of image consciousness, for as long as there has been representation, there has been the struggle to track the real and the facsimile—where they separate, where they congregate, and to what extent they denigrate and draw from one another. Now that technological innovation is coming in a deluge to redefine magic, to create surfaces anew, to induce vision and sensation, and to readdress our bodies’ sensual functions, the same question of demarcations is growing alongside the innovations. It is into this dialogue that Andrea Pinotti arrives with his fascinating and rangy At the Threshold of the Image, which advocates for neither admission nor insulation against the invasion of image, but simply—as the title states—addresses our enduring romance with the boundary, and how it underscores our resistance to physical limits.

Narcissus falls in love with his reflection, Alice plunges into Wonderland, Galatea’s marble body begins to move, a viewer attempts to swat away a fly painted onto a canvas, the near-opaque figure of Tupac Shakur sways in front of an audience of thousands, Brecht knocks down the fourth wall, Wan Hu-Chen writes himself into a book in order to be with its protagonist, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome constructs the television screen as a passage. . . These are but a few of the samples, references, artworks, productions, and narratives that Pinotti draws on throughout his treatment of the threshold between representation and reality, forming the conceptualization of this in-between space as an “in/out dialectic” that incites both our desire to become a part of the image, and to have the image come to life. As he illustrates with encyclopaedic knowledge, images represent doorways of imaginary proportions, and we’ve never been able to resist tapping on a door.

Still, now that this door is no longer an unopenable photograph, cinema, text, painting, or dream, and has morphed with digital largesse into something that can truly be considered “an osmotic membrane,” Pinotti is attempting to diffuse this semi-traumatic evolutionary jump by mapping out the aesthetic and phenomenological lineage of humans skipping back and forth across the threshold. It is a yearning that stems from the very first mirror-reflection, he surmises—from the very first acknowledgement that what one sees looking back is not only an image, but an extension of the self. As such, this is not a text that presumes any judgment or prescription for the increasingly morally complex presence of growingly convincing un-realities, but one that positions this pursuit of immersion within the history of human consciousness.

Because the instinct and fantasy of entering the image is a possessive one—and possession is so human. We are creatures covetous of experience, and the more we are aware of our own experiential limits, the more we seek to surpass them. It is our appetite for feeling, for navigating, for discovery, and for conquest that leads us not only to create works of unreality—which expand and multiply our reality—but also to long for the real potentials of those unrealities. History evinces that standing at a threshold never means turning back, it means forging on. Even if, as Pinotti so artfully and expertly illustrates, we have to invent somewhere to go.

5

Castigation by Sultan Raev, translated from the Kyrgyz by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Syracuse University Press, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

In Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s virtuosic translation, Sultan Raev’s novel Castigation displays an astounding variety of tones and forms. The translator’s note advises readers to “give up all attempts to fit this tale into any frame,” and indeed, within the text you’ll find poems, lists, digressive footnotes, vengeful snakes, Soviet punitive psychiatry, extensive quotations from Shakespeare and Şayloobek Düyşeev, and references to several of the world’s religions. Rich with polyphony and plethoric subtexts, Castigation rewards careful reading—and rereading.

From the beginning, Raev employs doppelgängers and recurring images to agitate the vortex of uncertainty in which his characters—seven psychiatric patients trudging through a desert to the Holy Land—find themselves. Is the desert a post-apocalyptic world? Or is it “The Seven” who are lost between death and reincarnation? Does the Holy Land even exist? The disorientation becomes thoroughly terrifying as the characters’ historical namesakes, including Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, invade their dreams and undermine their sense of self, and their relationships are complicated by mistaken identities and past traumas.

Denominated “a new Kyrgyz epic” on its cover, Raev’s novel has earned a place among the monumental thousand-year-old songs that inaugurated Kyrgyzstan’s indigenous literary traditions. Balladic rhythms and refrains suffuse the prose along with soothsayers and gods of epic poetry, but Raev’s story overturns the tradition of celebrating bloody military exploits; instead, he amplifies the voices of victims—women, the mentally ill, exploited animals, children . . .

The bitterness of the vulnerable betrayed by the powerful pervades the novel’s sense of history and The Seven’s coerced expulsion from their world. Kyrgyzstan was formed when the Soviet government took it upon itself to decide what being Kyrgyz meant and where to put people who seemed to fit the official description. In return for being basically exiled to a reservation, the indigenous nomads were promised advantages which Stalin later retracted, allowing poverty to overrun the Kyrgyz peoples.

Raev critically juxtaposes such imperialist violence with domestic abuse, political repression, and ecological destruction. The desert is partly a figure for an exhausted Earth suffering from deforestation and post-extractivist climate change, and in chastising humanity’s exceptionalist illusions, the curses that rain down upon Castigation’s conquerors are reminiscent of Kojojash, a traditional Kyrgyz epic in which a hunter is cursed by a mountain goat after driving her kin almost to extinction. “You’re not the pillar of the World!” an elderly woman screams at Alexander the Great. “All the living beings on Earth were not born to feed your belly!”

6

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander

For readers already familiar with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s rich literary imagination, her patchwork novel House of Day, House of Night will seem like a homecoming of sorts. Set in the author’s adopted home of Krajanów, the stories return to her familiar themes: feminism, spirituality, astrology, the more-than-human world, and a mysticism rooted in the rich humus of the everyday.

Krajanów is part of the region of Silesia, annexed by the Prussians in the eighteenth century and slowly Germanized until it was returned to the Poles after the Second World War in a land swap. Tokarczuk addresses this porousness of borders and the trauma of relocation in House of Day, House of Night, which could not be more rooted in place and its shifting nature. In a scene loaded with tragic irony and sly humor, a relocated German returns to his village with his wife to see the town he grew up in, only to die on a hill, unwrapping a chocolate bar he would never eat, as his wife waits in the car below. What follows is an administrative tug of war as Czech and Polish guards discover the body and shove it repeatedly across the border to avoid claiming responsibility. The foxes, for their part, crisscross the frontier with impunity.

The cast of characters are the town’s residents—the intrigue of their foibles and follies, the adventures of their lives. The narrator is a writer who has recently moved in, and one of her closest friends is an older woman and wigmaker, Marta, who is both the guardian of the town’s memory and a reminder of human time’s fleeting nature. As they listen to Anna Karenina together on the radio, the narrator muses about her friend: “I sometimes wonder if she can understand these stories made up of dialogue read out by a single voice, and I think maybe she’s only listening to individual words, to the melody of the language.” In the next sentence, she hints that Marta may be becoming senile. The human tendency towards meaning becomes lost in music, and memory, and—like life—fades out and on.

But for those of us still able to distinguish words and make meaning out of sentences, House of Day, House of Night is a joyous read for the deep empathy and consideration Tokarczuk has for her characters. In this reissue of Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s luminous 2003 translation—which brought Tokarczuk’s work into English for the first time—readers will find deep insights into the origins of Tokarczuk’s fiction, which lie in the genius loci of Krajanów.

7

The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi, Dorothy Project, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander

Laura Vazquez’s The Endless Week begins with a promise of sorts—a biblical epigraph hinting that the following pages contain knowledge of the face of God: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; / then we shall see face to face. / Now I know in part; / then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” But as much as the novel is a meditation on both the divine and the human, it is also a reflection on the omnipresence of images on social networks and the way they mirror and refract our reality.

Salim, the young hero of the The Endless Week, is a poet who posts his work online and lives at a remove from the world. He has stopped attending school after a classmate had his eye gouged out, disturbed by the collective non-response of the administration; instead, he learns about life outside his doors through the internet, speaking to his followers and messaging his friend Jonathan, whom he eventually meets in “real life.” Sharing this isolated existence is his sister Sarah, their father, and their dying grandmother. Vazquez threads all these various elements to form a plot that involves Salim and Sarah’s search for their lost mother, who is a potential blood donor for their grandmother. This leads to a departure from their insulated life to confront the flesh-and-blood incarnations of existence, which show up in a motley cohort of the homeless, drunk, and disenfranchised. Yet, despite The Endless Week’s novelistic appearances, it is at its core an exceptional work of poetry.

Vazquez aligns herself with a mystic tradition that observes the world with a detached, almost clinical view of events as they occur. Operating on the level of koan, a concise paradoxical wisdom similar to that of verse, Vazquez extends both aesthetics to deploy them in prose. The result is a mediatization of images that reflect and refract on the fragile, slippery nature of existence and its essential nature. In one scene, Salim he becomes conscious that he is a collection of images (thoughts) while engrossed in his phone:

He wondered how many images were engraved in his mind like that, how many ads, how many words, shapes, songs, smells, scenes, faces, how many thousands of clips lived like that in his mind, and how many more would get in without him realizing. He wondered if the scenes in his mind belonged to his mind or if they belonged to the world. Was he made of this combination of images and memories, some abstract, some clearer, in his mind? Did his memories make him, or did he make his memories? He locked his phone, he shuddered once.

For Vazquez, the world itself begins in words that come from a distant voice, whispering us into being. In a world of deepfakes, The Endless Week reminds us that reality is pure fiction and that we co-author our existence with a cohort of other agencies, suggesting that each one of these others is a face and facet of God.

8

The Investigator by Dragan Velikić, translated from the Serbian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić, Istros Books, 2025

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

How does the past manifest in us to shape our sense of possible futures? Celebrated Serbian writer Dragan Velikić confronts this question with quiet torment in The Investigator, his second novel to be translated into English.

Dragan Velikić, a fictional narrator who shares his author’s name, suffers a paralytic tremor of the soul when his mother dies in Belgrade, upon which his recollections of her become entangled in his terror of losing his memory to Alzheimer’s. He recalls her domineering passion for order and detail; over and over she had poured over old photographs, “obsessed with wanting to have the full wealth of her experience at her disposal at every moment. That was why she had to keep remembering the life she had lived and vigilantly reign over its vast territory.” Here is a suggestion that time can be ruled—and that the ruler may select their life experiences from the offerings available within the territory’s borders. “The world was like a catalogue,” says Velikić of his strictly organized childhood. In his mother’s eyes, anything in the catalogue, any past or present detail, could be read as a “warning sign” for the future. This is the logic of genetics as well as superstition: using past circumstances to explain the present and anticipate the future. But even as he notices his mother’s inclinations surfacing in himself, Velikić finds them stifling.

Is it madness to seek order in a life consisting of unfinished stories—especially considering how easily events may be forgotten, families lost, borders redrawn? Velikić’s grappling with bereavements, memory lapses, and aborted projects is part of his struggle to exist in a place that should be home but offers none of home’s comforts or stability; in violent ethnic conflicts, his native Pula becomes Italy one minute, Yugoslavia the next, and ultimately Croatia. When Yugoslavia’s disintegration renders Pula unsafe for Serbs, dispossession and relocation to Belgrade catalyze the fatal decline of Velikić’s parents.

Christina Pribichevich-Zorić’s beautiful translation of Velikić’s muted conflicts insists on a slow read; his ruminative plot appears to leave no loose ends while in fact creating sheaves of them. As the novel progresses, it becomes difficult to distinguish actual events from what the narrator merely imagines, and the reader may find herself unable to trust her memory of what she has read—or sometimes not wanting to trust it, when Velikić re-envisions a previously remembered episode in a richer imaginary. With uncertainty pathing the text, The Investigator’s greatest revelation may indeed be the creative promise latent in the truth’s vulnerability.

9

Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, translated from the Persian-Dari, Two Lines Press, 2025

Review by Liliana Torpey

Ideally, anthologies would act contrary to our expectations, shining brightest when they complicate what might be simplified, and introducing plurality over a flattening unity. This is certainly the case in Hair on Fire: Afghan Women Poets, the broad parameters of which shelter other, more specific descriptors: clandestine, diasporic, exilic, activist, academic, feminist, feminine. In her introduction, Aria Aber states that Afghan poetry is one “of fragmentation, multiethnic positionalities and languages, and geographic variation.” The five poets featured here, writing in Persian and brought into English by eight translators, deliver a variation in poetics that will surely offer any reader of poetry a place to land.

I was particularly taken by Maral Taheri’s poems, which writhe and dance like a ball of worms (figures that feature prominently in her verses). “I need to spit to one side / and send kisses to the other / then come back and fill out my crosswords / I would never admit that the world has no meaning,” writes Taheri in Hajar Hussaini’s muscular translation. Here, love and irreverence wrestle and embrace amidst existentialist chaos and material violence.

Mahbouba Ibrahimi’s poems, on the other hand, elicit feelings of longing, a troubled introspection: “Mournful, enraged, / these days / poetry / can’t work its poetry.” Meanwhile, Mariam Meetra’s work throws a gut punch of tenderness and despair: “and plant a tree in the middle of the room / so the explosions can’t shake it / the blood stench can’t smother it.”

Some poems are unyielding in their act of witnessing war, terror, and stolen childhoods, as in Karima Shabrang’s lines: “Of all things silent I am afraid, / of a silent God / who dwells where the hands of orphans can’t reach.” Others grasp with determination toward freedom: “If you have no legs, leap into the dark . . . By any path that can lead away from this prison / you have to escape,” writes Nadia Anjuman.

In focusing only on five poets, Hair on Fire brings their stature into focus, recognizing these writers’ place in a global, feminist canon. You could never make me believe that poetry has no meaningful effect—not when collections like this exist.

10

You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine, edited and translated from the Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, Copper Canyon Press, 2025

Review by Christopher Alexander 

You Must Live, New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza. In one of the early poems of the collection, Waleed al-Aqqad addresses this mutilated body politic and the collective mourning of its citizens in “I have never seen a corpse intact”:

I have never seen a corpse intact
but I recognize each of them
every one of them, each victim.
Even those fingers, I know whose they are.

For the most part, the collected works are written in an experimental vein of modernist Arabic poetry inaugurated by Mahmoud Darwish, which—while resolutely contemporary—is rooted in classical traditions. In their introduction, editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Boor address some of the difficulties of bringing this form of verse into contemporary English, particularly given the prevalence of poetic devices in everyday speech and the common motif of personification that speaks to a pre-Islamic, animist view of the universe.

One example of this intersection between past and present aesthetics can be found in the queer politics of Nema’a Hassan’s “How to build a pub in a country prohibited from love.” Arabic verse has a long tradition of odes to young boys and a running theme of liberation through excess and drinking, both of which existed alongside strict conservative mores. In referencing not only the repressive force of the Israeli army but also the theocratic rule of Hamas, Hassan demonstrates the possible subversions:

To my neighbor whose window I peep through each night,
urged by the tight dress I love to wear,
I smile and feed
naughty children syruped pies.

For the poets included in this volume, simply submitting their work was an act of courage, as each message sent to the outside world initiated them as potential targets—and still does. The process of translation and editing also put them at risk, shining a beacon each time they connected to a cell tower or satellite; to hone their language, they put their lives on the line. Still, as the authors of this volume remind us again and again, simply living in Palestine is deadly, and the depths of the tragedy must be heard and understood for it to stop. To imagine such a future, certain poems in this volume also conjure up an end to the war, such as in Khaled Juma’s “When the Soldiers Leave this Place”:

When the soldiers leave this place,
I’m going out to buy a few millimeters of air
and try, if I can, to sing you
to sleep.

. . .

When the soldiers leave this place
don’t mess with what remains of the story.
They know—they only know
what is only known to them.

The story is not over, and this collection grants its readers access to the knowledge and experiences of those living on the ground: the bonds of family and kinship, the intimate awareness of death, the devastating impacts of genocide, and the will to go on living.


 

Christopher Alexander is a poet, performer and multidisciplinary artist. S he is currently engaged in a long-term investigation on interspecies communication and the performance of nature in the Mediterranean. Together with the visual artist and researcher Alexia Antuoferomo, they co-founded the collective of artists and researchers, Tramages. Heir texts and translations have been published in Asymptote, Belleville Park Pages, Pamenar Press Online Magazine, parentheses, Point de chute, FORTH Magazine, Fragile Revue de Créationsremue.net, and Transat’, among other publications. Heir work has been exhibited at 59 Rivoli, La Générale Nord-Est, Mémoire de l’avenir, and the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Heir first poetry collection, play-boy, explores the seepage of toxic masculinity into contemporary gender norms and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition with Le Nouvel Attila in 2026.

Regan Mies is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in the LA Review of BooksCleveland Review of BooksNecessary Fiction, and elsewhere. 

Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, editor, and translator.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong writes experimental fiction, essays, and poetry. Her books include The Box and Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl, both published by Graywolf Press.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

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…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

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.

images

 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…

Gestures of the Light, Shadow of Things: Kayvan Tahmasebian on Persian Poetry and Activist Translation

Why should we accept the universal validity of the categories that the West creates for self-description?

Born and raised in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, Dr. Kayvan Tahmasebian is a writer and scholar whose work examines Persian literature’s place in the constellations of what is labeled as ‘world literatures’, and a poet and translator working on Persian, English, and French. Dr. Tahmasebian’s co-translation of House Arrest (with Rebecca Ruth Gould, Arc Publications, 2022) by Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh was recently shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, and he has translated and studied Persian-language texts from ancient Persian astrology and dream writing to contemporary Iranian modernist poetry.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Tahmasebian on his translations from the Persianate literary world, both modern and from antiquity, as well as the potential expansion of activism through translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): First of all, congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation for co-translating Hasan Alizadeh’s avant-garde House Arrest (Arc Publications, 2022). You also worked with Rebecca Ruth Gould on your translation of High Tide of the Eyes (2019) by Bijan Elahi, one of the figureheads of Iranian modernist literature. Could you tell us the experience of translating both Alizadeh and Elahi?

Kayvan Tahmasebian (KT): Bijan Elahi is a highly experimental poet and translator in modern Persian poetry. He moves through different language registers—formal, colloquial, archaic, even obsolete ones. He’s also a difficult poet. His poetry is intricate and can be quite challenging in its images and structures. For me, translating Elahi was an exercise in trying to grasp his poetic fluidity. And by ‘grasp,’ I mean something similar to what a photographer does when capturing a fleeting moment—seizing something that’s just passing by. The tough part was that his language is so volatile, and the perspectives he offers on his subjects can be so intuitive, that they sometimes clash with English poetry, which tends to be more discursive and analytical.

Hasan Alizadeh is almost the opposite of Elahi in many ways. It is the simple, the everyday, that speaks through his poetry. But that simplicity is deceptive. It’s a mask that hides the real delicacy of his poems. What I really admire about Alizadeh is how he uncovers the subtleties of spoken Persian, the little hidden dramas that play out in the unnoticed corners of everyday conversations. Translating his poems was about getting in touch with that extraordinary intimacy in his language. I actually had the chance to meet Mr. Alizadeh in Tehran in 2023, and it was fascinating. The way he recited his own poems, the way he seemed almost surprised by the stories his poems tell—about chance encounters, moments of forgetfulness, or the magical appeal of everyday objects—was fantastic.  READ MORE…

Vision, Capacity, and Patience: Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Part II

Kazakhstani [authors] are . . . trying to decide what story to tell the world about themselves.

In part one of this interview, translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega spoke to Willem Marx regarding the complex, genre-traversing works of Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, whose dramatic work, “Trinity,” was featured in our Spring 2024 issue. Today, we continue the conversation with an extended discussion of Central Asian literature—including the collection Amanat, a pioneering compilation of contemporary Kazakh women’s writing, edited by Fairweather-Vega and author Zaure Batayeva; the importance of raising women’s voices; shaking off old Soviet literary hierarchies; the complexities of working from pivot languages; and the links between colonialism and ecological disaster in Central Asia.

Sarah Gear (SG): You translate from Russian and Uzbek, and also work from Kazakh. How did you come to learn these languages, and what have the main challenges been?  

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): That’s right, and in the past year, I’ve made it through a Kyrgyz book, as well as an Uzbek text that includes Turkmen and Tajik—so my collection of major Central Asian languages is now pretty much complete. I know Russian very well, having studied it and worked in it for the longest by far, and having lived and worked in Russia for two years. I often tell people that I began learning Uzbek to pay my way through graduate school, which is the truth: fellowships for Uzbek paid for an intensive summer course and the last year of my master’s degree. Of course, I didn’t do it just for the money; I was studying the politics and recent history of the region, and had the sense that only knowing Russian would give me an incomplete picture of Central Asian society, not to mention its literature. When I began translating more work from Kazakhstan, I signed up for another intensive summer course, this time for Kazakh. The grammar and a lot of the vocabulary was very familiar to me from Uzbek, and now I’ve got a big Turkic section of my brain where Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz words all jumble together. This means I can’t speak or write very well in any of those languages, but reading and translating them works out quite well, if I’m careful—and I try to be careful.

SG: You worked with Kazakh author and translator Zaure Batayeva on Amanat, a collection of Kazakh women’s fiction published in 2022.  Why did you decide to focus on contemporary women’s writing?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The House of the Edrisis by Ghazeleh Alizadeh

Occasionally, outside the windowpane, she saw an apparition of her dead husband in a cotton summer suit . . .

This Translation Tuesday we present an excerpt from celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh’s The House of the Edrisis, a novel about the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries. Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh’s story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.

The emergence of chaos is not sudden in any house; a soft dust settles in the cracks of the wood, the folds of the sheets, the seams of the windows, and the pleats of the curtains, waiting for a breeze to find its way into the house through an open door, and release the components of dispersion from their place of entrapment.

In the house of the Edrisis, life went on as usual. The wall clock with its engraved frame and its top covered with the images of birds and flowers, the work of Bukhara turners, struck ten times.

Leqa looked at her wristwatch, adjusted it forward, and got up from the breakfast table. She swept up the breadcrumbs to feed the fish.

Vahab, the young man of the family, took the last sip of tea from a lapis lazuli–colored Sèvres cup, swallowed his yawn, and turned toward Mrs. Edrisi. “He feels better today.”

The elderly lady shifted her glasses on her nose; her eyes behind the glasses were a cloudy blue. “Nothing that he does is clear.”

The fog came halfway down the arched windows, rubbed against the windowpanes, spun, and went toward the pine and spruce trees. From the end of the entrance hall came the sound of the washing of dishes, the opening of the faucet, and the bubbling of the samovar. In the kitchen, Yavar, occasionally coughing, dragged his feet when he walked. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Mexico and the Philippines!

This week, our editors-at-large share reflections on prose from Mexico and an event on women in translation in New York. From the wise words of a beloved centenarian writer to a reading celebrating ‘minority’ languages, read on to find out more!

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico

“Prose is everything,” said Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale with cheeky irony. “I have a so-so relationship with poetry, but prose… it presents more challenges to me. Poetry is a matter of rhythm, of good or bad taste. But prose… prose is everything.”

Last year, Vitale reached the modest age of 100, and last week, with unparalleled lucidity, she inaugurated the Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y los Universitarios (Filuni), a book fair organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for students, academics, publishers, and writers. READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2024

A deeper look into our Summer 2024 issue!

With so many wonderful pieces in the Summer 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

We loved Eduardo Galeano when he spoke of “the infinite and invisible altars of our Latin America”, but perhaps we paid not enough attention when he called reality “. . . life that sings with multiple voices”. Despite the efforts of many historians and writers in establishing the distinctions and singular complexities of Latin American countries, outsiders tend to cohere the regions in a syncretic whole, held by the commonalities of language, Iberian colonialism, and modals of development. The term “Latin America” originated with the Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, who sought to contrast Europe and the Americas as past and future, instating a rhetoric in which the archaisms of the former could be overturned by the luminous visions of the latter: “. . . reason against religion, hope against tradition, union against isolation. . . the logic of sovereignty against oligarchic constitutions”. This summation of continents may have served him when the routes of imperialism carved the globe up into the Old World and the New World, but we’ve no use for such simplistic declarations today.

In “neozone”, the Chilean writer Juan Carreño is on the road. In a diaristic frenzy, this excerpt translated by Maya Feile Tomes moves from Mexico’s San Cristóbal to the city of Comitán, then past the Guatemala border with a stop at the capital, before urging its way towards the Nicaraguan capital of Managua (“crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific”). All the while the writer’s mind is running faster than the speed of any car or bus, threading in memories and markers across this immensely varied continent in the electric instantaneity of mobility, when every new encounter sends itself hurtling across the mind, awakening memories, desires, references, the middles of anecdotes, connecting itself to the great shifting web of a body amongst. Yet, even as the sights, the people, the landscape are playing their own pinball game within the ratting corridors of Carreño’s journals, the stark insider-outsider paradigm finds plenty of iterations in movements and border-crossings, illumed within the subtle details of social code—“I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion”—that characterises the Chilean against the Guatemalan, the Mexican, the Nicaraguan. Regionalisms, habits, and assumptions abound, and the people who offer their company or a splinter of their story are as open as they are fleeting, honest in a way that is only possible without surnames. Holding to the shared language that occasionally sizzles with the separateness of nationalities, they share opinions, invitations, songs, insights. There’s something familiar, profound in this incidental intersection of the passing-through, when finding oneself in a different country and suddenly given the position of ambassador, as if a person is a miniaturised model of a nation. And when you tell them about where you came, you give the truth as only you could, and the country glows a little in response, in that stranger’s mind, and another house is built on the phantasmagorical, long accumulated, imagined atlas of the world—that which makes the maps seem paltry in comparison. READ MORE…

Our Summer 2024 Edition Has Landed!

Featuring Georgi Gospodinov, Patrick Autréaux, Ali Wajeeh, and Brigitte Giraud in a Special Feature themed on collectives

What stops a cancer from killing its host? What might have prevented a grandmother from dying in a refugee camp? What allows a Deliveroo rider to keep his dignity through itinerant gig-work? Perhaps it’s care: “the connections we have with others and the everyday actions we engage in for each other” (Micaela Brinsley). Care is a vital #lifesupport—a necessity up there with shelter and air. The problem is that it’s scarce, as attested to by our brand-new Summer edition spanning 35 countries and featuring an exclusive interview with 2023 Booker International Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s debut in English, as well as new translations of Paul Éluard and Hamid Ismailov. In settings that take us from hospital to hospital and even one assisted suicide facility, few find it, while others seek it with increasing desperation. Patrick Autréaux’s exquisite memoir of chemotherapy, for example, describes cancer as a “cold octopus . . . groping at me as though I were some bizarre object . . . embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.” In Inga Iwasiów’s startling novel, on the other hand, the dead moon jellyfish forming a “gelatinous strip between the water and the land” becomes a buffer between the cancer-stricken narrator and intentional death (which in Pooya Monshizadeh’s devastating Red Meadow is canceled without even a refund). Against absolute loss, Honora Spicer, in this issue’s poignant Brave New World Literature entry, opened the very text that she had requested to translate one week after her grandmother died—to the wide field of “se fue.”


The hospital is also the setting for fifty percent of this issue’s Criticism section. While Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom paints a portrait of intimate life at a psychiatric hospital, Vanessa Springora’s Consent begins with a teenager being hospitalized for rheumatism, only to receive not one but two additional diagnoses during her stay. Though it’s the second of these (by a predatory gynecologist) that sets off a nationwide scandal with legal consequences, the first diagnosis very much deserves pause as well: according to the psychologist who sees her, our protagonist is “disengaged from her peers . . . isolated and vulnerable”; she struggles to “join” with others in society. This malaise is directly echoed in the trio of pieces (from SwitzerlandDenmark, and South Korea) heading off the entire issue. All three are heart-wrenching portraits of alienation that speak to the current epidemic of loneliness.

If this edition or in fact any issue of this magazine has alleviated your loneliness, I hope you’ll take just three minutes to sign up as a sustaining or masthead member. Subscribing to our Book Club is a great way to take your support for world literature to the next level. If you’re interested in joining our team, good news: In addition to social media managers and marketing managers to join us on the frontlines of a more inclusive world literature, we’re inviting talented illustrators to come onboard as our guest artistssend us a link to your portfolio if you might be interested!

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What’s New in Translation: July 2024

New publications from Chile and Iran!

This month, we introduce two extraordinary novels erecting vivid, immersive narratives upon the intricate sociopolitical histories of their respective nations. From Chile, Carlos Labbé builds an intricate match of class warfare and collective action against the backdrop of professional soccer; and from Iran, Ghazi Rabihavi tells the tragic story of two queer lovers as they navigate the repressions and tumults of pre- and post-Revolution Iran.  

the murmuration

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, Open Letter, 2024

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration begins like a monologue from The Twilight Zone: a robust voice draws you aboard the night train from Temuco to Santiago, and a conspiracy of uncertainty and intrigue quickly follows. Cigarettes smolder, nail polish glistens, and a retired sports commentator’s hot cup of matico tea steams into the noir-film night. Suddenly, you find yourself hurtling through the darkness on Schrödinger’s train, where a director of the Chilean national soccer team may or may not be asleep in her first-class train car—or perhaps she is in the dining car, having a drink with the sports commentator. Furtive eyes dart about, noting every detail, but Labbé’s experimental style calls reality itself into question, letting linguistic artistry lead the way in an investigation of Chilean identity, representation, and collective memory. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Triangle with Four Sides” by Nasim Vahabi

The line is the rebellious child of two insignificant points that came into existence because of one movement of a pen.

This Translation Tuesday, we present new hybrid, experimental fiction from Iranian author Nasim Vahabi whose debut novel in French  Je ne suis pas un roman (I am not a novel; Tropismes, 2022) was released to critical acclaim. Abstract in a generative way, A Triangle with Four Sides cleverly interrogates the notion of resistance. In each of the four angles that mirror and complement one another, we find a progression to expose and reconcile the many absurdities in everyday life and a wry attempt to rise above micro-oppressions. This is a well crafted puzzle of a piece that will definitely linger in the mind. Read on!

Geometry is more than a mathematical concept. It is the art of observation and comparison.

For example, the line—alone, single, and aimless—has geometry wrapped around its finger. It gets along with any shape. The line is the circle’s entire existence. Sometimes smooth or curvy, straight or zigzagged, sometimes boring and stretched out into eternity, other times stupidly coiled like a snake or long and high maintenance, and sometimes, like a hyphen, humble and content with its small lot in life.

The line is its own boss. When it wills, it folds over, straightens up, creates a sharp edge, or lies parallel with itself, but if it lies parallel with another line, it is liberation and generosity.However, once it decides to stretch even longer, its determination gets on your nerves. It seems something must interfere to save the line from itself. Perhaps self-replication? Or breaking into parts to create an independent entity such as a triangle—the perfect form, an archetype of stability. The square has always been envious of the triangle’s fortified flexibility. With three sides equal in length, whenever it wills, with a delicate, subtle movement, it could demonstrate equilaterality. But the square is heavy. Its movements are coarse. And yet, all it needs is to look at the rectangle or trapezoid to realize it could be worse: cumbersome and uneven. It could always be worse. The rectangle is the master of optimism. Rectangle considers itself the best of all shapes. Hates others and takes pride in having four sides staring at each other. Fanatic and self-absorbed, it only socializes with the rhombus, which is always uncomfortable and self-loathing. The rhombus is the shiest with the least confidence among all shapes: an unlucky rectangle.

The line would have never imagined having such offspring. The line is the rebellious child of two insignificant points that came into existence because of one movement of a pen. No one would ever know if that single movement was intentional or accidental. Right from the start, the point knew the line would not be satisfied with having a simple destiny as, let’s say, an em dash. The points knew the line’s ambition would make all the other points proud one day. Yes, the point—despite its insignificance—was aware of all these.

The geometry family, like all families, has its own untold stories. Geometry is life’s summary despite all its good or bad surprises.

I call my story triangle in honor of geometry, and I know that all it takes for my story to fall apart and turn into a coarse, inflexible square is one broken angle.