Language: Portuguese

Translation Tuesday: “The Stops” by Artur Azevedo

A comedic piece about a missed connection by a 19th-century Brazilian master

Norberto, who at first enthusiastically accepted the stops the streetcars made in Botafogo, is now their greatest opponent. Do you want to know why? I will tell you:

One night, at the Expo, the poor young man met the most beautiful and fascinating woman his eyes had ever beheld, and this woman—oh, joy!…oh, fortune!…—this woman smiled gently at him, and with a sweet look she invited him to accompany her.

Norberto did not wait for the invitation to be repeated: he accompanied her.

She stepped into the Avenue of the Pavilions, made her way to the entrance, and went out as if she were going to take the streetcar; he followed her, but there were so many people leaving that he lost sight of her.

Desperate, he ran for the streetcars, some six or seven being ready to depart, and he climbed onto all the side-rails, searching in vain, with eyes peeled for the unknown beauty.

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The Festival that Won by Knockout

A dispatch from the Festival of the European Short Story in Zagreb and Šibenik, Croatia

Zagreb’s vibrant cultural scene was home to the Festival of the European Short Story last week: an appropriate end to what has certainly been a great season of culture, music, and activism in Croatia’s small (yet exciting!) capital.

This was the festival’s thirteenth year running, and the festival featured Brazil as its partner country. The festival was delightfully lively and action-packed, featuring not only readings and discussion panels, but also a charitable football game, an introduction to Brazilian fiction, a Portuguese translation workshop, and a cook-off (?). Some of the festival took place in Šibenik, a town on the Croatian coast (a sound decision, as the Croatian culture scene is becoming notoriously monocentric, with virtually all of the events and manifestations happening in Zagreb).

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Asymptote Spring 2014 Issue – Out Now!

…and it's packed with the most exciting new literary translations, critical pieces, and more from around the world.

What are you waiting for? Highlights from Asymptote’s Spring 2014 issue include new work by Nobel laureate Herta MüllerDavid Bellos (author of “Is that a Fish in Your Ear?”), and Prix Goncourt-winner Jonathan Littell. Plus, our annual English-language fiction feature spotlights Diasporic literature from Bosnia, China, India, Japan, and Singapore.

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“Delicacy,” by Maria Rita Kehl

Translated by Julia Sanches

If I were God and I existed, I would execute an act of administrative intervention on São Paulo. I would raze the whole city to the ground throughout the next decade: it stays just the way it is. Nothing else will be knocked down, nothing more will be built. Try to work on the city as it exists: monstrous, imbalanced, poorly planned and poorly maintained. If it’s a matter of moving money, invest in public spaces: in roads, squares, gardens, sidewalks, lighting, leisure centers, flood prevention—anything and everything that makes of what would otherwise be nothing but a heap of housing, something alike to that impressive human invention we call a city. Investing in urbanity also gives financial return. READ MORE…

Neustadt Prize Winner Mia Couto’s “Serpent’s Embrace”

2014 Neustadt Prize Winner Mia Couto

The latest winner of the Neustadt Prize, Mozambican writer Mia Couto, stands as one of the preeminent writers working in Portuguese today. Couto, 58, counts poems, short stories, novels, and essays among his output of 25 books. The Neustadt honor comes on the heels of the 2013 Prêmio Camões, awarded to Couto in May. Much as the Neustadt is often called the “American Nobel,” the Camões is likewise nicknamed the Portuguese-language Nobel.
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Weekly news round-up, 20th October 2013: Nobel Prize and awards-season special

The first of our weekly columns on literary news from around the world.

The big news of the week (naturally) was the launch of Asymptote‘s new Fall 2013 issue, and, alongside it, that of a new blog, which we very much hope you’re enjoying. For those of the Asymptote team who’ve worked on the quarterly journal, one of the more exciting things about the blog is the new-found ability to comment on events almost straight away. You’re reading the first of our weekly news round-ups, and the idea is to bring together (and perhaps even hold forth on) the most interesting literary news of the past week.

Stockholm. The problem with launching just over a week after the major literary news of the year – the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature – is that we feel compelled to report on it, even though, given the internet’s voracious 24-hour-news appetite, it’s really all a bit old-hat by now. Oh well. We hope your own appetites will stretch to a more international view on proceedings than you might have seen elsewhere. READ MORE…