Language: Quebecois French

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

May 5, 2025  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Daniel Yadin, Hilary Ilkay, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, Sauvryn Linn, and Sayani Sarkar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 9, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bridget Peak, Wambua Muindi, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Kenya, Canada, and Oman!

In this week of literary news, our editors on the ground are bringing stories of triumph, mourning, and commemoration. In Kenya and Ghana, readers mourn the loss of pioneering feminist author Ama Ata Aidoo; in Canada, a Quebec initiative supports readers in finding more books by Indigenous writers; and in Oman, a lauded author brings home the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

The end of May seemed to position itself as a direct communication to geo-literary production history; on May 27, a bilingual anthology of East African short stories, The Heart is A Bastard, launched at the Goethe Institut Library, Nairobi. Edited by Elias Mutani and Zukiswa Wanner, the collection is a result from the Kenyan writing workshop under the auspices of the Univerity of East Anglia International Chair in Creative Writing. The inaugural chair for Africa, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangaremba, expressed her delight over the launch, which includes stories in English and Swahili translations. Some of the emerging writers featured in the anthology include Gladwell Pamba—from whose story the anthology’s title is taken, Fatma Shafii, Nyasili Atwetwe of Writers Space Africa Kenya, Charlie Muhumuza, Noella Moshi, and Sia Chami. The anthology not only holds space for these writers but also represents the creative breadth of the region, while simultaneously embedding a language politics given its bilingual character.

However, this joy was dislodged by the unfortunate news of a writer’s death. On May 31, Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian author of Our Sister Killjoy (1977), a pioneering feminist novel, died at the age of 81. As such, Africa is mourning; Ghana is mourning and Kenya, too, is mourning the novelist, playwright, short story writer, and committed radical feminist, who wrote to assert the agency of African women within literary history. As reverential eulogies have been paraded across the world, the Kenyan literary community joined in the outpouring of grief in a country where her influence not only transcends her writing, but is also compounded by a teaching stint she had at the then named Kenyatta College, now Kenyatta University, as well as the literary contributions of her Kenyan-born daughter, Kinna Likimani. Where Austin Bukenya, a leading East African scholar of English and literature, for instance, dubbed her “Queen of African literature”, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the author of Nairobi Heat and son to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, sees her as a “pillar” without which “the African literary tradition wobbles”. While Joyce Nyairo, an academic and a cultural analyst, references the short story “Something To Talk About On The Way To The Funeral” as praise of her storytelling genius, Yvonne Owuor lamented, in proper proverbial fashion: “A great, and giant tree that sheltered many beings has fallen”. Moreover, her writings, which among others, include The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), No Sweetness Here (1969), Anowa (1970), and Changes (1991) cut across the genres to show the depth of her imaginative oeuvre and demonstrate the commitment—in different but related ways—to the African woman’s cause, through literature and in society. Rest in Power Mama. READ MORE…

Translating Le jour des corneilles: A Conversation with Alice Heathwood

May 24, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tyler Candelora

But I always try to play by the rules of the source text. It’s as if I can dance, but always to the music of the author.

Asymptote’s most recent Spring Issue includes an excerpt from Alice Heathwood’s translation of Jean-François Beauchemin’s idiosyncratic and playful Le jour des corneilles (translated as The Day of Crows). The novel plays with language and voice, creating a sense of whimsy that counterbalances the darkness of the story. In this interview, Tyler Candelora talks to Alice Heathwood about translating Beauchemin, the tension between translating the reading experience one had and leaving open the possibility of other readings, and inventing words.

Tyler Candelora (TC): Can you tell me what led you to Jean-François Beauchemin’s work, and why you decided to translate this story in particular?

Alice Heathwood (AH): I came across Le jour des corneilles many years ago. I was going through a period where I was craving fiction, but just couldn’t find the right book for me. It had been ages since I’d fallen in love with a novel, and I missed that immersion in another world that you get from really good stories. I asked a friend who worked in a bookstore for a recommendation and she handed me Le jour des corneilles. It sucked me in completely from the first line. The language is so lyrical, so striking, so odd yet so inviting. Fortunately, my friend had told me nothing of the plot, which is dark, and would be difficult to handle if not wrapped in the book’s particular prose, or I may never have read it. But it is exactly that juxtaposition of light and dark that makes the book so compelling. It was my first taste of Beauchemin’s work and a strange sort of introduction, as his other works, while very poetic, do not play with language in this very idiosyncratic way. Of course, being so struck by the prose, I couldn’t help wondering how it could be translated: occupational hazard. But for years I dismissed the idea as crazy, until eventually, I just could not resist the challenge. It was as if the book wouldn’t leave me alone. 

TC: Do you typically translate from Quebecois French, or was this a new venture for you? 

AH: Being based in Paris, I normally translate from the French of mainland France. I wouldn’t necessarily take on any book from another culture, but the book’s unique style places it, in some ways, outside of its particular literary context. At the same time, I want to be careful not to brush that context entirely aside. I’m aware of the dangers inherent in translating a work from a culture in which I am not immersed. However, I think there are ways to mitigate our blind spots and approach the work with respect and a willingness to learn. In practical terms, this means reading more Quebecois literature, listening to podcasts, watching films from Quebec and talking to fellow translators and the author himself. Recently, I participated in a week-long event with other literary translators at the International College of Literary Translators in Arles, France (the ateliers ViceVersa, run by the French association for the promotion of literary translation, ATLAS and brilliantly facilitated this year by Mona de Pracontal and Ros Schwartz). We each brought along an extract of our work to workshop with the others. It was a wonderful, enriching experience. One colleague in particular, Arielle Aaronson, who lives and works in Montreal, really helped me rethink my approach. I think it’s great to collaborate with other translators. In my experience we are always willing to help each other out.  READ MORE…