Language: Spanish

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2026

February 2, 2026  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Blog editors weigh in on our latest issue!

We are not only celebrating the release of our newest issue, the fifty-eighth under our belt, but also fifteen years of working to promote global literature! This is a jam-packed issue, with two special themes and giants in the world of translation interspersed with up-and-coming voices. There is so much to discover, and our blog editors are here to help you navigate the rich offerings on hand!

In a heartwrenching ending to a long poem, Franz Wright wondered:

. . . but
why?
Why
was I filled with such love,
when it was the law
that I be alone?

And therein lies the bind of desire, which is solitude incarnate, which demands that the object of our affections remain distant and suspended, love being most absolute when it resides in wish and conjecture. We are most in love when we hibernate within our singular conception of it, alone. The pain of the unrequited condition consoles, then, by providing us with the most vivid chimeras, pursuing the indefinite with abandon, setting up its own precipitous stakes and utmost heights, the heartening glimpses at pleasure. Such speculations lead easily into self-indulgent ecstasies, but Dino Buzzati is fluent in dreams, and as such he knows that they are only interesting if relayed by someone who sees their truths.

In the earnest and lovely “Unnecessary Invitations”, one perceives the writer who had once said that he believed “fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism”—who understands that a head in the clouds remains connected to the two feet on the ground. The story, addressed to an unnamed lover, sets up several scenarios of the wonderful things the narrator would like to do with his beloved: “to walk . . . with the sky brushed grey and last year’s old leaves still being dragged by the wind around the suburban streets”; “to cross the wide streets of the city under a November sunset”. The scenes are rose-coloured, ripe with affection—but Buzzati follows up each with a cold splash of recognition, in a brilliant switching of registers captured by translator Seán McDonagh:

Neither can you, then, love those Sundays that I mentioned, nor does your soul know how to talk to mine in silence, nor do you recognise, in exactly the right moment, the city’s spell, or the hopes that descend from the North.

READ MORE…

The Winter 2026 Issue Has Arrived!

January 29, 2026  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

World literature remains, at heart, a problem of attention: of who is seen, who is heard, and who is permitted to remain invisible.

As authoritarianism continues to take hold across the world, writers and translators are compelled to revisit an age-old question: What might art offer in response? Perhaps not answers, but something quieter and more resilient—a reminder of shared human frailty, and of the possibility that our “flow of being,” as Anatoly Loginov writes, might arrive at a “narrow neck” where attention itself becomes an existential force. Writing in our Winter 2026 Issue, which also marks Asymptote’s fifteenth(!) anniversary, Loginov turns to a literary and philosophical tradition that seeks “not mastery over an object, but communion with it, even if that communion burns.” For this second of our two issues devoted to attention, we bring together his tour de force survey of 200 years of Russian thought with a luminous travelogue by the beloved Taiwanese writer Sanmao, an excerpt from Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon’s prizewinning Tarantula, an exclusive interview with Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov, a quietly devastating story by Italian master Dino Buzzati, and new translations of Milo De Angelis by Lawrence Venuti, alongside never-before-published work from 32 countries. All of it is illustrated by our talented Dublin-based guest artist Yosef Phelan.

Winter-2026_blog

If Loginov argues that attention, when cultivated deeply, can ground compassion toward others, Finnish playwright Minna Canth takes this ethical impulse further into the realm of collective action. In her barnburner drama, railway workers pushed beyond endurance channel their shared anger into defiant sabotage, making exploitation visible at last. Writing from a different frontline, Kurdish journalist Zekine Türkeri bears witness to life in the Mahmur refugee camp in the days preceding an ISIS attack, showing how attention to the living entails the inescapable labor of mourning the dead. Elsewhere, in Egyptian writer Mariam Abd Elaziz’s fiction, characters struggle to care for one another as they swim and sink in the deadly currents of maritime refugee smuggling. The issue’s arc closes with an interview in which China’s Wang Guanglin reflects on the difficulty of imagining a genuinely global literature at a moment marked by isolationism, xenophobia, and resurgent nationalism. World literature, he suggests, remains, at heart, a problem of attention: of who is seen, who is heard, and who is permitted to remain invisible.

For fifteen years, Asymptote has been organized around this problem. Founded on the conviction that literature across languages deserves sustained, serious attention, we have worked to widen the field of vision—introducing readers to voices beyond dominant centers, and treating translation not as a secondary act but as an ethical and imaginative practice in its own right. If this project has mattered to you—if you believe that attention, patiently given, can still resist the forces that would narrow our view—we ask you to help keep it alive by becoming a sustaining or masthead member. Your support ensures that the flow of being we trace here continues to move, freely and exuberantly, into the years ahead.

READ THE ISSUE

GET INVOLVED

Translation Tuesday: “Cleaning Matters” by Alba E. Nivas

January 27, 2026  |  in Translations  |  by Annuska Angulo Rivero

You don’t need to read poetry, or believe in myths and prophecies, to sense that humanity is undergoing a relentless metamorphosis.

For this Translation Tuesday, we’re bringing you an essay by Spanish writer Alba E. Nivas, translated by Annuska Angulo Rivero. Beginning with a simple daily greeting, Nivas ponders what it means to be anchored to the world; she plunges into a meditation on the invisible rhythms of care, labor, and waste that sustain a city and a society. She deftly travels between personal and planetary scales, tracing connections from a Parisian courtyard to colonial legacies, domestic chores to Hindu cosmology. What forms the core of human consciousness, and what can we gain by giving up the idea of “humanity” entirely—instead, embracing an awareness of the myriad lifeforms that surround us and constitute our earth? It is an attempt to uncover, out of contemporary life, glimpses of a profound, interconnected vitality.

“Bonjour,” she greets me every morning. Sometimes we cross paths in the entry hall of my building, other times on the corner where I lock my bike near the subway entrance. At that hour, Paris streets are just beginning to fill with people on their way to work, parents holding their children’s hands, heading to school. Gradually, the pale morning light thickens with purposeful human motion. Eyes still heavy with sleep, most people avoid looking at each other, as if trying to hold on a little longer to the warmth of oblivion before surrendering to the strange rituals of routine. This woman, though, always smiles at me with a clean, direct gaze, as if we knew each other, even when she’s chatting away on her phone in what might be Urdu or Punjabi, probably with someone in a very different time zone. Every time, she seems more awake than I am. Somehow, the kindness of her greeting snaps me back to planet Earth. My day starts. 

Even though municipal policies have drastically reduced traffic in the city center, at this hour delivery vans crowd the streets, supplying shops, hotels and restaurants. Reluctantly, drivers of buses and cars suppress their impatience as the vans load and unload, blocking their way. We cyclists, driven by haste, dart around them, sometimes swerving onto sidewalks to a chorus of verbal abuse from pedestrians. There is tension in the air. We all feel like cogs in this hungry, about-to-wake-up machine, propelled by a relentless rhythm and wrenched from our quiet, domestic time and space. Our tiny, electrified Parisian lairs will sit empty for a few hours. Hundreds of thousands of men and women head out in pursuit of a paycheck, leaving disarray behind to rule their homes. 

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2026

January 12, 2026  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Dan Shurley, Fani Avramopoulou, Hilary Ilkay, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Nicole Yurcaba, Randle Browning, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from China, France, Peru, Italy, Romania, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Sweden, and Japan!

Looks like 2026 isn’t coming in slow. Despite the chaos, we’re looking forward to another year of illuminating the best of what world literature has to share—and we’re starting off with plenty to go around, with thirteen titles from ten countries. Find in the mix a new translation of one of the Peruvian canon’s most dazzling and convulsive works; a novel depicting the delicate indigenous customs of a region between Siberia and northeast China; a shocking, propulsive novella from a Japanese cult writer; a story of transformative grief from an enthralling Romanian voice, and so much more.

The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated from the Chinese by Bruce Humes, Milkweed Editions, 2026

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The opening lines of Chi Zijian’s wondrous novel, The Last Quarter of the Moon, set a carefully measured tone for this enchanted story of Evenki nomads: “A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.” this rich and essential passage gently, and with deference, opens a window into a world where humans confide in rain. Chi and translator Bruce Humes indulge the word weather in at least three of its meanings, conveying the narrator’s resilience and hinting at her costly intimacy with other-than-human energies.

A word exchanging its meaning for other meanings—as if adopting different bodies to slide between existential contexts—invokes the dynamism of the shamanic Evenki cosmos, wherein earth and sky, humans and nonhumans, the embodied and the disembodied, dance together in precarious balance and tender reciprocity. Everything is alive in the Evenki’s animist multiverse, every entity ensouled, each Earthling an embodiment of the Spirits, and every human owes a debt to the Spirits for the lives of nonhumans killed for food. In turn, when a human child goes missing, in danger of freezing to death, a reindeer child must go “to the dark realm on [the human’s] behalf,” in a mimetic exchange.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 9, 2026  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, China, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors report on the cancellation of a controversial comics festival in France; the Arabic-language launch of an important literary account of Spanish colonization; and the awardees from one of China’s most prestigious prizes in children’s literature. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The fifty-third annual Angoulême International Comics Festival—a renowned celebration of comics and graphic novels slated to take place January 29 – February 1, and which I have written about for Asymptote twice in the past—has been cancelled for 2026. Save for one cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first time in the festival’s history that it will not be taking place.

The festival’s organizers, a group called 9e Art+, announced the news in early December, asserting that this cancellation is due to lack of funding. However, authors and contributors—including Anouk Ricard, the winner of the festival’s grand prix last year—have been raising calls to boycott the festival for the past few months following multiple ignored sexual assault cases, un-transparent business practices, and commercial excess. Over four hundred authors called for a boycott in April of 2025, and multiple others have joined the call in the time since. READ MORE…

Graveyards as Palimpsests: A Review of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

January 5, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Darius Sobhani

The book does not merely document—it exhumes, observing death and its afterlives with a unique combination of spirituality and doubt.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Hogarth, 2025

On a visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans, the narrator of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave describes a particular site: ‘Another grave has a sign that says “Crime happened here” in red, but the story, which is detailed on the lower part of the sign, is illegible, washed away by the rain.’ With this image, the Argentinian author provides the perfect analogy for her approach in this most recent non-fiction. In historical and literary terms, a palimpsest is a manuscript page—typically made of parchment—that has been scraped clean to be reused for new writing. However, the original ink often left ghostly remains—faint traces of the earlier writing bleeding through the new surface. Just as a palimpsest may contain multiple eras of writing on a single sheet, the graveyard is a site where history is simultaneously layered and scraped away by neglect. Thus for Enríquez, the graveyard is the ultimate palimpsest: a site where the past remains waiting for a sensitive traveller to decipher its remnants, akin to a medium searching for spirits.

In summary, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is a compilation of personal anecdotes that take place in specific cemeteries, with chapters set in Georgia (the state), New Orleans, Paris, and Guadalajara, among others. These places become testing grounds for the notion of graveyard as palimpsest, a methodological effect winningly achieved through Enríquez’s standout narration, which reads as equally friendly and eccentric, with a bleakly comic outlook and a fascination with the supernatural, while also tinged with a hardened scepticism. She is not any mere tourist of the morbid, but someone with a deep, almost joyful affinity, for the macabre. This odd combination of credulity and cynicism is best illustrated in the chapter detailing her visit to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. During a visit to Conrad Aiken’s grave, the narrator recounts the horrific predicament of his family—how he was orphaned as a toddler after his father murdered his mother and subsequently committed suicide—but frames it within a series of casual remarks. Rather than expounding at length on the gruesome story, Enríquez mentions the grave with a peripatetic levity, recounting it amongst the perceptions of other graves that she walks by, noting: ‘Aiken’s grave isn’t the only one with a bench—Johnny Mercer also invites you to sit down.’ READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #1 Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words by Daniel Saldaña París

December 31, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

París mediates on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

It follows that our most anticipated and widely read work of 2025, tackles the most batted topic of the year: AI. Daniel Saldaña París’s “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words” (tr. Christina MacSweeney) tackles it head-on in an interesting project for Cita Press, and shares his reflections in a thought-provoking essay published in the Summer issue.

For context, Cita Press is an open access publishing project that “pairs contemporary authors and designers with public domain or open-licensed texts to create a free online library of carefully designed books by women, in Spanish and in English.” The project at hand, the “Literary Translation & Technology Project,” involves using  AI (Large Language Models, Neural Language Models, and Machine Translators), traditional translation tools, and of course, a literary translator to evaluate AI’s potential for creating open access editions of works in translation. París took on a Spanish translation of Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly. In this piece, they mediate on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

Exactly how revolutionary is this new technology in terms of our profession? Based on my one-off experience of translating Diez días en un manicomio, I can say that the benefits are limited to speeding up the translation process while not necessarily improving it.

. . .

When choosing the most appropriate translation of a particular phrase or sentence, I keep in mind the readership of the text, in addition to its social function: I don’t make the same decisions when translating for a Spanish publishing house as I would for an independent Latin American publisher, or for an open access project that will be consulted by Spanish-speakers of different origins who are unfamiliar with my version of the language. At the other extreme, when translating, I am also conscious of the historical immutability of the original: I am working with a text written in 1887 and I must retain certain usages of that context, even when this may shock our contemporary political sensibilities. 

First, París stresses the unacknowledged and unpaid labor concerning the body of work that trains AI. Given that this work is largely skewed to texts by male authors, there is an inherent gender bias in AI results. This would likely apply to translating the subtleties of minority-specific content that the software isn’t adequately trained to handle. Not to mention, were you aware that “each ChatGPT consultation uses two glasses of water?”

READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #4 Anthropocene by Carolina Brown

December 28, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

A cocktail with notes of dark humor, existential dread, and a macabre aftertaste to complete a hard-hitting flavor.

Our fourth most popular article of 2025 is a stand-out from the Summer 2025 issue: “Anthropocene” by Carolina Brown (tr. Jessica Powell). In this literally biting cli-fi, we follow two postdocs investigating the excrement of an endangered penguin species in Antarctica. To give you a taste of the narrator’s acerbic voice, here’s how the story begins:

I’ve caught myself, several times a day, thinking about Octavio’s pelican dewlap. The thing about doing research full time is that it leads you to fantasize; you spend a lot of time alone and sampling is a repetitive task. Also, who hasn’t dreamed of killing a coworker? Everyone has, obviously. Of course they have. People have this image of scientists as evolved, circumspect types. What’s that word people use to describe Brits? Phlegmatic. 

Alex feels uncomfortably real—the details of their study are intriguing, and their isolation is felt as raw misery. The tension that builds between Alex and Octavio is intense and engrossing; we’re kept on our toes by razor-sharp exchanges and an unapologetic stream of consciousness. A well of pity for Alex quickly morphs into a raging sense of alarm for our futures. The touch of climate horror presents a perfectly believable future to our present, belying an entirely appropriate sense of anxiety. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2025

December 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Dan Shurley, Hilary Ilkay, Kaelie Giffel, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Japan, Peru, Germany, Austria, Czechia, South Korea, Brazil, and Hungary!

In our final round-up of the year, we present a thrilling novel capturing the margins of Germany as the nation begins to veer into fascism, a collection gathering the voices of powerful Hungarian women poets, a Brazilian novel testifying to the colonial erasure of indigenous language and being, a series of essays considering the act of reading as an oppositional force against capitalism, and more!

kappa

Kappa by Ryonosuke Akutagawa, translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Bownas, Pushkin Press, 2025

Review by Kaelie Giffel

Even if one is unfamiliar with his work, English readers will recognize the name Ryonosuke Akutagawa from the prestigious Japanese literary prize, named after him posthumously by a friend. Kappa is a novella published in the final year of the author’s life. Pushkin Press’s reissue of Geoffrey Bownas’s 1970 translation comes on the heels of a 2023 retranslation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell, published by New Directions in 2023. Multiple, competing translations indicate the continued importance of Akutagawa’s work, which has a renewed urgency in our time.

Kappa is a philosophical meditation on whether difference can be encountered without violence and how we might meet others in the strange in-between spaces. Structured as a frame narrative, its inciting incident is the testimony of a patient in an unnamed mental institution. The patient speaks about meeting strange creatures with tummy pouches called Kappas. The Kappas have their own cultural, historical, and philosophical institutions and orientations to life, and the narrator lives among them for a while, alternately admiring, baffled, or repulsed as he learns more about their existence. They oppose birth control for silly reasons; sacrifice workers who have been laid off by literally eating them; prohibit artistic performance because they believe the general public to be hopelessly stupid; and are generally misogynist—female Kappas are cast as libidinous huntresses that oppress male Kappas. The narrator is bewildered by the similarities and differences between himself (Japanese) and the Kappanese. Hence, the mental institution.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Priest without Judgment” by Sara Munizaga

December 9, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Sara Munizaga

Reconciling Jessica with the faith was perhaps the task God had entrusted to me in this life, the reason I had been preparing for years in silence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a short story by Chilean writer Sara Munizaga, translated from Spanish by the author herself. In it, a Catholic priest reflects on the frustrations of his vocation, recounting numerous examples of so-called believers whose behavior belies their professed faith. His suppressed anger conflicts with his desire to embody God’s all-encompassing forgiveness. This all comes to a head when he is asked to officiate the wedding of Jessica, a former object of infatuation who, in his telling, led him on and then cruelly rejected him. Munizaga’s story is a cynical and clever exploration of religion, gender relations, and above all, the self-deceptions that control our lives.

This vocation makes you indolent: deaths, births, and people in general cease to matter, because nothing is more demoralizing to the soul than speaking of God’s love to those who are not listening. We know they come here, to the church, as a last resort—without hope and without any genuine desire to hear the Lord’s message.

They convert to religion at the last minute, under pressure, for on their deathbeds they have no salvation plan other than the one I can give them. I feel their trembling hands clutch at my cassock, trying to keep the fate of a hell they so carelessly secured for themselves from swallowing them whole. Now they fear facing the devil when death is imminent, but when they were healthy they felt immortal and could not be bothered to live virtuously or serve others.

For that reason I spare no one in my funeral sermons. It is the only time I obtain an audience held captive by grief, and I lecture them with tedious catechism texts as a punishment for their superficial and agnostic lives. I am unmoved by the widow’s inconsolable weeping or the mourners’ emotional speeches. I know they are hypocrisy; and I will not worship any god but the God of truth, my Lord Jesus Christ. It is so simple to understand: one need only look at the life of Doña Patricia. Five children, twenty-five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and every day she arrived alone at the noon mass, accompanied only by a nurse hired by the family—who preferred to pay a stranger to take charge of the woman who gave them everything. The Christmas before last, Doña Patricia confessed to me that she had kept all her relatives’ gifts, still wrapped, there at the nursing home where she lived; her family never came to see her, and she was left alone during the holidays. And yet, a year later, at her funeral, the church was overflowing—not a single seat left empty. Then she achieved the full attendance she would have desired. I wanted to have the nerve to throw those still-wrapped gifts at their faces from the very altar, but that is not the Lord’s way. He is almighty and teaches us to find forgiveness. A greater crisis will come to that family that will rouse them from the selfish stupor in which they conduct their lives.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Cicada Green” by Ju Donzelli

December 2, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Grace Penry

The giant cicadas came and went, hurling themselves at Iturbe. He kept waving his arms, trying to scare the bugs off.

A languid summer vacation takes a distressing turn in this short story by Argentine writer Ju Donzelli, translated from the Spanish by Grace Penry. A group of high school friends abscond to a nearby town to swim, drink, and hang out, but the relaxed atmosphere slowly grows more tense, leading to an altercation between two boys—one of them being the slender, soft-spoken Flaco Luna, an anomaly among the guys and beloved by the girls. The sudden outbreak of violence reveals the unspoken tensions of adolescence, when masculinity must be achieved through publicly dominating others, including your own friends. Between the electrifying fascination of otherness and the terrorizing brutality of conformity, the boys’ fragile ecosystem is fiercely shaken by the incident.

I don’t go on vacation with the guys from high school anymore, but with Flaco, I’d go again. The last time we were all together we went to Guayamba, one of those towns where we Santiagueños will spend a couple of days because it’s nearby, because there’s a river, because it’s cool and cheap.

In the evening, the giant cicadas started getting on our nerves. It’s always like this, but on this day in particular they screeched and screeched. They look like other cicadas, only much bigger and rounder, the area around Santiago is full of them because of the carob trees. They’d zoom past us and hit things like projectiles, making a dry sound when they slammed into the wall. That’s what’s so funny about them: they sound empty when they bang into something and they’re always acting like they want to kill themselves. If there’s a pool, the first thing they do is head straight into the water and buzz their wings until they drown and die. And if you take them out, they’ll jump right back in. It’s an infinite loop lasting half the summer. 

Whenever we’d go to Guayamba, we’d stay in Manso’s parents’ house because it’s pretty big and has a pool. Us guys had taken our clothes off, it wasn’t that hot out, but we were drunk, the humidity made the air dense, and during the siesta we’d sunbathed at the river. Plus, the power kept cutting out because it had rained, and the fans kept turning off. The girls were still in their shorts and bikinis, with their feet in the pool and hair dripping with the smell of chlorine. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alejandra Camila Quintana Arocho and Amal Sarhan

The latest in literary updates from Bahrain and Puerto Rico!

This week, we are proud to introduce one of our newest Editors-at-Large, Amal Sarhan, for Bahrain, alongside first-time contributor Alejandra Camila Quintana Arocho, who gives us a dispatch from Puerto Rico. From a long-delayed book fair and ongoing discursive panels in Bahrain to the launch of a new book festival in Puerto Rico, read on to find out more!

Amal Sarhan, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bahrain

Bahrain is a quiet country to many. Dotted with date palms, surrounded by sea, and appearing as a mere speck of dust on the world map, it is natural for locals to feel an air of insignificance, including with regards to its literary scene. While the bellows of the recent launch of the 20th Sheikh Zayed Book Award, the Riyadh International Book Fair in October, and the ongoing Sharjah International Book Fair reverberate far into the Arabian Sea, the Bahraini equivalent has been delayed for years, our dismay at which has been cleverly captured in this very poignant caricature by the famed Bahraini artist Khalid Al Hashimi.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, MARGENTO, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest from Spain, Romania, India, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring news of publications with big reputations, celebrations of nature writing in the Himalayas, and a new city joining the prestigious line-up of UNESCO Cities of Literature. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain

From November 5 through 11, the Romanian Language and Culture Center at the University of Granada, Spain hosted a series of events featuring the major voices and rising stars of contemporary Spanish poetry, some of whom included writers with Spanish-Romanian identities, connections, or collaborations. Amongst them, the prolific and multiply awarded Romanian-Spanish poet and painter Mariana Feride Moisoiu was given top-billing, and people crowded in for her reading-performance.

Feride Moisoiu is the founder of the international festival Mujer, Manantial de Vida (Woman, Source of Life), in addition to coordinating the festival Grito de Mujer (Woman’s Scream) in Villa del Prado, Madrid, which focuses on women’s voices, empowerment, and gender equality. She serves as the executive director of the literary magazine Krytón (also published in Villa del Prado), while also being the honorary president of the Casa Nacional de Rumanía (Romanian House/Institute) in Getafe. The event in Granada presented an opportunity for Feride Moiosiu to launch the latest issue of Krytón, coedited with poet Cristian Mihail Deac, which pays tribute to the journal’s founder, Cornel Drinovan. During her reading, the poet moved the audience through a serene and relentless, indomitable cadence, one that placed lyric femininity at the heart of a multifaceted—political, sentimental, and cosmic—vision. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2025

November 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, Liliana Torpey, and Nichole Gleisner

New work from India, Serbia, France, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iran, Spain, Lithuania, Palestine, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This month, we’re bringing reviews of eleven different titles from eleven different regions, from a trilingual text of experimental fiction that veers between Vietnamese and English, a visceral and psychically frenetic portrait of a marriage gone wrong, a rich collection from a master Iranian poet that gestures towards his remarkable life, and the latest metafiction from a Spanish literary giant. 

dog

Dog Star by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Subha Prasad Sanyal, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Something’s rotten in the city of Kolkata. A corrupt managerial class—within which mad scientists and war-mongers play a major role—has conspired with local authorities to capture, confine, and starve as many canines as possible. While the city’s “dead serf-servants and healthful, cellphone-carrying ever-connected mummies and balloons” stagger through their dystopia, the dogs have disappeared from the urban bustle, and no one cares. Animal rights groups have been eliminated, and in the way of Nazi death camps, the system targets even newborn pups. What’s a dog to do in these last dog days? “Bark! Bark!” replies the snappy refrain of Dog Star, the lyrical, subversive, and highly re-readable novella by Bengali writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, delivered in a kinetic English by Subha Prasad Sanyal, who has doubtlessly advanced this innovative author’s reputation in world literature.

A self-proclaimed fable, Dog Star leads the reader through dark alleys where street dogs—“nerikuttas”—hide from “pincers,” form alliances, trade information about current dangers, and strategize escape plans, looking to the constellation “Lubdhok, aka Dogstar, aka Sirius aka Alpha Canis Majoris” for liberation. These survivors, along with their unlikely feline allies, are anthropomorphized in their emotions and dialogues, and their plight, although set in West Bengal, is familiar enough to seem representative of any place under political (dis)order. The Netanyahu regime’s genocide against Gaza comes to mind, for example, as do the active “detention centers” in the US: “They’ll yank and drag you by your neck with the pincers to the caged car. Then throw you in.” Bhattacharya does not avoid visceral descriptions of animal torture, but he balances its brutality with astute irony, giving the murderers absurd lines like: “We must pay heed that there aren’t ridiculous expenses.” READ MORE…