Language: Spanish

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 1, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Cristina Pérez Díaz, MARGENTO, Peera Songkünnatham, and Suhasini Patni

Book fairs, Booker longlists, and magazine launches from Thailand, Puerto Rico, India, and Romania!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on the political undertones of a Bangkok book fair, new translations of Indian literature, new magazines out of Puerto Rico, and celebrations of Francophone literature in Romania. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Bookworms are back wheeling their suitcases around in the country’s biggest book fair. It is the place to get another year’s worth of kong dong (“pile of pickles”)—i.e., unread books. After a cancellation last year and a move online the year before, the twelve-day National Book Fair, organized by the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand is being held at the new rail transport hub, Bangsue Grand Station, until April 6. Many publishers, both major and independent, release new books in anticipation of this event, where they can get a bigger cut from sales and buyers have come to expect extra-special discounts. With over 200 publishers participating, author meet-and-greets, and predictable logistical complaints at the temporary new venue, we can perhaps sense a return to normalcy.

If one looks at this normalcy more closely, however, one can see an increasing trend of explicit politicization in the largely commercial enterprise. The calendar of main-stage events includes book launches by pro-democracy politicians from the Move Forward Party and the Progressive Movement (of the disbanded Future Forward Party). The names of four such politicians, all men, grace the official calendar—without the titles of their books, oddly enough. The Progressive Movement is also publishing its first translation: an illustrated children’s book, นี่แหละเผด็จการ (Así es la dictadura) by Equipo Plantel, first published in 1977 in post-Franco Spain. These examples provide quite a contrast to ostensibly political but effectively depoliticizing events led by, for lack of a better word, the literary establishment, like the panel discussion “Stepping into the Third Decade of the Phan Waen Fa Award: Political Literature for Democratic Development,” featuring three award committee members and a literary scholar.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 25, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Mary Hillis, and Nestor Gomez

Translation competitions, new publications, and poetry readings from Japan, Guatemala, and El Salvador!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on a translation competition and an event to support Ukraine in Japan, the publication of a harrowing new memoir from Guatemala, and a celebration of women poets in El Salvador. Read on to find out more!

Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from Japan

Give Artists a Voice was held on March 15 at the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo and live-streamed on social media. Organized by EUNIC Japan and E.U. member cultural institutions and cultural departments in Japan, artists expressed their support of Ukraine through music, film, poetry, dance, and talks. Joining from Kharkiv, contemporary artist Olia Fedorova read text in Ukrainian documenting life during the war. Poet Marie Iljašenko read “Five poems from collection St. Outdoor” in Czech and Yoko Tawada read “Auszeit von Menschheit” (“Timeout from Humanity”) in German. Michal Hvorecký, author of the novel Troll (published in Slovak in 2017), delivered a message on disinformation and literary translation as a vehicle for deeper understanding.

Earlier in the month, at Bungaku Days Spring 2022, the award winners of the JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) sixth International Translation Competition were recognized: English grand prize winner Grant Lloyd and Spanish grand prize winner Eduardo López Herrero. Contestants translated two texts, “Namiuchigiwa made” by Maki Kashimada in the fiction category and “Ojigi” by Kuniko Mukōda in the criticism and essay category. The original texts and winning translations can be read on the JLPP website.

Designed to both recognize and provide support for emerging translators of contemporary Japanese literature, the event began with a prerecorded video showcasing comments from the judges and messages from the top three awardees in English and Spanish respectively. Former contest winners Polly Barton and Sam Bett joined this year’s winner, Grant Lloyd, for a symposium on the topic of becoming a translator, moderated by Yoshio Hitomi of Waseda University. They discussed Lloyd’s prize-winning translations and also analyzed the challenges of working with stories, novels, and essays from Japanese, while revisiting steps on their journeys to becoming literary translators. The publishing panel was moderated by Allison Markin Powell and included Anne Meadows (Granta Books), Yuka Igarashi (Graywolf Press), and Tynan Kogane (New Directions), who discussed their points of view on pitching, the acquisition process, and barriers to publishing literature in English translation. The seventh edition of the competition is now in progress and entries are being accepted in English and French.

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To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda

March 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I want to know what fear is. Why are we so afraid? What does fear make us do or not do? How does fear change our bodies?

Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. With influences spanning from H.P. Lovecraft, to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called “creepypastas,” Ojeda’s novel Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021), translated expertly by Sarah Booker, explores the darkest aspects of relationships between women, amidst the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador. 

In Jawbone, popular girls and best friends Annelise and Fernanda have created a religion of their own, outside of the classroom. The girls set up camp in an abandoned house, form a secret cult that worships “The White God”, and engage in a series of increasingly dangerous dares that threatens to tear their friendships apart. Meanwhile, their Spanish literature teacher, Ms. Clara, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother, begins to lose her grip on reality. Things take a sinister turn when Ms. Clara takes Fernanda hostage in a deserted cabin, intending to show her pupil the true meaning of fear. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised, and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Ojeda in person at a coffee shop in Madrid. Over orange juices, we discussed psychoanalysis in language, the implications of Latin American gothic literature, and her favorite horror films.

Rose Bialer (RB): The first book I read of yours was the poetry collection, Historia de la Leche, which investigates the strange violence of family relationships—specifically those between mothers and daughters. What drove you to return to this theme in Jawbone?

Mónica Ojeda (MO): I don’t remember if I first wrote Historia de la Leche or Jawbone. Well, I know that Jawbone was published first, but I don’t remember which book I wrote first. I could have been writing them at the same time. However, I do know that at the time, I was very interested in the violence within passionate relationships between women. I think the relationships between best friends, or sisters, or mothers and daughters are intense, and so of course there are a lot of possibilities for violence to get in. I’m kind of obsessed with how desire and love can be taken to the next level—the next level being sometimes absolute violence.

RB: I think your poetry comes through in your writing, especially in such highly imaginative phrases such as “mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb,” “umbilical-cord love” and “that sleeping-angel-of-history voice.” Tell me about the process of constructing these new terms.

MO: I think invention comes to me because I do see the act of writing as a way of putting language in some kind of crisis. In conflict. So sometimes, you have to develop some new forms to express certain things; that is something which pulls me back to poetry even when I am writing narrative. Because I think that poetry does that. Poetry reverts language, re-births language. Sometimes when words join together, developing new concepts and images, it can sound strange because you have no familiarity with something which has just been born. As such, it develops some kind of extrañamiento (estrangement), which also provides an atmosphere that I like, having to do with the strange and something that Freud called lo siniestro (the uncanny), which is when something unknown reveals itself in the middle of what is ordinary, during your daily routine. That is scary: when you are surrounded by the things that you know and then the strange comes in. I like to do that not only in the story of my narrative or my novels, but also in language. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2022

March 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Eva Wissting, Ka Man Chung, and Laurel Taylor

New works this week from China, Sweden, Italy, and Argentina!

March feels like a month of renewal, and our selections of translated literatures this week presents a wondrous and wide-ranging array of original thinking, ideations, philosophies, and poetics. From a revelatory collection of Chinese science fiction, to art critic María Gainza’s novel of forgery and authenticity, to Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays on writing, and a debut collection of poetry from Iranian-Swedish poet Iman Mohammed—there is no shortage of discovery amidst these texts. Read on to find out more!

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The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, Tordotcom Publishing, 2022

 Review by Ah-reum Han

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a trailblazing new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, created by and featuring the works of an all-female and nonbinary team of writers, editors, and translators. As a lifelong fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre but new to contemporary Chinese literary scene, I found this collection a true gift—warm and generous to the novice like myself, for whom Chinese literature has only ever been accessible through translation. Under the meticulous curatorial vision of Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, the stories and essays within celebrate decorated and emerging voices alike, indicating at an exciting future of sci-fi and fantasy for digital natives in our culturally porous world.

As you enter the collection, leave everything at the door and hold on tight. This book will whisk you away from one uncanny valley to the next—from a world where children raise baby stars as pets, to a near future where parenting is turned into a computer game, to a fisherman’s village where they practice the art of dragonslaying, to a woman on the road mysteriously burdened with a corpse, and much more. The title story, “The Way Spring Arrives” by Wang Nuonuo (trans. Rebecca F. Kuang), situates itself amidst the babbling creeks where giant fish carry the rhythm of the seasons on its back, delivering spring from year to year. In “A Brief History of Beinakan Disaster as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu (trans. Ru-Ping Chen), we are caught in a post-apocalyptic world, where people live under the threat of devastating heat currents and history pervades as literal memory capsules passed down by a select few. Despite the imaginative heights these stories reach, each creates enough space in its strangeness for us to reexamine our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Often, folklore and fantasy crosses into sci-fi and allegory, and readers are left feeling unsettled in even the most familiar landscapes.

Between these stories, you’ll find essays on genre, gender, and translation that enrich the surrounding fictions; these intelligent texts help orient readers in socio-political, historical, and global contexts, while looking to the future of this young genre. In “Net Novels and the She Era,” Xueting Christine Ni discusses the role the internet has played in disrupting gender norms within publishing—particularly in the case of the popular online sci-fi serials. In Jing Tsu’s essay on the collection at hand, she points out: “This volume shows that there is also a difference between science fiction about women and other marginalized genders and the ones written by them.” We also hear from translators, such as Rebecca F. Kuang, who writes about the symbiotic relationship between writer, translator, and reader—the choices implicit in the things left unsaid. “What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia is a playful de-reconstruction of the famous English pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—as both story and essay, illuminating the act of translation in a modern world of search engines, artificial intelligence, translation software, and media. As the author notes: “intersexuality is the dominant mode to create as well as to read most of the works in our time: quotation, collage, tribute, deconstruction, parody.” This collection pioneers its own conversation around its stories. We are paused at intervals to consider: who are we really, and where do we go from here? READ MORE…

“I want my words and those of the law to meet on the page and touch”: On Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill

March 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

In looking at disobedient women, the book dismisses “the lawyer’s red pen” and the “narrow confines” of law.

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, And Other Stories, 2022

Could such bloody murders really have been committed by women? Did they owe their homicidal violence to advances in feminism?

Alia Trabucco Zerán has been training herself to suspect—as if it were an art form. It is this honed ability for distrust, combined with her background in law, that brings her close to the four women at the center of When Women Kill. In her debut novel, The Remainder (shortlisted for the 2019 Booker International), Trabucco Zerán told the story of Iquela and Felipe, who undertake a road trip to help their family friend Paloma collect and bury her late mother’s body. The lives of the trio are bound with the loss and terror of Pinochet’s rise to power, and as the sky darkens to the color of ash, they too dream of corpses, sinking into hazy memories. The Remainder sealed its author as one of Chile’s most recognized and poignant debut novelists, and central to its story is the same uneasiness of forgetting that pervades When Women Kill; what is true, in a lawful sense, is curled and uncurled in this text, making it one of the more incisive intersectional feminist analyses of myth and murder.

Trabucco Zerán begins her book by explaining why she undertook this study, claiming that a woman who kills is “outside both the codified laws and the cultural laws that define and regulate femininity.” Scavenging through multiple archives, court documents, films, and plays, she reconstructs the history of Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel, and Teresa Alfaro—four high-profile Chilean murderers of the twentieth century. She is unconcerned with learning about the motivations behind the acts; instead, the book serves as an account to remember and discern the women who commit crimes, who have expressed their rage. READ MORE…

Violence, Beauty, Structure, Freedom: An Interview with Translator Urayoán Noel

March 9, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Noa Mendoza

Urayoán is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word.

In the early days of the pandemic I became obsessed with a little book called Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) by Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. Two years later, I’m still returning to it again and again. Berenguer’s poetry, ranging from a classically lyrical style to experimental concrete work, speaks to a certain gruesome dance that defines the intense moments of closure and euphoric freedom of the pandemic era. The poems—particularly her concrete works—contain wells of meaning; they dip into abstraction and yet are completely literal, hung in the spatial galaxy of the page, intimate and infinite, like vessels unto themselves. The English translations, pasted next to the original Spanish, felt like an impossible feat. How, I wondered, was it possible to translate these vessels in which every letter, fluidly molded in Spanish, was essential to their form?

 When I interned for UDP in the summer of 2021, I seized the opportunity to chat with one of the translators who had worked on the book, and specifically on these visual poems, Urayoán Noel. Noel is a poet, translator, and professor based in the Bronx, originally from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. His poem “ode to coffee/oda al cafe,” named after the iconic Juan Luis Guerra song, deconstructs the relationship between English and Spanish, empire and cash crop, moving in and out of the two languages like a defiant and fluid snake. This is emblematic of the warm and brutal intelligence that Urayoán brings to the act of translation: he is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word, and he has a deep love for language and an understanding of all that it celebrates, erases, amplifies, and reveals.

Noa Mendoza (NM): I thought it might be nice to start out talking about a poem that I’m actually going to get a tattoo of soon.

Urayoán Noel (UN): No way, really?

NM: Yes! This graph one, it’s untitled, but it is a pictorial representation of a beach scene, with a jumble of letters underneath.

I’m wondering what your experience was translating this graph, and, more generally, the incomprehensible. The words in the middle that don’t necessarily hold semantic meaning. And also gibberish more generally, if you ever think about that when it comes to translation.

UN: I think I might make a distinction there. I certainly agree that Berenguer’s language isn’t linear. I’m not sure she’s a poet of gibberish. I think of gibberish as a kind of uncontained language. My sense is there’s always this rigor in her work and a constant struggle between freedom and constraint.

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Translation Tuesday: “Luz” by Samanta Galán Villa

March 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Tricia Viveros

Her tone of voice was like the chirping of a small bird.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to this sparse and beguiling story of a young schoolgirl who escapes from home and encounters a strange little girl, Luz. Written by the Mexican writer Samanta Galán Villa and published in Monolito magazine in May 2021, this story—related through the perspective of an innocent child—appears deceptively simple, but conveys a deeper sense of the way a child’s gaze can defamiliarise her little world into something bizarre and oftentimes beautiful. Tricia Viveros explains, in her translator’s note, how she strives to preserve this duality and makes a case for reading this writer from Guanajuato who represents a counterpoint to the dominant ways Mexican literature is read.

“My English translation of ‘Luz’ aims to maintain Galán Villa’s artful economy of language as much as possible—a task that required some compromise as, for instance, it’s not possible to omit the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in English. Adopting an adequate level of rudimentary wording was also challenging. The Spanish original elicits a sense of irony by juxtaposing its childish diction and syntax with a sophisticated narrative structure. Writing that is too unrefined risks detracting from the text and inhibiting the plot’s development; by frequently using simple sentences and contractions, my translation seeks to convey the near-surrealistic irony of the original without diminishing the prose. Samanta Galán Villa is part of a growing number of emerging contemporary voices across underrepresented regions of Latin America. Hailing from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, her writing evidences a long-established literary tradition beyond that of more cosmopolitan, affluent centers like Mexico City.”

—Tricia Viveros

Mama slapped me. Her lower lip trembled. How could they possibly have punished me, after class was dismissed, she said, together with the disobedient children. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that someone had smeared my braids with paint and I’d defended myself.

She didn’t want to hear it. She said that she knew me. That I wasn’t going to eat chocolate cereal with the family later, that she’d only give me a glass of juice. Zip it and don’t talk back to me, brat. Go to your room, right now.  READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

February 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Julia Sherwood, and Kristina Tatarian

Literary festivals, translation contests, and more from Mexico, Armenia, and the Czech Republic!

This month has seen the publication of new essays in Mexico highlighting the importance of editors, literary festivals in the Armenian capital, and the screening of restored screen adaptations of Czech literary classics. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The literary community has not been discouraged by the global pandemic. February is already blooming with a host of literary events and new publications, some of which—announced early to build excitement—will reach readers later in the year.

On February 4 and 5, the fourth edition of the Kerouac International Festival took place. The event featured poetry readings and performances, showcasing work that disturbs traditional boundaries between visual art, music, and literary creation. The festival takes place every year in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. This year, the lineup included several nationally and internationally recognized poets. Among them was Hubert Matiúwàa, who has been translated by Paul M. Worley for Asymptote. Poet Rocío Cerón also participated in the festival, presenting performances that blurred the lines between digital art and poetry. Shortly after the Kerouac Festival, she also kicked off a solo video art and poetry exhibition called Potenciales Evocados (Evoked Potentials), hosted in the convent where Early Modern poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lived.

Four hours north of Mexico City, in the state of Querétaro, another event of international importance took place: the publication of Editar Guerra y paz (Editing War and Peace) by the independent publishing house Gris Tormenta. Written by Argentine editor Mario Muchnik, the book is part of Gris Tormenta’s Editors Collection, a series that highlights the work behind designing, planning, and putting out a book.

Finally, February also brought thrilling news to writers. Translated by seasoned Asymptote contributor Christina MacSweeney, Daniel Saldaña Paris‘s novel Ramifications was featured in the longlist of the Dublin Literary Award. Similarly, poet, translator, Asymptote contributor, and champion of contemporary literature in Spanish Robin Myers had her poem “Diego de Montomayor” selected for the compilation The Best American Poetry 2022.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Suhasini Patni

New translations and upheavals in publishing from India, Central America, and Palestine!

Around the globe, February has seen upheavals in Indian publishing, the release of new translations of Central American literature, and the loss of a giant in Palestinian letters. Read on to find out more! 

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The Indian publishing industry was taken by storm on February 1, when Amazon India announced that it was shutting down Westland Books, home to some of the fiercest writing from the country. The details of how it will affect the backlog of books, whether they will remain available or be taken out of circulation, are still unclear. Westland is one of the largest English-language trade publishers in India, with an imprint called Context that publishes literary fiction and another called Eka that publishes translations. They have consistently released daring titles, such as The Price of the Modi Years by Aaker Patel and Modi’s India by Christophe Jaffrelot.

The Mint Lounge, one of the first publications to break the news, wrote: “The editors of Westland were informed about the impending closure only earlier today, a member of the staff at the publishing house said, requesting anonymity.” After hearing the devastating news, many have posted on social media to appeal to readers to buy books before they run out. The Bookshop, an independent bookstore in New Delhi, wrote: “For a company to acquire an independent, local publisher of books that will in future certainly prove to be foundational texts of Indian literature, and then to arbitrarily shut it with no forewarning is a highly reprehensible act that the entire community of booksellers condemns.”

Westland recently published best-selling Malayalam author KR Meera’s latest novel Qabar, translated by Nisha Susan. A short novella of magical realism, the book is a riff on the Babri Masjid case. It explores increased communalism in India and ultimately magnifies the tensions that lead to lynching, mob-making, and dehumanization.

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Rosa Chávez: “Poetry is my spine.”

February 9, 2022  |  in Essays, Profile  |  by José García Escobar

"Poetry has always moved me, but I’ve also been moved by history, by my people’s history."

Rosa Chávez is La Poeta here, but she defies definition. The Mayan artist and writer has walked a variegation of paths and left her indelible mark on scores of people and places, ensuring that her legacy will be a monument to curiosity, surprise, and multiplicity. In the following profile, Editor-at-Large José García Escobar speaks to the Guatemalan La Poeta and her ever-widening world of poetics, which trespass the page—and language—to take on other numinous forms.

La Poeta walks towards a small table. She lays a sonaja, a tiny drum, some colorful ronrones, and a few whistles made of clay upon it, as the electric sounds of a turntable fill the room. Soon, from the speakers, the voice of Berta Cáceres comes: “We are fighting to protect the rights of indigenous people,” and her speech echoes across the small room of a school in rural El Salvador. “We have struggled for more than five hundred years,” Berta goes on. “We have always lived as a community,” steps in the voice of the indigenous leader Lolita Chávez, “and our community includes mankind, but also plants, birds, fish too, and all the animals.” Wearing a shirt and a pair of small glasses, the DJ turns the knobs to move the musical landscape, which carries the activists’ voices.

“I remember that children had decorated the classroom using bits of paper, mimicking the lush fields outside, the green mountains,” says Rosa Chávez, La Poeta.

La Poeta takes then the microphone.

“Pick it up. Take what’s yours,” she says, she recites, she conjures. “Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let them take it from you. Pick it up. Leave it under the sun. Let it dry. Pick the weevils off it,” La Poeta says, and a tiny whistle and a pair of soft cymbals hiss across the room. “One by one, remove the kernels. Look how it shines: red, yellow, white, black. Undo its body. Grind its body. Cook its body. Don’t toss it aside, though. Don’t give it a bad look. Never forget to grow more.”

That’s how one of Selva y Cerror’s first shows occurred—August of 2017, during the Festival Mundial de Poesía Cien Voces, in El Salvador; the song I’m describing is called La Abuela y el Maíz. Selva y Cerro is a Guatemalan musical duo consisting of DJ and producer Teko (Andrés Azmitia)—best known as Sonido Quilete—and Rosa Chávez. It is also the latest project of Chávez, out of her wide-ranging roles as poet, mother, performer, actress, teacher, artisan, cultural manager, screenwriter, filmmaker, bisexual, Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel.

Rosa contains multitudes. She insists, however, that she’s a poet—an interesting fact considering that she never sought publication. She says that even today when she writes, she’s not thinking of “putting together a book,” despite having published five. Urges move her, motivate her. The multitudes inside Rosa talk to each other. Poetry took her to performance. Performance to the theatre. Theatre to community work and human rights. Poetry is the thread that weaved, and still today weaves, the urges of Rosa’s career. For Rosa Chávez, poetry has no end.

READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

February 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Barbara Halla, Bassam Sidiki, Caridad Svich, and Lee Yew Leong

Highlights from the Winter 2022 edition, presented by our section editors!

Gathering new work from 43 countries, the Winter 2022 edition might be overwhelming at first. But don’t let that stop you from diving right in! Whether you consume the issue from cover to cover or click on whatever catches your fancy, we just hope you enjoy reading this eleventh anniversary edition as much as our section editors have loved putting it together! Here to tell you more about their lineups are Yew Leong, Barbara, Bassam, and Caridad. If, after reading the issue, you’re inspired to submit work, don’t forget that we welcome submissions all year round; if you are a Swedish-English translator, take note that we’re currently inviting submissions to a paid Swedish Literature Feature, slated for publication in Spring 2022. For guidelines on how to submit, go here.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, Special Features, and Interview Editor:

The statistics are undeniable: With one language dying every two weeks, ninety percent of all languages will go extinct within the next one hundred years. Even as we at Asymptote celebrate another milestone with our most diverse issue yet, loss—specifically that of entire worlds indexed by languages—is never quite far from our minds. In Dear You, translated brilliantly by Samantha Farmer, Croatian author Jasna Jasna Žmak takes us on a playful thought experiment inspired by Barthes: ”What if one word was removed each time a speaker of its language died as an act of remembrance?” Intended as an enjoinder to Eliot Weinberger’s essay published in these very pages one year ago, Yeshua G. B. Tolle’s submission to this issue’s Brave New World Literature Feature examines Aaron Zeitlin’s poetry, written in a language “half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth” when Nazis invaded his native Poland. “On what world do we gaze,” he asks poignantly, ”when the poet himself believes the world is over?” Whole worlds are rendered believably before our eyes in Matt Reeck’s skillful rendering of Rachid Djaïdani’s 1999 classic of banlieue literature that smashed Parisian tropes, and in Kim Su-on’s atmospheric science fiction brought to us by talented translators Spencer Lee-Lenfield and Lizzie Buehler. My two personal highlights from the Poetry section couldn’t be more diametrically apposite: the first (the Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov) is as light (and alive with defiance) as the second (Spanish poet Pepe Espaliú) is weighted (with clear-eyed acceptance of inevitable death); both are powerful and moving. Rounding up the issue’s stellar lineup, Neske Beks and Charlotte Van den Broeck (in the Flemish Literature Feature I curated) as well as Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte (in the Visual section, which Eva Heisler assembled) make important contributions to the conversation on our collective racial past.

From Barbara Halla, Criticism Editor:

In many reviews, the very act of translation can feel like an afterthought; usually reviewers will include a short line or paragraph to acknowledge the deftness of the translator’s skill, but that will be the extent of their engagement. I can understand why that happens: at times, without some familiarity with the original, it can feel impossible to speak in detail about the translator’s craft—which is why Tom Abi Samra’s review of Huda J. Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen’s translation of Salim Barakat’s poetry is such a revelation. In his review, the translation features front and center, as Abi Samra investigates how Barakat’s attempt to defamiliarize Arabic is rendered into English, doing an almost phrase-by-phrase analysis of the translation. There are some texts, however, where the reviewer does not have a choice but to engage with the translator, because the very book they are reviewing questions the porous borders between author and translator. This is the case with Catherine Fisher’s fascinating review of Tomaž where Joshua Beckman appears not merely as a translator, but as a co-writer having had a direct hand in choosing how to present Tomaž Šalamun’s poetry into English. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa and Charlie Ng

The latest from Mexico and Hong Kong!

January brought a plethora of literary events, from author talks to publishing announcements. In Mexico, the publishing house Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing put out a new bilingual poetry volume. In Hong Kong, the Dante Alighieri Society hosted a discussion on writing in your second language. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The first month of 2022 has seen many commercial and independent publishers announce new books, both in Spanish and in translation. Though the year, like the two before it, will also be strangled by the global pandemic, the exciting vitality of the publishing scene brings momentary solace and hope.

North American publishing house Deep Vellum published The Love Parade, George Henson’s translation of El desfile del amor, a detective fiction by acclaimed Mexican writer Sergio Pitol originally published by Anagrama in 1985. An expert in contemporary fiction from Latin America, Henson has also contributed to Asymptote in the past, publishing the translated work of other outstanding Spanish-speaking authors such as the Mexican Alberto Chimal and the Peruvian Pedro Novoa. Deep Vellum is not new to Mexican literature either; its catalogue includes the names of contemporary international luminaries from Mexico, among them the poets Carmen Boullosa, Rocío Cerón, and Tedi López Mills.

The renowned Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli co-edited the sixty-fifth edition of independent San Francisco-based literary journal McSweeney’s, assembling a stellar collection of stories, letters, and translations. The compendium is not only dazzling but also urgently political. According to the journal’s website, the issue “delves into extraction, exploitation, and defiance.” The quarterly includes work by several internationally acclaimed writers from the American continent. Many are authors whom Asymptote has featured in the past, such as Gabriela Wiener, Samanta Schweblin, and Claudia Domingo. Their names are listed alongside other famous voices who have rapidly achieved international fame, including Laia Jufresa, Megan McDowell, and Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2022

January 24, 2022  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The reconstituting of memories that have been erased is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue.

Asymptote’s Winter 2022 issue is now out, marking the magazine’s eleventh year in publication! The newest edition features writing from a record forty-three countries and twenty languages. Here to introduce you to what this issue has to offer are our blog editors with some thoughts on the pieces that stood out to them the most.

In Maria Stepanova’s 2021 genre-defying work In Memory of Memory, she wrote that her excavation of family history was motivated by a desire to discover “the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova was absorbed with not only recovering the stories of her Jewish family but also probing her own obsessive relationship with memory itself. The memoir suggests the faultiness of memory in its rips and tears, while betraying an anxiety over its artifice in the way the memoirist manipulates the archive through inclusion, exclusion, and distortion for the purpose of her narrative. The reconstituting of memories that have been erased through the forces of time and displacement is a central concern for the playful yet meditative Winter 2022 issue. Like Stepanova, the authors of these varied works construct complex inquiries into the past through reappraisals of memory, dreams of alternate lives, and imaginative play with form. They seek the truth through memories while contesting their inevitable artificiality and malfunctioning.

In Rose Bialer’s deeply affecting interview, the Hungarian poet, memoirist, and translator George Szirtes speaks of returning to certain memories and themes in his personal history throughout his career in poetry, sometimes writing new poems that function as continuations of collections published decades before. This idea of Szirtes’s “return” to the same moments for their comprehension reflects his mistrust of memories but also his belief that truths are embedded within them. One of the talk’s many astonishing moments is when Szirtes claims that the return over time to the same memories in his poems reveals parallel narratives that add up to a palimpsest of personal history and identity. For Szirtes, formal constraints such as the terza rima continuously open the same memories to new facets and understandings. This illuminating conversation demonstrates how the fluidity of memory allows the poet-translator to construct an unstable past and self while “registering the sense of truth in all its complexity.”

READ MORE…