This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant story of youth, manhood, and mental illness by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, translated by Tim Benjamin. Young Vicente lives with his family in a small town, right across the street from the Gaucho—”all the terrors of this world in a single individual”—a gigantic man famed for his physical strength and rumored cruelty to children. Yet even as Vicente’s uncle and mother threaten him with stories about the Gaucho, the only violence Vicente has seen from him is self-directed: he has repeatedly attempted to hang himself from the tree outside his house. When the Carnival comes to Vicente’s town and Vicente finally experiences the violence and recklessness that have made the Gaucho a figure of local legend, he makes a choice that, small as it may seem, will change both their lives forever. Read on!
They’re going to ask me why.
—José Watanabe
I
He liked to wonder if the moments when his dad had to sprint across the street, wrestle down the enormous Gaucho from the tree from which he’d once again hung himself, were moments of life in the world, or of death. There must have been minutes that ticked by in which more people were born than died. And vice versa. Someone, somewhere, must be keeping count. This is what he thinks, he’s got an image in his head of a little bead with the Gaucho’s name on it attached to a wooden abacus, swinging back and forth between dead and alive. He watches the Gaucho through the kitchen window, big, gigantic, now crumpled in the dirt and gasping for breath, like Aunt Ermilda’s epileptic dog. His mother and Uncle Thomas are there too, standing behind him, breathing down his neck as they watch his dad and the Gaucho disappear into the little shack across the street, and then they all sit back down at the kitchen table and wait for him to come back with the details. His father comes through the door in a state, sweat soaking through the front of his shirt, glazing his brow. He wipes away the sweat and they all stare at him as he mumbles an I’m coming or something like that but none of them totally understand what he says, and nobody responds. Finally, he sits back down at the table, takes a knife to the food on his plate.
This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says 
Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025
Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.
In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.
Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.
In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.
With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…
Contributors:- Bella Creel
, - Meghan Racklin
, - Xiao Yue Shan
; Languages: - French
, - German
, - Italian
, - Macedonian
, - Spanish
; Places: - Chile
, - France
, - Italy
, - Macedonia
, - Switzerland
, - Taiwan
, - Turkey
; Writers: - Agustín Fernández Mallo
, - Damion Searls
, - Elsa Gribinski
, - Giorgio Fontana
, - Lidija Dimkovska
, - Sedef Ecer
; Tags: - dystopian thinking
, - identity
, - interpretation
, - nationality
, - painting
, - political commentary
, - revolution
, - the Cypriot Question
, - the Macedonian Question
, - translation
, - visual art
, - Winter 2025 issue
, - world literature