Language: Spanish

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 8, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Kristina Tatarian, and MARGENTO

The latest in global literary news from Ukraine, Guatemala, and Belgium!

The naming of Abdulrazak Gurnah as our latest Nobel laureate in Literature is what’s topping headlines around the world this week, but there’s plenty more happening outside of the Swedish Academy. Our editors on the ground is bringing news of multi-media literary festivals, architecturally transformative contemporary art, Ukrainian translation forums, and the passing of a beloved Guatemalan writer. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brussels

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest was hardly over when another literature festival was announced in Europe’s capital: Les Voix en Ville (Voices in the City), organized by Lettres en Voix. This year’s edition featured mostly collaborative projects involving writers, musicians, and filmmakers presenting concerts, readings, workshops, and “cinematic poems.” The venues were as diverse as cathedrals, museums, theaters, pubs, and public squares, while the works presented were more often than not site-specific. Maud Vanhauwaert, for instance, after recently receiving ovations at Planetarium Poetry Fest, participated by reading an “Ode to the Socio-cultural Worker” at the legendary literary cafe La Fleur en Papier Doré. The poem culminated in a work that went beyond the text per se, resulting in a video of the reading which featured images of the venue and a music soundtrack—an illustration in and of itself of the many “workers” who had contributed from behind the scenes.

In the meantime, Brussels’ literary and arts scene is frantically resurfacing from the lockdown. Among the 300 exhibiting artists, 150 workshops, 100 animations, and “concerts, live, dance, street art, performance, and literature” events inundating Ixelles (the arts quarter of Brussels), there was also a “coup de coeur” (heartthrob, sudden crush) exhibition at the animated Demeuldre art gallery. Among the highlights was Bert Mertens, a senior artist with a fresh eye for estranging details and collaged panoramas who mesmerized the visitors from the moment they entered with the hyperrealist light radiating from his paintings. The diversity of forms and approaches of other artists—ranging from graphic art to photography to sculpture to installations to comic strips—also succeeding captivating one’s attention. Still, what really overwhelmed the audience and kept visitors wandering the upper floors and attic of the 19th-century china shop for hours on end was the Talk C.E.C. exhibition, which reunited dozens of artists from France, Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere in a joint project converting the place—its architecture, its interior and exterior walls, the literal holes in the walls, the cafe, kitchen, and even the bathrooms—into a powerful collective manifesto revisiting and fusing sacred traditions, unorthodox spiritualism, and transgressive eroticism from an urgently environmentalist and culturally inclusive perspective.

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Ukraine

As summer ended festively with the thirtieth annual Independence day in Ukraine, a succession of literary events showcased new national literatures and opened up conversations about the changing trends in translation. Not long ago, the Ukrainian Book Institute established Translate Ukraine, the first translation initiative of its kind to be sponsored by the government, and which has helped literary festivals turn their focus towards an international audience. As a result, a record number of Ukrainian titles were translated into English in the past five years. M any Ukrainian publishers have noted that international literary festivals are not the only places to showcase the wealth of contemporary literature available in the country, stressing the importance of supporting local literary forums to better promote Ukrainian letters globally. Earlier this year, the famous literary festival Kyiv Book Arsenal hosted publisher B2B meetings to facilitate international translation deals and pitch the best of Ukrainian literature to publishers. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2021

September 27, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Sarah Moore

New work this week from Mexico and Algeria!

This month, our editors dive into two powerful works that look into the dominating subjects of human life: sex and war. An erotically subversive collection of stories by award-winning author Mónica Lavín moves to the darkest and most questioning arenas of desire, and a memoir by Algerian Freedom fighter Mokhtar Mokhtefi stands as a cogent and compelling text of witness of his nation’s struggle against French colonialism.

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Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder, Katakana Editores, 2021

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

There is catharsis in transgression, and pleasure—especially the centering of one’s own pleasure—is all too often transgressive. The twelve short stories in Mónica Lavín’s collection, Meaty Pleasures, thoughtfully curated and translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder, capitalizes on this subversive desire, exploding the tranquil veneer of domestic life by compelling our complicity in the deeply uncomfortable and socially taboo.

It all begins and ends with the flesh. “Postprandial,” the decadent opening story, foregoes grounding details about setting and character in order to focalize an aphrodisiac tasting menu, offered from a hotel restaurant manager to a passerby, and the explicit sex that follows. It readies the reader for Lavín’s challenging approach to realism, intimacy, and power imbalance which pervades the rest of the collection. The final story, “Meaty Pleasures,” also emphasizes the sensual relationship between food and sex—but in a completely different way. Told from the perspective of an adult daughter who has watched her parents’ Saturday afternoon artisanal butchering hobby grow into an obsession that echoes over the course of their lives, the sex is left entirely to the implicit, straining in constant tension with the parental web of familial obligations. The daughter and her sister reflect: “Sometimes we’d ask each other, have you tried calling Papá and Mamá on Saturday afternoons? Because on that day of week, they never answered the phone to either one of us.”

In between, we meet many a troubled family. As is common in stories of nonconformity, various characters rebel against the numbing effect of matrimony, but their resistance does not lead them to any predictable conclusion—or perhaps any predictability is heightened to a manic extreme. In “What’s there to come back to,” a husband leaves his repentant wife on their doorstep for a whole winter’s night before he, begrudgingly, allows her back into their home. Snyder’s translation captures a certain languor and resentment in his stream of consciousness that induces anxiety when set against the excruciating awareness of her waiting, building a rawness that painfully and coldly leads to his reflection upon waking up in the morning: “Fried eggs again for breakfast, the TV news. I think she’s gone. Maybe she froze to death. Maybe we both froze to death.” In “You Never Know,” a son tires of the demons left to him by his mother’s abandonment. “Then, you kiss and hug them in the shadows of a movie theater, and you masturbate thinking about them, and when you start to want something more than their bodies, like their companionship and tenderness, you leave without saying goodbye.” Innocent—righteous, even—though his anger seems, his journey darkens with an incestual turn. “Roberto’s Mouth” finds a disgruntled housewife disappointed yet again when her own plans to leave her family are thwarted by her naughty-mouthed chat-room lover’s lazy approach to cuckholding. In such narratives that continually unpack and distort the concepts of familial intimacy, images of transgressively penetrated flesh dominate the collection, inviting the reader to reflect on the discomfort they inspire. READ MORE…

Resurrection: An Interview with David Cruz, 2021’s Winner of the Manuel Acuña Poetry Prize and Author of Lazarus

September 9, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

I like to think that all the ghosts from everything I’ve read since I was a kid have sat next to me whenever I sit down to write.

Silvia Plath once wrote, “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—”

This is the opening line of Lady Lazarus, a poem originally included in Plath’s second book, Ariel, published in 1965. Plath, the Bible’s Saint Lazarus, Ovid, David Bowie, Wisława Szymborska, Federico García Lorca, and others sat next to Costa Rican poet David Cruz, or so he claims, as he was writing—and “rigorously editing”—his latest book of poems, Lazarus. This is David’s third book of poems and a follow-up to his 2017 She likes to cry while listening to The Beatles (Valparaíso Ediciones). Earlier this year, Lazarus won the Manuel Acuña Poetry Prize (PIMAPLE in Spanish); previous winners include Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Malibran, and Isabel Conejo.

Lazarus is a retelling of the myth of Saint Lazarus and Plath’s Lady Lazarus. It’s also, says David, “a game of dualities”: past and present, life and death; and an homage to “voices from the past.”

David Cruz is one of Central America’s most exciting poets working today. His poetry is a force of nature. Stunning, picturesque, exquisite. Devastating, earth-shattering, dense. Divine, esoteric, spiritual, mythological, and personal, too. In 2015, more than two hundred critics from universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, and Princeton chose forty Spanish-speaking poets, born between 1970 and 1985, who, they believed, were “the most relevant” at that moment. They called them El canon abierto—The open canon. The list includes authors such as Andrés Neuman, Urayoán Noel, Raquel Lanseros, and David Cruz. The few glimpses we’ve seen of Lazarus in Vislumbre and available here (PIMAPLE asked David not to share the book just yet) are a testament of such power and “relevance.”

Lazarus I

The mind is a multidimensional map.
Everything we see is but the tip of the iceberg.
I go to the basement of my head
and find many lives,
many memories that I have not lived.
Now I understand Vallejo
“I will die in Paris with the downpour,
on a day I already remember.”

David has published three books of poetry, and in 2011, he won the prestigious Luis Cardoza y Aragón Poetry Prize for his collection Trasatlántico. He’s currently completing a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

José Garcia Escobar (JGE): The last book you put out before Lazarus was She likes to cry while listening to The Beatles in 2017—originally in Spanish, in 2013. What type of literary concerns (or, to put it differently, what “ideas to write about”) did you have then, and what happened to them?

David Cruz (DC): My last book was a personal interpretation of the social, cultural, and technological shifts we experienced between the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. My poetic self in that book gazed at a girl, and I gazed at the world through her. It’s a book nourished by many things such as music (The Beatles, naturally, is the book’s motif), daily news, artists’ ego, politics; I wanted to abridge many ideas under a clear and organic structure. And these are ideas that are still in my head, that remain, and they come to life every time someone reads the book.

TRACK 1

Music is a cavern of sounds
that resists oblivion.
Notes stretched out in bars.
Shallow vaults where the ships run aground.
Clouds in the depths of the universe
that at the point of impact with the rocks, plagiarize
their own interpretation.  READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

September 2, 2021  |  in News  |  by Darren Huang, Kent Kosack, and Suhasini Patni

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

We hope you’re staying dry. If you’re looking for a book to curl up with, check out these staff reads—hailing from Colombia, Germany, and India. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like an archaeology museum, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (New Directions, 2020), translated from the German by Jackie Smith and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, catalogues objects, places, artwork, people, and animals lost to history across centuries of time and continents through twelve genre-bending and essayistic pieces, one of which was previously featured in Asymptote. Schalansky is a German writer and editor, whose previous novels grappled with the transience of things, isolation, and the disappearance of islands and species. Schalansky adopts a wide range of styles to enter the world of her material and reanimate the objects under consideration, while Jackie Smith captures the idiosyncratic form of each piece. Schalansky’s pieces are indeterminate, meandering collages of history, biography, memoir, and criticism. They are linked through their concerns with the ravages of time, the processes of decay, and memorialization. In the style of W.G. Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne, these pieces represent memento mori, in that they meditate on the disintegration of things, while also asking us to consider how the past is interpreted from writings, artifacts, and a discontinuous archive. These retellings of history are acts of preservation—they give voice to the silenced, reorient the reader toward an era, a place, or a person, while also probing the political and philosophical dimensions of memory and forgetting.

—Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

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David, an aging painter losing his vision to macular degeneration, reflects on the most difficult night of his life: his son’s euthanasia twenty years ago. Such is the plot of Tomás González’s elegiac novel Difficult Light, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, and released by Archipelago Books. As David writes, he keeps returning to the night in New York City when his family waited to hear if his son, paralyzed and suffering, had followed through with his decision to die. Will the doctor show for the illegal assisted suicide in Portland? Will his son change his mind? Death permeates the novel. His son’s. His wife’s. His own, impending. But so does beauty, love, humor, and though it’s difficult, light.

—Kent Kosack, Director, Educational Arm READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Speed of Gardens” by Eloy Tizón

August 31, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba and Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa

There are loves that crush those who receive them.

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the titular short story from Eloy Tizón’s Velocidad de los jardines (The Speed of Gardens), which was chosen by El País as one of the hundred best books published in Spanish in the past twenty-five years. A tale of adolescence, the dramatic expansion of life’s possibilities, and its accompanying disappointments—Tizón’s narrator recalls an entire class and their fascination with the luminous Olivia Reyes. All this is told through Tizón’s finely wrought sentences which itself is a kind of spellbinding music. Hear from the translators about the peculiarities and pleasures of Tizón’s baroque style. 

“Eloy Tizón is one of the most important baroque writers working in the Spanish language today. In his language, where the baroque tradition reigns supreme, mastering the baroque style is tantamount to mastering the style of the Spanish language tout court. There have been no shortage of competitors for this title on both sides of the Spanish-speaking Atlantic, and in the Iberian Peninsula, we find such luminaries of the baroque register: Gómez de la Serna and Francisco Umbra, followed by Cristina Fallarás and Juan Manuel de Prada. In these writers, who are equally as prominent fiction writers as they are columnists, we find in them an affected antiquarian prose, a contrarian bravado at the level of ideas, a curated brand of O.K.-Boomerism, with sudden tinges of chauvinism, misogyny, or anti-Trumpism—depending on the day.

Tizón is a stranger to this school. He is worthy of winning the baroque pennant—not that he would care—but he might not be playing the Spanish league. Though a stylist of excess, and a habitual contributor to newspapers, he has shaken off all remnants of regional scruff. His sentences abolish the habitual linguistic ostentation of his contemporaries; there is no old fogey gesturing in his work; he is not known to indulge in that strange form of Iberian competition that consists in piling up subordinate clauses and stringing consonantic polysyllables. This has to do with Tizón’s readings of Clarice Lispector and (I venture) Virginia Woolf. Like them, his style is elastic, image-heavy, allusive rather than exact in a pseudo-philologist kind of way. Like them, he knows when to surrender style to character. Like them, he knows the purpose of curlicues and filigrees: to entertain the reader and not the author’s vanity.

Praised by many of his contemporaries, perhaps the aptest compliment comes from Alberto Olmos, who once described his style as “pouring MDMA on the dictionary.” What dictionary, he didn’t say. Certainly not The Royal Spanish Academy’s.”

— Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa and Manuel Antonio Castro Córdoba

Many said the fun ended when we passed into eleventh grade. We turned sixteen, seventeen; everything gained an unsettling speed. Sciences or humanities was the first customs house, the first border crossed, separating friends like travelers commuting from one train to another, their luggage left somewhere between the snow and the porters. Classrooms disbanded. Javier Luendo Martínez broke up with Ana María Cuesta and Richi Hurtado stopped talking to the Estévez twins and María Paz Morago dumped her boyfriend and scholarship—in that order—and Christian Cruz was expelled from school after hurling a flask containing a fetus at the biology teacher. 

Oh, yes; from class to class we towed Plato and something called hylomorphism that belonged to some forgettable school of thought. The Russian Revolution spread itself wide across our notebooks, and on page seventy-something the Tsar was executed between crossed-out scrawls. The economic causes of the war turned out to be complex, not what they look like by a long stretch, even if impressionism brought a fresh palette and a new idea of nature to painting. Mercedes Cifuentes was very fat and didn’t get along with anyone,  but that year she came back crushingly thin and still didn’t get along with anyone.

It was a kind of hecatomb. Half the class fell in love with Olivia Reyes, at the same time or in turns. Every morning she came into the classroom, showered, barely powdered, it was a creaking and vulnerable vision that could hurt you if you dared think about it around midnight. Olivia always arrived forty-five minutes late, and until she made her appearance the syllabus was something dead, a waste, the teacher rambled on about Bismarck, as if painstakingly brushing his tailcoated corpse, the chalk repulsed. Her arrival resuscitated our desks. You couldn’t believe it, Olivia Reyes, something so sponge-like and scented, stepping into the classroom, laughing, providing us with her fabled profile, her light at the prow, you wouldn’t believe it, it hurt so much.

The first days of spring have an amazing air about them, unimaginable, you can’t tell where it comes from. This effect is heightened by the first sightings of summer clothes (the coats strangled in the closet until next year), of bare-armed students carrying decapitations and whole kingdoms inside their folders. We would walk into school through a great red-brick patio with the basketball courts outlined in white, a scrawny tree blessed us; we would jog up the double staircase, hurried on by the dean—who comprised a blonde moustache with a wholehearted dedication to cursing—and then the bell would ring, firing the starting signal to our daily race for wisdom and science. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 27, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Xiao Yue Shan

Catch up on literary news from our editors on the ground!

This week, our editors report on literary gatherings, from a Chinese organization that seeks to bridge the cultural divide between the mainland and Taiwan, and Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

The Taiwan Strait measures only 130 km at its narrowest point, but it is the other distance—the unphysical distance, imposed by human prescriptions—that defines it. Recently, with the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taiwan’s own future was placed into question, with many remarking that the island was due to become “the next Afghanistan,” and criticizing American foreign policy as a hasty manifestation of 始乱终弃—to play with and abandon as if with a toy. Whether or not the US will continue its disengagement of military intervention, the geopolitical tension has deepened the chasm between the island and the mainland—in history if not in nature—with the continual wear of weariness, suspicion, and speculation.

Yet in Pingtan, Fujian, from where Taiwan is vivid and impossibly near on the other side of the waters, there persists certain attempts of breaching the cultural distance, most recently by the Pingtan Cross-Strait Sinology Center, established in 2018. Regularly hosting forums and lectures on Chinese and Taiwanese scholarship and texts, the Center, on August 18, held a talk on Taiwanese women writers, and how they write about love.

As Taiwanese writer 余光中 Yu Guangzhong once remarked, it is the work of women writers that have contributed most significantly to the nation’s exceptional range of contemporary essays. The traditional memoirist 林海音 Lin Haiyin, the nomadic and impassioned diarist Sanmao 三毛, the erudite humanist 琦君 Chi Chun—the works of such women essayists both expanded and challenged the imagination and logics of Taiwanese letters, intervening in the traditional discourse with intelligent intimations of selfhood, voyage, and being. While delivering the lecture, professor Yuan Yonglin remarked on how writers such as 张晓风 Zhang Xiaofeng and 简媜 Jian Zheng impressed deeply in their works by giving personal insight as to how they defined their relationships with the men in their lives—the former with the letters written to her husband, and the latter with writings on her father. In the depiction of men as subjects of love, these texts identified passions, affections, and aestheticizations specific to the female experience, addressing their complexity and bringing them into public language. READ MORE…

On the Verge: Keila Vall de la Ville and Robin Myers Discuss The Animal Days

August 26, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Allison Braden

What gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s debut novel The Animal Days is a thriller—but not in the traditional sense. Protagonist Julia, a climber, chases mountain highs as she tightropes between life and death, joy and grief, adolescence and adulthood. She also chases a boy bent on destruction. Julia narrates this time in her life—the animal days—in a powerful, fluid vernacular that plunges readers into her precipitous milieu. We’re proud to feature this cliffhanging novel as our Book Club pick for July and to share this conversation between Vall de la Ville and translator Robin Myers, which was held live for members. The collaborators discuss the delicacies of portraying gender violence, the climbers’ patois, and the way contemporary Latin American literature plays with time and tense.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive Book Club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only interviews with the author or the translator of each title!

Allison Braden (AB): There’s so much going on in this book, even though it takes place over a relatively short time span. Keila, how do you describe what the book is about?

Keila Vall de la Ville (KV): I think of the book as the story of the process of becoming, in which travel, spatial movement, has to do with the inner journey as well. That might seem a little general in the sense that many talk about displacement and movement, geographical movement, as a way to travel inwards.

What makes the book different and what gives the book its identity is this relationship with fear and with the extreme—not only because the characters are climbers but also because of their own particular intimate relationship. Julia’s actually transitioning from one state and one moment to the next. So, it’s all about extremes.

Gender violence pervades the whole story, and it’s very important to me. It took me a while to figure out how to talk about it. We all know how terrible it is, but at the same time, it has so many nuances, and so many colors, and so many ways of manifesting. I believe it’s important to show that it’s not only about physical violence or even psychological violence. There are many, many ways to feel violent, especially in an environment that is mostly masculine.

AB: Robin, how did you encounter this book? What attracted you to the story?

Robin Myers (RM): I came into contact with this wonderful book after coming into contact with Keila herself. We’ve actually been working together for so long that I can’t even remember which came first, Poetics on Beauty or this novel, but we’ve been in touch for a number of years about different projects of Keila’s. Shortly before we started writing to each other, this book had won the Latino Book Award, so Keila was interested in having it translated into English.

I read it and was instantly fascinated. I was riveted by the story and by the force of the narrator’s presence—she has a very subtle narrative voice. But in terms of the language itself, which is always what does it for me or doesn’t as a translator and reader, I was so interested in the intensity and the directness of the narrative voice, which is very beautiful but also very blunt. It has this almost spoken quality, which I was really interested in. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 20, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, and Peera Songkünnatham

This week, our editors report from Thailand, Sweden, and the USA.

Around the world, the way we read is changing: Eva Wissting digs into book sales data in Sweden and finds a spike in digital subscription services amid the pandemic, Peera Songkünnatham reports that Thai poets are reinventing a classic form, and Allison Braden rounds up a slew of Women in Translation Month events. The annual celebration, dedicated to shaking up the canon, makes for a perfect moment to envision the heady, vivid future of literature.

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A literary project called Bokbastionen (“The Book Bastion”) is finally about to launch in Sweden. The Swedish Arts Council has granted Svenska Bokhandlareföreningen, an association of Swedish booksellers, 400,000 SEK to support in-store events with authors. Although it was the challenges posed by the pandemic that led to the idea of supporting booksellers, coronavirus restrictions have delayed its start because gatherings have not been possible until now. Finally, the first event supported by the project will be held this coming week at a poetry festival in picturesque Söderköping. The initial plan for Bokbastionen included twenty author events this year, but about half of these will spill over into next year instead. The interest to host events has been particularly large among smaller, independent bookstores, which now are looking for ways to create interest among readers and book lovers.

Even though the pandemic has had severe consequences for much of the cultural sector, book sales have had a positive development in Sweden, according to a new report from the Swedish Publishers’ Association. In the first half of 2021, overall book sales have increased by over 10 percent, but there is an ongoing shift between sales channels. The largest growth is in digital subscriptions with almost 20 percent, followed by an almost 15 percent increase in online bookstores. Physical bookstores, on the other hand, have had an 8 percent decrease in sales during the first half of this year. Both digital and printed books increased in sales, by 14 percent and 7 percent respectively, indicating that ebooks are not replacing physical books. Out of all book sales in Sweden, almost 80 percent take place online—50 percent through online bookstores and 28 percent through digital subscriptions. The report concludes that book sales have been greatly influenced by the pandemic. More customers have turned to online options, including digital subscription services. Though there are more bookstores closing down permanently than there are starting up, readers seem to be returning to physical bookstores as vaccination rates increase. READ MORE…

Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

August 18, 2021  |  in Essays, Multimedia  |  by Francesca Leveridge

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2021)

August 12, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff are publishing books and winning awards!

After organizing a #GraphPoem computational poetry event that attracted hundreds of participants and thousands of viewers at DHSI 2021, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is in the process of collaboratively starting a Digital Literature Lab at the Royal Library of Belgium on a FED-tWIN grant involving Université catholique de Louvain.

Chinese Social Media Manager Jiaoyang Li has received a China-Scotland Digital Collaboration Grant from the British Council and the City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts to work on a series of community based literary events and workshops.

Assistant Director of Outreach Ka Man Chung’s English translation of Over the Left Bank of the River by Chung Wenyin has been awarded a translation and publication grant by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. The work is expected to be released by Serenity International in 2022.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s new book Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature has just been published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short craft essay on the retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” up at Fiction Writers Review.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M.L. Martin’s collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes, won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award, and will be published later this year with Anhinga Press (USA). In addition, her anti-translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem by the anonymous, pre-10th c. proto-feminist, Wulf & Eadwacer, was named a finalist for CSU’s 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series (USA). READ MORE…

How to Start Women in Translation Month Off Right

August 5, 2021  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Stock up this August with some of our favourite presses and titles!

The impetus to read women is very similar to the desire to read the world; one does not necessarily do it out of a purely social cause—though that can hardly be argued against—but because the profound, intelligent curiosity that sustains the act of reading can only be validated by reading variously, probingly, and with an awareness of life as it is being lived now. Even as the world of letters is slowly ridding itself of entrenched biases and definitions, it remains an indisputable truth that the idea of being a woman in this world continues to throb with chaos and fragility, and increasing globalist awareness only reinforces the fact that womanhood remains replete with mystery, inquiry, and greatly variegating methods of approach.

To find the language that does justice to this experience of living—whether or not womanhood is the subject—requires a persevering intellect and originality that one finds in the greatest of minds. A reader does not pick up a work of translated literature to learn how being a woman is done in that part of the world, but to be allowed entrance into a vast, ridiculously under-explored, realm of humanity, whose inner workings often prove to be—as a result of challenges that must be overcome—intellectually complex, stylistically thrilling, and revolutionary in their uncoverings of human nature.

That is why I, for one, am grateful for the existence of causes like Women in Translation Month, which celebrates the excellent work produced by women around the world and also urges towards an increased conscientiousness about our reading choices. In solidarity with our fellow comrades who support global literature, below are some incredible opportunities you can take advantage of this August.

Many presses are currently offering promotions for the duration of WIT Month. One of our favourites, Open Letter Books, is offering a generous discount for the women-written and women-translated books in their lineup. Some recommendations I can make confidently include Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea, a gorgeously lyrical fiction of 1920s Barcelona; Marguerite Duras’ The Sailor from Gibraltar, of that terrific Durassian ardor and intimate poetry; and Can Xue’s Frontier, masterfully multilayered and graceful in its surrealism. Fum D’Estampa, a press specialising in Catalan literature, is also offering discounts on all their titles, with Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s brilliant melding of the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years among them.

The wonderful Charco Press, which time and time again has brought out exceptional Latin American works, has put together special bundles of their texts—three carefully curated sets of three books each. “Revolutions” includes Karla Suárez’s Havana Year Zero, a sharp and attentive novel about unexpected connections during Cuba’s economic crisis; “Interior Journeys” features the subversive, cerebral work of Ariana Harwicz; and lastly, “Stories of Survival” gathers narratives of persistence against violence and trauma, with Selva Almada’s incredibly powerful Dead Girls among them.

World Editions is another publisher getting it right, partnering with Bookshop to provide a list of highlighted titles. Included is Linda Boström Knausgård’s October Child, a poetic and elegant autofiction about the escaping borders of reality in her experiences with mental illness and memory loss. The Last Days of Ellis Island, the award-winning novel by Gaëlle Josse that centres around the painful tenets of migration, is also up for grabs. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 30, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Nestor Gomez, and Thirangie Jayatilake

The latest literary news from Taiwan, El Salvador, and Sri Lanka.

This week, Asymptote team members report on a Taiwanese science-fiction novel that’s caught the attention of Japan’s literary establishment, a poetic commemoration of a 1975 tragedy in El Salvador, and a Sri Lankan press that promises to be the first of its kind. Discover the latest from around the world, then catch up on this week’s blog entries, including a review of Asymptote‘s July book club pick.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

In July, Taiwanese novelist Li Kotomi (Li Qinfeng) was awarded one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Akutagawa Prize, for her novel “Higanbana ga Saku Shima” (An Island Where Red Spider Lily Blooms). The novel, which incorporates elements of science fiction, concerns a girl narrator, Umi, who drifts to an imagined island between Taiwan and Japan. The island is governed by women who lead the religious ceremonies and political affairs, while men are excluded from government. The islanders speak a language called “nihon” and another called “female language,” which can only be learned by women over a certain age and is used to pass on the history of the island. Qinfeng has remarked that for thousands of years, patriarchal societies have written official history through the perspectives of men. In this novel, she reflects on the imbalance of history-making by imagining a community where women control the writing and inheritance of history. Qinfeng’s win is unique as she is the second writer whose native tongue is not Japanese to be awarded the prize. Her accomplishment was also well received in Taiwan, where she is considered one of the first Taiwanese writers to be recognized by the Japanese literary establishment. Previous winners of the award include Mieko Kawakami for Breasts and Eggs and Hiroko Oyamada for The Hole.

Despite the recent escalation of the pandemic in Taiwan, the cultural minister Lee Yung-te emphasized that the Taiwanese arts, especially in literature, illustration, and film, continue to flourish. Literature and art museums have continued their exhibitions with COVID precautions. Notably, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature is celebrating a century of progressive literature and thinking through its exhibition, “A Century of Heartfelt Sentiment,” which started on May 8. The show is organized into a series of love letters, or writings and works from authors, painters, and other artists, focusing on six essential intellectuals of the last century. The exhibition includes the manuscripts of the poet Lai Ho, the diary of the social activist Tsai Pei-huo, the artworks of the painter Tan Ting-pho, and works of music from the era of Japanese occupation.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville

July 29, 2021  |  in Book Club  |  by Allison Braden

Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction—and the first to be translated into English—invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s The Animal Days explores young adulthood at high altitude. The narrator pursues a passion for rock climbing as she struggles to navigate a similarly perilous life at home. But the world of climbing and her escape from civilization come with their own dangers, which close in as the narrative hurtles toward a suspenseful finale.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Katakana Editores, 2021

Rock climbing invites glib metaphors. Inspirational posters—prolific in offices where the only vertical challenge is conquered at the touch of an elevator button—often use summits to symbolize widely held values like perseverance and determination, but the experience of serious climbers is anything but universal. Their insular world trades on levels of pain, risk, and anticipation foreign to the average individual. Enough time in that world can warp perceptions of the other world—the one where the rest of us live. “Thanks to the mountain, you’re able to make out the mechanisms that dictate daily life, life on land. You come back different,” explains Julia, the young narrator of The Animal Days. “Now that your battery has been recharged, now that you’ve obtained this ultraviolet vision, you carry on until you need to plug back into the mountain again. Until everything starts to lose its luster.”

The Animal Days, Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction and the first to be translated into English, invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu. Julia’s journey is a world tour of precipices, as she balances her obligations to her dying mother against an escapism inherited from her absent father. Estranged from her everyday surroundings, she finds intimacy among her climbing friends, who provide a respite from her internalized abandonment, and who alone can understand the peaks and falls of a life on ropes. They shirk steady jobs and spend their time chasing both chemical and literal highs.

READ MORE…

The Full Spectrum of Phrases: An Interview with Annie McDermott

July 28, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Sophia Stewart

I like to jump around and work on different passages at random; it’s a way of coming at them fresh and seeing what stands out.

Annie McDermott is a London-based literary translator working from Spanish and Portuguese into English, bringing to readers the works of acclaimed Spanish-language authors like Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, and Selva Almada. She now adds into her exceptional oeuvre Brenda Lozano’s Loop, a fragmented novel that takes the form of its protagonist’s personal notebook, kept while her boyfriend Jonás is away in Spain. A wonderfully wandering text that traces the myriad pathways of the mind, Loop is the English debut of one of Spanish-language literature’s rising stars and an immersive, innovative introduction to Lozano—who is already a widely influential writer in her native Mexico. I recently had the pleasure to correspond with McDermott over email, and quickly took to her; she is as excellent an epistler as she is a translator, her prose suffused with wit and poise. During our exchange, McDermott graciously shared with me her approach to dialectical difference, her fragmented method of translation, and her love of phrasal verbs. 

Sophia Stewart (SS): You translate fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese. How did you come to pursue both of these languages? What’s your literary-translation origin story? Do you find you enter a different “zone” depending on which language you’re translating?

Annie McDermott (AM): I learnt Spanish by mistake and Portuguese on purpose—or maybe “by chance” is more accurate than “by mistake.” I moved to Mexico after finishing university, on a bit of a whim, and ended up staying for a year, teaching English and learning Spanish and living the sort of bilingual life that I’d always found both completely fascinating and completely distant from my monolingual upbringing in the south of England. I realised I loved spending time in the space between languages, and that was what led me to think about translation. I then moved to Brazil, to São Paulo, with the specific aim of learning Portuguese so I could translate Brazilian literature as well.

As for the zones: I think mostly the zone depends on the text rather than the language, but the zone does change from language to language as well. I learnt both Spanish and Portuguese as an adult, and when you learn languages as an adult you often vividly remember the circumstances in which you first encountered particular words, meaning that your existence within that language is strewn with all these different memories of people, places and situations. So in a sense, switching between languages means switching between different sets of memories.

SS: Allow me to geek out for a second, because I studied Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics in undergrad. With so many regional differences in Spanish, how do you approach issues of dialect in your work? Translating, for instance, a Mexican author and an Argentine author would be totally different, from the conjugations to the slang. Did you learn a specific dialect of Spanish first, and then expand out to others from there? Do you feel most comfortable with a particular dialect?

AM: What a great thing to study! I’m jealous. Yes, there are so many regional varieties, and it’s one of the things that makes Spanish such a fascinating language. One of my favourite things is looking something up on the WordReference forum and finding an extensive thread full of people weighing in from different countries, and even different regions of different countries, each with a completely different idea of what the word means.

I learnt Spanish living in Mexico, and it’s definitely Mexican slang, rhythms, and speech patterns that I feel most comfortable with. When it comes to translating other varieties of Spanish, I think the important thing is remembering how little you know—it’s so easy to be tripped up. This is another reason why I’m in awe of people who translated before the internet; nowadays, you can watch films and videos, and read news articles, social media posts, etc. etc., from whichever region you happen to be working on, and get a feel for it that way as well. READ MORE…