Language: Spanish

What’s New in Translation: February 2025

February 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eamon McGrath, Marcel Krueger, Rosalia Ignatova, and Xiao Yue Shan

February's latest in translation.

In this month’s round-up of recent translations, we present eleven titles from Japan, Iraq, Colombia, Indonesia, Austria, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Slovenia. From neorealist postwar fiction to the graphic novel, stories capturing the tides of time and the turbulent eras of violence, narratives of migration and mystery, innovations of the short fiction form and unconventional looks into classic tales . . . these titles are invitations into hidden places and profound sights, stark realities and dreamy visions.

aperfday

A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Other Press, 2025

Review by Rosalia Ignatova

Nanae Aoyama’s short novel, A Perfect Day to Be Alone, is the English-language debut of its lauded young author, offering a delicate exploration of existential drift through the eyes of Chizu, a restless twenty-year-old, and Ginko, her elderly relative who takes her in for a year. While the narrative is sparse on action, it is rich in atmospheric detail, focusing on the quiet moments that shape their unlikely cohabitation.

READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter I Fire

February 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Fire blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.

/

*

Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”

The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१

agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01

– The Ṛgveda

/

*

Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.

Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.

READ MORE…

Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

February 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Carissa Coane, Daniel Yadin, Devi Sastry, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sayani Sarkar

Dive into our new issue with these choice recommendations from our amazing intercontinental team!

Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.

I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.

Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”

When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.

Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”

—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 31, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, René Esaú Sánchez, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Hong Kong, Mexico, and Kenya!

This week, we mourn the loss of one of Kenya’s boldest voices in non-fiction and reportage, look in on multimedia and interdisciplinary revivals of literary works in Hong Kong, and celebrate the poetry of one’s native tongue in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

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

In Kenya, the year began on a sombre note for writers and readers, as on January 11, Rasna Warah breathed her last. Her prolific and bold body of work includes Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self-Discovery (1998), Mogadishu Then and Now: A Pictorial Tribute to Africa’s Most Wounded City (2012), War Crimes: How Warlords, Politicians, Foreign Governments and Aid Agencies Conspired to Create a Failed State in Somalia (2014), and Unsilenced: Unmasking the United Nations’ Culture of Cover-Ups, Corruption, and Impunity (2016)—this latter work stemming from her stint as an editor with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. A Kenyan of South Asian extraction, Warah was a committed social critic and brought this fire to her journalism and writing. Her courageous journalism, passionate writing in local dailies, and numerous X quips on national, regional, continental, and world politics endeared her to the digital public, where she remained active before and during her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2022. The loss of her voice and talent is immense, demonstrated by the outpouring of grief and reverential eulogies, and standing as a testament to the power of the pen. Among others, this grief was  displayed in the tribute poem by writer Tony Mochama, celebrating Warah’s career and detailing her courage and commitment to social justice. Rest in power Rasna Warah! READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

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…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

READ THE ISSUE

GET INVOLVED

What’s New in Translation: January 2025

January 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Christopher Higgs, Henry Gifford, Jordan Silversmith, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

‘My writer friends used to say: you’re writing Trainspotting in Comala’: An Interview with Mateo García Elizondo

January 8, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Elisabeth Goemans

When you're reading, you're always in that painful or uncomfortable present.

I first came across Mateo García Elizondo in the 2021 Granta issue featuring the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists; the compilation included his short story ‘Capsule’, about a man subjected to life-long, unbearable suffering in an absurd, dystopian penitentiary system. Struggling to find their way in unwelcoming environments, from outer space to the famously liminal city of Tijuana, García Elizondo’s characters are often those who are marginalised, those we don’t even bother taking pity in, those who quietly tell their story while the world refuses to listen. With empathy but without sentimentality, García Elizondo grants the reader a privileged insight in the mind of his protagonists.

How to escape the eternal, unbearable present is one of the questions guiding the protagonist in García Elizondo’s 2019 debut novel, evocatively titled Una cita con la Lady, which follows a drug addict who is ready to leave the world of the living behind. Tired of losing and hoping never to return, he travels to his final destination, the small village of El Zapotal, accompanied by the last of his opium and heroin stash. The novel explores the blurred and unidentifiable boundaries between life and death, and as the protagonist wanders through the village, unresolved heartbreak from the past imposes itself, complicating the execution of his ultimate project. Awarded the City of Barcelona Award and previously translated into Greek, Arabic, Italian, French and Portuguese, Una cita con la Lady was published in June 2024 as Last Date in El Zapotal, in the translation of Robin Myers and from the Edinburgh-based Charco Press.

It was a pleasure to talk to Mateo García Elizondo, who is a big fan of Asymptote himself. Our conversation ranged across literature, screenwriting, meditation, the richness of the Spanish language, influences, and the privilege to work on non-commissioned projects.

Elisabeth Goemans (EG): Congratulations on the English translation of your novel, Last Date in El Zapotal. It’s not the first time you have been translated.

Mateo Garcia Elizondo (MGE): Thank you. Yes, the novel has been translated into various languages now, but the only ones I have been able to read are the French, English, and Italian—as well as the Portuguese version that came out not long ago.

EG: How is your relationship with Robin Myers, your English translator?

MGE: Well, with the French and the English translation I could meddle a little bit more with the translation, and it was a great pleasure to do that with Robin. I mean, Robin does all the heavy lifting, but I always tell her what I like. Sometimes she accepts my suggestions, other times she does not. And I always trust the translator. READ MORE…

Eat Their Words: On the Translator’s Appetites

January 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Stories and poems can be shared, but voices cannot; languages can be shared, but consciousnesses cannot.

In this essay, translation is explored as a physical, materialist phenomenon. In comparing the craft of language-transformation to the corporeality of eating and digesting, the role of the translator is expanded beyond a secondary conduit of texts, and posited instead as the owners of a unique, private production.

In her Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag coined the word ‘cosmophagy’, defined as ‘the devouring of the world by consciousness’. That neologism, physiological instead of cerebral, underscores the appetite so inherent within the act of thinking, a hunger that represents the need to absorb and to take in, but also to digest and to integrate—the outside brought inside, the other made into the self. In considering the relationship between eating and reading, the most common notion is the idea of literature as somehow satiating, or the insistence that books are an essential part of livelihood—but beyond the simplistic conjecture of text as food, correlating the two human acts invites the assertion of the self as a desiring presence, and the body as a capacious methodology of transformation. By affecting our hunger onto the world, we claim a type of ownership over it, and once the materials of the world enter the realm of our senses, they change—becoming irreducibly ours.

Translators are likely to be familiar with this textual ingestion, having spent more time chewing on their words than most. After taking their meal, they are the ones who make a home for the text, carrying it for months or years, witnessing it seep into their own voice, their own imagination. ‘A translator is a professional schizophrenic. . .’ the Hungarian writer Zoltán Pék stated. ‘He is operating in an elevated state of mind,’ which is to say, a state of harbouring multiple minds. When they are humble, many translators will use terms such as I hope or I tried to speak of their work, positioning themselves as simply one flawed interpreter, seeking the approval of the authors that still live inside their heads. This lack of vanity is essential to the craft, which often forces oneself to confront one’s lack of knowledge, fluency, originality, or ability—but it must also work to emphasise the singular inventiveness of each individual translational attempt. The author may be in there, a wonderfully influential companion, but at the end of the day, it’s still your head. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

December 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Len Sander, Liliana Torpey, and Regan Mies

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

91lH9qCMjTL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_

What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, New York  Review Books, 2024 READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, José García Escobar, and Thuy Dinh

The latest from Vietnam, Central America, and the ALTA conference!

This week, read about the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, the new pathways Vietnamese writers and translators are helping to pave in the Anglosphere, as well as the new accolades, conversations, and impact of Central American literatures.

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora

Han Kang’s recent Nobel win has spurred lively discussions among writers in Vietnam and the diasporic community on how to sustain and promote Vietnamese literature beyond its national borders. Thiên Kim, co-founder of UK-based Major Books, believes it’s not a quality issue but the scarcity of works being translated into English that has prevented Asian literature from being more widely appreciated.

To rectify the situation, Major Books has teamed up with talented translators Nguyễn Bình, Đinh Ngọc Mai, and Khải Nguyễn, among others, to present a “well-rounded portrait of Vietnam while preserv[ing] the integrity and … originality of each [translated] work.” Titles to be published in 2025-2026 range from a new translation of a beloved national epic (Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều), a broad satire on sexual mores during the French colonial era (Vũ Trọng Phụng’s Making a Whore), a gritty exploration of contemporary LGBQT culture (Vũ Đình Giang’s Parallel), to a biting social critique via the lens of folklore and existentialism (The Young Die Old by Nguyễn Bình Phương). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 6, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary news from Southeast Asia, Bulgaria, and Chile!

In this week of world literature, our editors cover the influence of censorship and propaganda on literature, and look back on Southeast Asian literature released this year.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia

What a year in Southeast Asian literature! The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand took center stage in Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA)’s catalogues, with a range of texts published throughout the year. First off in March was Bleeding Sun by playwright-novelist Rogelio R. Sicat, translated by one of Sicat’s children, the translator and editor Ma. Aurora L. Sicat, from the original Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, which was serialised beginning 1965. Sicat, who came of age in the aftermath of the American Occupation, wrote novels which further revealed his belief in land reform and love for Tagalog as a literary language, veering away from his contemporaries who were influenced by Euro-American conventions.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 22, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, MARGENTO, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest from Greece, Spain, Romania, and Mexico!

This week’s literary round-up include groundbreaking publications of Romanian literature, what to look forward to in the upcoming annual Guadalajara International Book Fair, and the passing of a Greek lyrical poet. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania

It’s the age of rediscoveries and revisitings in contemporary Romanian literature, both at home and abroad. In his singular indefatigable and all-inclusive manner, past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau has launched the first volume of the monumental anthology Grandes escritores rumanos (Great Romanian Writers), previously presented on our blog. The event took place on November 15 in Madrid at the Romanian Cultural Institute, where Nicolau presented the collection together with co-editor Alba Diz Villanueva.

While introducing Romanian classics to Spanish-speaking audiences—and thus marking a huge milestone in Romanian literature in translation, the impressive release has received accolades regarding its unique approach and framework amidst the entire Spanish-speaking literary world, specifically regarding its multifaceted richness fusing translation, literary commentary, didactic utility, and cross-cultural interpollination.

Felix Nicolau has also been involved in what is perhaps this year’s most sensational rediscovery in Romanian literature: De dor de sufletul lui Andersen (On Missing Andersen’s Spirit), a collection of fairy tales by Nichita Stănescu, published by Rentrop & Straton. Nicolau authored the preface to the text, and recently contributed an astute review of the same book to the literary magazine Astra. Famously known for his neo-modernist poetry of intriguing sophisticated imagery and memorable, abstractly paradoxical formulations that both stylistically revolutionized Romanian letters in the 1970s and implicitly opposed Communist social realism, Nichita Stănescu has been rediscovered in a staggeringly surprising capacity. These one-of-a-kind fairy tales verge on potentially best-selling children’s literature without relinquishing the radically imaginative innovativeness and the hypnotizing oracular diction of his poetry, with Nicolau placing them at the crossroads of Perrault, Saint-Exupéry, and Terry Pratchett. Additionally, argues Nicolau, there is so much more to these tales, as they are informed by avant-garde poetics and retain a cultural relevance within the digital age. READ MORE…

By Way of Dreams: Annie McDermott on Translating Mario Levrero

November 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

One of Levrero’s first publishers described him as a realist writer who lives on another planet.

The world is strange, and we make it stranger by living here. Uruguayan author Mario Levrero knew that better than most, and in his debut collection of short stories, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, one is guided by extraordinary vision and delightful humour along the writer’s gallery of fantasies and absurdities, impossible events and otherworldly journeys, all of which are made real and cemented into reality by thought and emotion. In this interview, translator Annie McDermott speaks about being drawn into Levrero’s singular voice, working with co-translator Kit Schluter, and distinguishing imagination from invention.

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 USD20 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.   

Georgina Fooks (GF): How did you first encounter Mario Levrero’s work, and what drew you to his writing?

Annie McDermott (AD): It was through a series of strange coincidences—which seems fitting. I was living in Brazil at the time, and I happened to go for lunch with a Mexican writer called Juan Pablo Villalobos, who was also living in Brazil at the time, and he is a great fan of Levrero. He wrote a great piece for Granta about how he became a fan before he’d even had the chance to get his hands on any of Levrero’s books—because they used to be so hard to get hold of—and he became a fan based on the titles alone.

He recommended him to me, and I happened to be going to Uruguay on the way home from Brazil, and I picked up a copy of one of Levrero’s novels. I remember that as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I’ve never read anything else like it. He has this amazing voice, this kind of strange, absurd, quite deadpan voice that is like nothing else. It’s also very warm, and also really engaging, and also very companionable and a really pleasant narrator to spend time with.

At the same time, Juan Pablo Villalobos had also been enthusiastically recommending Levrero to Stefan [Tobler] from And Other Stories, so it all happened in parallel in a very pleasing way, and that was how I came to end up doing some samples and eventually translating Levrero’s books. READ MORE…