Language: Spanish

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 6, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Marina García Pardavila, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya!

In this round of weekly updates from our Editors-at-Large, we hear about literary festivals, awards, and the latest translations from North Macedonia, Spain, and Kenya! From a festival themed “Air. Wind. Breathing.” to a recently completed translation of the Bible, read on to learn more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The first weeks of autumn in North Macedonia brought exciting developments to the literary scene: the third installment of the Skopje Poetry Festival took place from September 24–28. The event spanned several venues, including the historic movie theater “Frosina”, the Skopje city library, and the bookshop-cafe “Bukva”. The festival opened with a performance entitled “Air. Wind. Breathing.”—a theme that was maintained throughout, as some of the readings were accompanied by musical improvisations with wind instruments. 

Represented at the Skopje Poetry Festival was a diverse range of cultures; Danish, Serbian, French-Syrian, Maltese, and Croatian poets gave readings alongside local authors. Aside from readings, there were screenings of several movies based on the poetry of Aco Šopov. One of the adapted poems was Horrordeath, which was featured in the Winter 2023 issue of Asymptote Journal in Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer’s translation. The screenings were followed by a musical concert, a creative writing workshop headed by Immanuel Mifsud (a Maltese author and recipient of the European Union Prize for Literature), a panel discussion on increasing the visibility of Macedonian literature abroad, and a yoga session in nature. Young Macedonian poets also had a chance to make their voices heard, during the “Springboard” event on September 24 dedicated to poets between the ages of 16 and 25.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 22, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Heloisa Selles, and MARGENTO

The latest literary news from Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Spain!

This week, our team members bring us news from around the world, from worldbuilding at a conference in Canada to reflections on the ties between Ireland and Spain. Read on for more on a bilingual publication out of Hong Kong, and Irish press publishing literature from the Romanian diaspora, and more!

Heloisa Selles, Executive Assistant, reporting from Toronto, Canada

 It was the last Saturday of August when a crowd of speculative fiction lovers gathered to attend the AugurCon, in Toronto. It was the first in-person event promoted by Augur Magazine, a biannual publication that promotes Canadian and Indigenous voices writing fantasy, science fiction, and other uncommon forms of genre fiction. As a reader and an appreciator of the strange and unusual, I knew I had to be there.

As the afternoon went by—a mild, muggy breeze bringing spurts of rain and, consequently, people in and out of the venue—I noticed my perception of neighboring urban outlines changing, shaped by the imaginative perspectives on worldbuilding the conference highlighted. Author Larissa Lai, one of the participants of “The Speculative City” panel, spoke about utopia as more than the capacity to imagine something better (or as a concept on the flip side of pessimism), but as a continuous investigation that honors the function of the dream. What is better in the dream, and for whom? “The dream as we dream it may not come to pass,” she said, “but our dreams impinge on flows.” This lyrical statement about the ethics of creation reminded me of the proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.” In SFF, creating new visions of what the world could become is also a way to keep the door open for those who will come after you, writers and readers alike.

Besides the panels, Augur also organized workshop AMAs with leading professionals in the publishing industry. I missed some discussions due to the overlapping agenda—and an enthusiastic, boisterous crowd—but I liked what I saw. I found the deliberate choice of keeping statistics out of discussion rather curious, especially in light of how BookTok helped boost sales in 2022 and fantasy genres went up 26.5% in sales in the first half of 2023, according to Publisher Weekly. Another overlooked but crucial aspect of publishing speculative fiction is the importance of funding for writers. This topic was partially addressed by a workshop about grants, which detailed the eligibility criteria for the Toronto Arts Council (TAC) Writers Program. In the federal sphere, the 2021-26 Strategic Plan created by the Canada Council for the Arts delineates how it is investing $1.6B in grants to authors to support artistic and literary creation.

The day was long and busy. As I packed up my modest book haul at the end of the one-day event, marinating in thoughts about fictional worlds, I noticed an old yearning being rekindled, the promise of being wrapped up in a fantastic story growing inside me. Maybe that is the primordial role of speculative fiction: to help us cope with real life by allowing us to step out of it, even if just for a little bit. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 15, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, José García Escobar, and Marina García Pardavila

The latest from Central America, Spain, and China!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us around the world for the latest of literary news! From a brilliant cast of Central American authors at Madrid’s upcoming literary festival, to an inside glimpse into Spain’s translation residencies, to a thought-provoking workshop at China’s aBC Art Book Fair, read on to learn more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Central America

Central America’s brightest stars are about to come together yet again!

On September 18, the latest edition of the region’s most celebrated literary festival, Centro América Cuenta, will kick off in Madrid, Spain!

This time, Centro América Cuenta will gather regional talents such as Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez (Guatemala), Cindy Regidor (Nicaragua), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), Mónica Albizúrez (Guatemala), Rodrigo Rey Rosa (Guatemala), and Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), next to Latin American and Spanish writers such as Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador) and Patricio Pron (Argentina). One high point of the festival will occur on September 18, when former president of Costa Rica, Luis Guillermo Solís, and former Guatemalan jurist living in exile, Thelma Aldana, will gather to discuss the current state of democracy in Central America.

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Translation Tuesday: “Hems” by Ana María del Río

September 12, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Justin Sergi

Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story about an odd couple. A husband is shrinking—physically eroded by the force of his domineering wife. In a lesser author’s hands, things would quickly turn risible: think grimacing stories of shrews and their nebbishes, or cheap, queasy raunch with betas and Amazons. But Chilean author Ana María del Río elevates the material by treating it with a disturbing, straight-faced intensity. Wife is elemental: she loves, cares, rages, panics, resents, and fucks with the same unremitting, meteorological violence. She is”thunderous” a natural disaster, yet possessed also of a brute guile for suffocation with which she strips her husband of his independence and dignity, as exhausted sentences attest.

Suddenly, I feel myself getting smaller. Little by little. I took my pants to the tailor to get the hem raised. She told me that it’s because of my shoes. In the summer people change to wearing low-tops or flats which make the pants seem longer. It isn’t that you’re getting smaller, she jokes, and tells me not to worry. She’s sweet. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. She raises the hem a bit anyway, just to humor me. She doesn’t seem to notice.

Still, I feel myself getting smaller. My wife tells me it’s nonsense.

It’s because of her. Each day she appears to get larger. More thunderous in her love. More outrageous in her furies. Larger eyes opening wider in the heat of more extreme panics. She’s on medication, but there are days when it doesn’t take. It’s because you don’t love me as you ought to, she says. And how ought I? Suddenly, I notice that I can barely get my arms around her, trembling with a violence I haven’t seen even in the most horrific withdrawals. Her muscles seem to slap against the bone. She kicks wildly. Her eyes, terrified, dart around the room, ah, that room, which is slowly becoming my prison. She knows. She bought padlocks for the closet. To protect us, she says, you should thank me. She fears they will come to kill her in the night. The tenants we evicted are murderers and drug-addicts, capable of anything, she says. It’s true we heard gunshots once or twice from down river. But it’s possible they were hunting rabbits. They were left homeless, after all. They were rude, she says. And if someone is rude to me, well, they’re in trouble. She hired a lawyer. Informed me we would split the bill. To throw them out. In the end, we did. All that’s missing is the judge’s order. When that day comes, she says, I’m gonna throw a fiesta. But who knows what fresh hell will arise that day. I’m exhausted, always a little more exhausted, waiting for days that never come and nice moments that only exist in the future. But she dreams of those moments constantly. When you realize all that I’ve done for you and return the favor. Scares the hell out of me. I don’t think we’re ever going to begin. Everything for us seems either to wither or to end completely. Or, in her case, to get larger. When the judge finally makes it official, I think we’re gonna find rats, huge ones, in the tenants’ place. But at least we’ll be able to go in—why are you always so negative that you have to wreck my dreams, she says. You don’t know how difficult it was to watch you fall off the wagon. Of course I know. She tells me all the time.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 8, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Carol Khoury

The latest from Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and the US!

In this round-up of literary news, our editors report to us on resilience, adaptation, and performance. In Palestine, a remarkable poet is honoured with a prestigious award; in the Philippines, literary works take to the cinema and the stage; and in Mexico City, an annual multidisciplinary book fair brings together literature, music, film, and more. 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

In the heart of a world often forgotten, where borders and conflict has created an intricate tapestry of endurance, there lives a poet named Mosab Abu Toha. He is a man of extraordinary eloquence, a lyrical visionary born amidst the chaos of Gaza. Each morning, as the sun timidly broke through the horizon, Mosab’s words flowed like a river, weaving tales of resilience and hope from the depths of despair. He perches on his metaphorical throne, the Edward Said Library, a sanctuary of knowledge he had founded in the heart of Gaza.

Mosab’s poetry is a testament to his life—marked by the relentless siege that encircled his homeland. From childhood innocence to the responsibilities of fatherhood, he had witnessed four brutal military onslaughts, yet his verses breathe with a profound humanity that refuses to wither. As Mosab’s words echoed through the world, many took notice of his poetry debut Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, (City Lights Books, 2022). He was amongst the winners of the Forty-Fourth Annual American Book Awards, announced last week. The book was also a winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Award.

Read an interview with him at PEN America’s weekly series, and a reading and discussion (video and transcript) can also be found at The Jerusalem Fund.

And far from the headlines and the spotlight, in the same enclave, three Gazan women also added their voices to the chorus of survival. Their books, A White Lie by Madeeha Hafez Albatta; Light the Road of Freedom by Sahbaa Al-Barbari; and Come My Children by Hekmat Al-Taweel, bear witness to the strength and courage of the women of Gaza, further enriching the archive of resilience. READ MORE…

Domestication: Where Love and Ownership Meet

September 6, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Charlie Ng

When companion species are left alone to live an equal life with species commonly considered “wild”, is it truly a fair and desirable situation?

In the final essay of this series taking an in-depth look at select pieces of our Spring 2023 Animal Feature, Charlie Ng discusses Marcelo Cohen’s unsettling satire, “Ruby and the Dancing Lake”, and its depiction of a world in which animals are truly free from human possession—or so it seems. By acknowledging our reality, in which “natural” alignments between wildness and domesticity no longer fit easily on a moral axis, Cohen’s story probes at the role of love in our relationships with animals, as well as the uncertain ideal of their freedom.

Can we love animals without knowing their real needs?

In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer compares the “tyranny of human over nonhuman animals” to that of racial dominance, stating that the plights of animals caused by human superiority is a moral issue no less significant than the injustice of racial discrimination. Animal vulnerability is one of the primary subjects that underlie bioethics, compelling us to respect nonhuman animals as individual beings who have an embodied existence, susceptible to suffering equal to that of human beings. While this suffering cannot be ended overnight, can literature take on the active role of imagining a world where animals live free from captivity and exploitation?

With its exploration of imagined possibilities and alternative realities, speculative fiction can be a meaningful genre that challenges readers to think more thoroughly about animal welfare and to re-examine ways of bettering human-animal relationships. “Ruby and the Dancing Lake” by Argentine novelist Marcelo Cohen, presented in Asymptote’s Spring 2023 issue, is one such example. With its strangeness and playfulness, the short story can be read as a thought experiment of animal liberation, taking place in a parallel universe where any ownership of animals is banned. However, in this realm, both animal cruelty and labour have only become more clandestine, while compassionate humans are left bereft, longing for the happiness brought by animals and their companionship. With its satirical representation, the story is not only critical of animal exploitation, but also recognises the inhumanity of attempting to sever all human-animal bonds, which may not entirely foster any deep awareness for cherishing animal lives. READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

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

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

READ MORE…

Translation as Disorder in Carlos Fonseca’s Austral

August 23, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . . disorder plagues the opening pages of the book, always in tight connection to translation.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“What is the social impact of translation?” is a question that often buzzes in my ear like a hungry mosquito, especially when I read translated books, and even more commonly when I try to teach colloquial expressions in Spanish to my non-Hispanic friends—more precisely, Spanish from Mexico City, my hometown. Immediately, attempts at clear definitions become convoluted, uncertain, ambiguous—in a word, atropellados (literally “ran over,” an adjective that refers to stumbling over words). I sound more or less like this: 

“Take ‘chido/chida/chide’ [CHEE-duh/-da/-de] (adj.). It can technically mean ‘cool,’ but also ‘good,’ ‘agreeable,’  or ‘comfortable’ (for things and places and preceded by the auxiliary verb ‘estar’); it also means ‘nice-kind-laidback-easygoing-friendly’ (for someone who meets all and every one of these attributes and with the verb ‘ser’); or ‘ok, no problem,’  and ‘thank you’ (in informal social interactions with a close friend but not necessarily an intimate one and, crucially, with an upbeat intonation)…but if you want to make things easier for you, just remember that in any colloquial situation where you would say ‘cool’ in English or the closest equivalent in your mother tongue, you can say ‘chido.’ Don’t forget to adjust the last letter for the grammatical gender of the noun, or the preferred gender of the person you are referring to. Recently, non-binary gender is expressed with an ‘e,’ but some people prefer ‘ex,’ or the feminine (a), or do not have any strong preference. When in doubt, ask.”

Similarly involved and protracted explanations often result in simpering faces and jocose efforts by my bravest friends to try out the words I share. More common, and more fun, is when friends also share their favorite colloquial untranslatables in their mother tongues, eliciting everyone’s excited perplexity and marvel at the abundance of meaning and the frustrating difficulties of carrying that meaning across languages and cultures. When we try to explain these terms, it is as though their translation abruptly hits the brakes on our language, pushing us into linguistic confusion with the inertia from the sudden interruption. In other words, translation begets disorder, upsetting the comfortable and normally thoughtless flow of everyday language. This sensation—which emerged in me after my recurrent attempts at translating colloquialisms—appears more subtly and robustly in the 2023 novel Austral by Carlos Fonseca and its translation by Megan McDowell. Disorder, Austral suggests, lies at the heart of translation’s social potential, as it makes translation (its exercise and its experience) essential for radical change.

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Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

August 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by José García Escobar

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 18, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Marina García Pardavila, and Zohra Salih

The latest in festivals, awards, and literary developments from Spain, Mexico, and India!

This week, our editors are bringing some very exciting news from the ground. In India, a working-class writer has been lauded by the prestigious Kerala Literary Academy, and a new documentary has been unveiled with one of our favourite publishers, Seagull Books, as its subject. In Mexico, the country celebrates its most promising young writers with a week-long festival. And in Spain, a comics festival sees the medium undergoing some radical new developments—including, surprisingly, a venture into audiobooks. 

Zohra Salih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Without a doubt, the most heartening literary news we received this month was that of Akhil Kavintarikath being feted by the Kerala Literary Academy. Akhil, at twenty-eight years old, won the academy’s annual Geetha Hiranyan endowment award for his 2020 short-story collection, Neelachadayan. This is an especially significant recognition because of Akhil’s unconventional background; he works as a JCB construction operator at a sand mine by night and a newspaper delivery man in the morning—quite contrary to the popular image of a young and upcoming novelist these days. As a fellow aspiring writer and friend commented while forwarding the link to the news to me, “Now we don’t have any excuses for not practicing our craft!” I completely agree, what better incentive can there be!

Akhil, who hails from a small village in Kannur in the southern state of Kerala, dropped out of school at the mere age of sixteen to support his family by doing odd jobs, all the while sustaining a deeply personal passion for literature and writing. He found inspiration in the mundane, managing to read a few lines here and there from the stories in the newspapers he would deliver, and then, with curiosity getting the better of him, filling in the blanks through inventive speculation. It was this curiosity to delve into the lives around him that drove him to write. This was further bolstered by his time spent working in the mines during night shifts, where the same imagination served as an antidote to the fear and loneliness that accompanied the dark.

Akhil has since authored Story of Lion in 2021, which draws from the ancient practice of theyyam, followed by Tharakanthan in 2022, which is inspired by the epic Ramayana; both are released by Mathrubhumi Books, one of Kerala’s foremost publishing houses. However, winning the prestigious honor has not meant that the tides have completely turned for Akhil, as the reality is that the award money is not enough for him to leave his job and commit to writing full time. This only underscores the need for more avenues in India to support such talent, through both monetary and social encouragement, lest we lose their brilliant voices to the margins.

Speaking of unconventional news, it is not often that one comes across a film celebrates an independent publishing house, so I was surprised to learn about the release of the documentary Of Books and Other Stories—but I was not surprised that the subject of this film is Seagull Books. I came across this publisher while working for the Jaipur Literary Festival in India back in 2019; Naveen Kishore, Seagull’s founder, was an important panelist for the event, and I had the privilege of witnessing his genius in person. While the saying does caution us against judging a book by its cover, I have to admit that I have often been drawn to literary works based on their aesthetics, and this is something that Seagull Publishers understands fully. Their commissioned books are works of art in themselves; you want to have one in your room as you would a gallery piece. Seagull works are distinctive, painstakingly curated, and the attention reflects in their design. The palette is astonishingly wide in breadth, with translations culled from across the world, on topics ranging from philosophy, art, theater, to literature. Fittingly, Seagull Books was awarded the Cesare De Michelis Prize this year for their contributions to the publishing world, and the film, directed by Pushan Kripalani, is an ode to this landmark literary institution, as well as to the joys of publishing and participating in the exchange of books across all barriers.

Marina García Pardavila, Editor-at-Large Spain, reporting from Spain

The Viñetas desde o Atlántico Comic Festival, which takes place in A Coruña (Spain) from August 7 to 13, has opened up its twenty-sixth edition to a striking response from the audience. Streets have been crowded and many visitors dashed to engage in the workshops, book discussions, exhibitions, and literary events organized in the city center, displaying an eager interest for the refreshing ventures of this artform—which will certainly continue to proliferate in the future. The festival highlights the narrative brilliance of authors such as David Rubín, who has been nominated four times for the Eisner Prize; the artistic couple Teresa Radice (screenwriter) and Stefano Turconi (illustrator); Emma Ríos; Xulia Vicente; Luis Yang; as well as the underground pioneers of the female scene—Ana Miralles, Roser Oduber, and Laura Pérez Vernetti. But it does not stop there; as the festival makes clear, times are changing in the comic world.

In collaboration with the actor Xosé Barato, David Rubín presented an audiobook of his last work O lume (The Fire)—his most personal comic up to this day. This new medium has the great potential to spark interest among new readers, who perhaps have not considered the comic, beyond its visual stimulation, as a thrilling opportunity to find good stories. It also fosters a more inclusive audience, as the acting work conveys a vivid feeling which mirrors the exact tone of the comic book. When the theater lit up, I witnessed an overwhelming applause, filling the room with excitement.

Laura Pérez Vernetti guided the exhibition surrounding the release of the Spanish poet Luis Alberto de Cuenca‘s comic, Vive la vida y otras poesías (To live life and other poems). The exhibition, curated by Asier Mensuro, originated from the question: “And why not meld the poetic language with the comic form?” Vernetti has a long track record in the visual translation of poetry into comic strips, having transformed Vladimir Mayakovski, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Schwob, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry into eye-catching comics.

Going along with his astonishing passion for the Greco-Roman classics, Luis Alberto de Cuenca regards comics as a perfect medium wherein the clash between high and low culture is blurred. Despite its underground beginnings, the comic form has reached outstanding recognition in the last decade. In this regard, Vernetti remarked on the anti-academicist nature and thought-provoking power behind this hybrid art.

From this quick contact with the vibrant comic industry, I dare to claim that comics are in the process of reshaping our literary landscape.

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

In recent news, the diverse literary communities in Mexico have proved that they remain vibrant and dynamic forums for both established and emerging voices. Between August 12 and 18, the prestigious cultural center, Xavier Villaurrutia, will hold the Semana de Letras Emergentes (Week of Emerging Literature). The event will give center stage to young poets from all over Mexico: Leopoldo Orozco (Baja California), Mónica Licea (Jalisco), Fabián Espejel (Ciudad de México), Marjha Paulino (Oaxaca), Rebeca Favila (Chihuahua), Delmar Penka (Chiapas-Tseltal), Luis Alberto Mendoza (Colima), Diana Mireya Tun Batún (Quintana Roo-Maya),  Ángel Vargas (Guerrero), Diana Domínguez (Oaxaca-Ayuujk), Roberto López (Tamaulipas), Gabriela Muñoz (Sinaloa), Anaid Gálvez (Hidalgo), and Yolanda Segura (Querétaro). Though all of the presenters have already shown their promise with publications of work accesible online, the most famous name in the lineup is Yolanda Segura. Self-decribed as “a lesbian-queer transfeminist writer,” she has been at the forefront of contemporary queer poetry in Mexico, with three published books under her name and a raft of prestigious awards.

Segura is from Querétaro, the state that hosts the annual Hay Festival, which just announced its lineup for this year. Running between September 7-10, the Hay will feature diverse panels, books readings, and presentations with acclaimed writers from around the world. Among the most well-known participants this year is the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, whose short stories have been featured in Asymptote several times. But the ambitious event will also feature other famous individuals from beyond the literary world. One of them is the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, known worldwide for starring in internationally acclaimed films such as Y tu mamá también and Amores Perros. Bringing together these cultural luminaries, this years’ Hay Festival is poised for an exciting and vivacious edition.

*****

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What’s New in Translation: August 2023

August 14, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison and Sofija Popovska

New work from Uruguay and South Korea!

This month, we take a look at two brilliant titles that embody the acts of interpretation and evocation. In Silvia Guerra’s poems, nature is given voice in stunning scenes of linguistic complexity. In Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s retelling of a Korean classic, beloved characters are brought to life in the graphic form. 

sea

A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, Eulalia Books, 2023 

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

What constitutes a translation? Thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan have argued that every utterance is a deeply intimate expression channeled through shared, culturally standardized verbal structures; that is to say, every time we speak, we are translating.

As with speaking, so with listening, as well. Bakhtin describes the act of conversing with someone else as a (re-)construction of our concepts upon the “alien territory” of the other’s mind. In A Sea at Dawn (Un mar en madrugada), a poetry collection originally published in 2018 and now out in English translation from Eulalia Books, the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra manages to push against even these (admittedly broad and inclusive) boundaries of defining translation. In her panoramic, evocative poems, she invites all kinds of life, organic and inorganic, to speak, thereby creating a delightfully strange linguistic landscape that is equally alien and welcoming to the voices of the world, all at once.

Given the vertiginous and heterodox nature of the book itself, it’s helpful to start with the afterword written by the translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, which illuminates the process of recasting Guerra’s captivating and difficult voice into English, and offers various ways to think about her poetry. For those that have read her in Spanish, it might seem that translating Guerra might seem an exercise in futility, leading to “disappointment and outright lamentation”; however, Kercheval and Pitas’ exquisite translation evokes neither of those things. Instead, contemplating Guerra’s intricate verbal designs allowed the translators to experience “lost and found” moments—instances where English revealed its ability to produce accomplices to Guerra’s “extremely innovative soundscapes” and formulations. Kercheval and Pitas cite an instance where they rediscovered the potential of English words to be “sonically evocative,” in which editor Michelle Gil-Montero offered “hacked in half” as a match for “pensamiento imbricado hendido”—instead of the initial idea, “thought interwoven split.” Later, quoting Walter Benjamin’s notion that “translation makes one’s native language foreign to itself,” Kercheval and Pitas’ afterword shows that reading Guerra in translation not only allows one to experience her mysterious Spanish transformed into English (A Sea at Dawn being a bilingual edition), but leaves our image of English irrevocably altered by her expansive, multipotential approach to language. READ MORE…

Summer 2023: Highlights from the Team

August 7, 2023  |  in News  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Heather Green, José García Escobar, Matilde Ribeiro, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Rachel Rankin

Still looking for entry points into our brand-new Summer issue? Members of our multi-continental team offer you several!

From the Indonesian Feature in the Summer edition, I was intrigued by the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, in vivid translations by John H. McGlynn, including “The Way to the Museum,” which begins with “All eyeballs dipped in the vinegar of the bourgeoisie will become pickled eyeballs” and continues, in long lines, to contemplate class, blindness, and revolution. It resonated against the pathos and absurdity in excerpts from Ulrike Draesner’s Schwitters, translated by Sharon Howe, and Tatiana Niculescu’s play Brancusi v. United States, fresh portraits of European Modernist artists Kurt Schwitters and Constantin Brâncuși, respectively. In each case, as the exile of the artist comes to the fore, the language of their place of origin is woven into the text, along with glimmers of humor. I particularly appreciated the note from Niculescu’s translator Amanda L. Andrei, which describes the process of working, as a heritage speaker, with her father Codin Andrei: “The emotional challenge [of translating this work] lies in my own hang-ups of being a non-native speaker due to political and historical forces beyond my control. When we co-translate, my father and I converse about Romanian culture from a perspective free of Western stereotypes of communism, vampires, and oppression, and we are delighted.” Finally, I was swept up in the atmospheric excerpt from Habib Tengour’s Women of the Odyssey (tr. Teresa Villa-Ignacio) while listening to Tengour’s mellifluous reading of the subtle text in French, describing those who console themselves by “sticking ear in seashell” or the “Unfinished / Wave bringing you to the threshold.”

—Heather Green, Visual Editor

I adore the rush of the speaker’s voice in Enrico Remmert’s The War of the Murazzi (tr. Antonella Lettieri), and its syntactical verbality, meandering but never losing control, digressing into tightness, into an accumulation of narrative stress. I love as well the narrator’s contextualisations of the backdrop of Turin and its historico-social problems with violence, particularly in a refugee context: Turin feels masterfully integrated into the plotline, like a combattant in the Murazzi war itself, and the vivacity of its violence continues running, naturalistic, organic, as the “river never stops running.”

The textuality of Mateo Díaz Choza’s Precipitations (tr. Lowry Pressly) is staggering: the dual columns that inform multiple methods of reading the poem, as well as the materiality of the poem, almost transforming it into an object itself. The way the words waterfall down the screen mimic the “drop,” a kind of fall from heaven, in a mode that lends itself to the digital form undoubtedly better than it would a magazine or a standard-format book, in the “depths of the page” that ultimately do not supercede the infinite scroll of the screen. When the poem’s substance and words meet and meld into each other, the poem’s two columns also merge into one, into the “weather,” “snow-mute” but “beautiful” in the void of its meaning. Choza creates an aesthetics of decay, of death, of abandonment, but of regeneration as well. The drop recurs again and again; the speaker will continue to recognise his lover, again and again.

I love the adventure of Amyr Klink’s One Hundred Days Between Sky and Sea (tr. Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren), the sense of movement through space and time that underpins the narrator’s paradoxical stillness, immobility. It is remininescent of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, venturing beneath the sea or into the heart of volcanoes, on a journey pushing against the boundaries of human capacity. Klink melds the joy and exuberance of a child discovering the world with a practical, didactical style of writing that underpins the veracity of his voyage. I find this piece particularly apt for Asymptote as a vessel in the sea of understanding, a buoy of translation in the archipelago of languages.

I appreciate Asymptote‘s continued dedication to featuring Ukrainian writing in each issue, particularly Ukrainian writing about the Russian invasion. In my view, this is one of the most essential tasks of literature in translation: to continually draw attention to the diversity of global experiences; to remind us that our lives are not insular, that we are not islands. To that end, I found Anton Filatov’s Finding Myself at War (tr. Patricia Dubrava) both heart-wrenching and vital. As his “eyes bleed” before the cruelty of false news stories, so do readers’ eyes before the horrors of Ukrainian soldiers’ war experiences. They are given voice not in those news stories, but in literature. Sharing their stories—and I love the detail of the abandoned cat, ironically (or not?) named Death, as well as the final section on cinema—is an act of taken care.

I find Nicole Wong’s discussion of translation theory in The Terroir of a Single Work: Redefining Scope in Approaches to Translation incredibly pertinent and eloquent, and I particularly enjoy the ‘close reading’ section where she dissects her own translation of Proust. It’s a priviledge to experience the clarity and sharpness of such a mind through this piece. Her style is reminescent of Kundera’s narrator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: playful, heavy on metaphor without falling into abstraction, clear, enlightening (and bearably so!). Since reading this piece, I’ve found myself returning to it as I internalise and integrate her analysis into my own understanding of translation.

 —Michelle Chan Schmidt, Assistant Editor (Fiction)

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