Dubravka Ugrešić on Asymptote: The Visa to Enter is Good Writing

August 10, 2022 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

Check out our submission guidelines and send us your best work today!

“As a reader of Asymptote, I am overjoyed to see literary texts by friends I haven’t seen for a long time, to discover new writers and new names from all over the world. Asymptote has become a literary realm in cyber space built by enthusiasts: the visa to enter is good writing.”

—Dubravka Ugrešić, winner of the 2016 Neustadt Literature Prize

Did you know that Winter in Sokcho, last year’s US National Book Award winner for Translated Literature, made its English debut in our very pages way back in 2017, and it was on the basis of that publication that translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins was able to find a publisher for her manuscript?

Asymptote is proud to be a leading purveyor of world literature—with a truly global readership that includes luminaries such as Dubravka Ugrešić. In our twelve years, we have built one of the best archives of world literature by casting our nets as far and wide as possible—not only is our team spread out across six continents, we are also open for submissions—in all the usual genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, criticism, and interviews—throughout the year. And we now guarantee a one-month turnaround time for submission outcomes, and offer optional editorial feedback so that you can grow as a translator.

If you’d like to be a part of our next issue, we encourage you to send in your best work today! Worth a special mention is our “Brave New World Literature” category, under the aegis of which we invite critical or even celebratory essays from readers, critics, authors, publishers, and of course translators discussing and problematizing the ways in which non-English texts reach Anglophone readers, perhaps envisioning a “brave new world literature.” Highlights have included Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef’s essay that fleshes out the very real challenges faced by non-white literary translators, as well as Eugene Ostashevsky’s whipsmart poems, from the current issue, that capture the translator’s liminality.

If you would like to publish in the blog instead, we welcome pieces on topics ranging from global cinema to the ethics of review to the literature of revolution. Apart from essays, we run dispatches from international literary events, interviews, weekly new translations, book reviews, and more. Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that considers the role of translation in literature, the arts, and the fabric of everyday life. We welcome pitches for the blog via email.

READ OUR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Photograph of Dubravka Ugrešić by Shevuan Williams

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Summer 2022: Highlights from the Team

August 8, 2022 | in News | by Andriana Hamas, Caridad Svich, Daniel Naman, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Liam Sprod, M.K. Harb, M.L. Martin, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

Don’t know where to begin with our latest issue? We’re here to help!

The most striking piece in this issue was Abdelfattah Kilito’s “Borges and the Blind” (tr. Ghazouane Arslane) for informing me of Borges’ deep affiliation with Arabic literature (something I wasn’t aware of before)—it opened my eyes to another dimension of Borges’ works as well as highlighted the blind spot of critics and readers of translation who might not be privy to the multifaceted aspects of the text behind the text. Cao Kou’s “The Wall Builder” (tr. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant) is a truly wonderful and chilling fable on the idea of border, i.e., a porous wall between insider and outsider, individual and the collective in a repressive society. Anna Felder’s “Unstill Life with Cat” (tr. Brian Robert Moore) is a lovely, fully immersive tale from a cat’s point-of-view. The translation is magical, wondrously immediate. I love Rose Bialer’s perceptive questions and the resulting interview with Maureen Freely for revealing how Turkey’s political situation might affect the relationship between an author and his translator, and how there are so many layers of “the other” in Turkish society.

—Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

Kelsi Vanada’s translation is itself a reflection of Andrea Chapela’s long meditation on the meaning and mechanics of mirrors, with all the inevitable subtle distortions and complex reconfigurations that Chapela elaborates on. This extended reflection employs myriad angles of vision‚ philosophy, science, toys, personal narrative, literature, and history, from which to view the significance of mirrors, the act of looking at oneself, and the act of constructing a self-image, with and without the fragmented and inevitably distorted images that mirrors provide. Juan Calzadilla’s poems from Dictated by the Pack (tr. Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott) are virtuosic translations—the complexity of the diction and rhythms as well as the subtlety of how the language accretes are very challenging to carry over into English without disrupting the balance between sense-making and surprises in the language. The lines shift across the page, like waves lapping onto the shore, as if the rhythms of thought have been recorded faithfully in their syncopated arrivals, gaps, and runnings-over. Almog Behar’s long poem “First We’ll Speak Many Words About God” (tr. Shoshana Olidort) is a meditation on religion and god, but also an interrogation of our conception of god, an interrogation of the faithful as well as the faithless. It’s subversive and yet hopeful. Sa’eed Tavana’ee Marvi’s ”The Open Tome” (tr. Khashayar Kess Mohammadi) is set in a post-apocalyptic, interplanetary, post-Earth world. The voice of the poem shifts‚ from an unnamed speaker, to a television set, to an ”Oceandweller,” to an unnamed speaker again. The experimental formatting of the poem allows the reader to shift between these different lens ratios. As such, the reader experiences a telescoping which perhaps informs the experience alluded to in the poem‚ by a visionary which either documents the future, or foretells the otherworldliness of the present moment. I really enjoyed Rose Bialer’s interview with Maureen Freely, which touches on the craft of translation, the challenges and the advantages of translating through the prism of race, gender, sexuality, etc., and what it’s like to navigate a translator-author relationship that spans two very different cultures, especially when the author in question is famous, and at certain points even infamous.

—M. L. Martin, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

I have a distinct affinity for Mitteleuropa miserablism, and this edition contains two quintessential instances of this literary tendency: Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Aaron Sayne) and Thomas Bernhard (tr. Charlie N. Zaharoff). It does not get much more central European than Austria, and the Austrians seem to have an affinity for misanthropy, self-loathing, destruction, perversity, and psychosis, but all expressed in the most perfect prose, poetry, painting, and music. Part of my love for these two writers in particular, however, is their pushing, bending, and breaking of the formal rules of language. Perhaps this formalism is my own perversity, since, as a copy-editor, I should be forcing such language back into its grammatical and syntactical straightjacket; but as much as I know and can enforce such rules in a professional manner, I thrive and find a thrill in breaking them. READ MORE…

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Summer 2022 issue
team highlights

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 5, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Cristina Pérez Díaz, Eva Wissting, and Jacqueline Leung

The latest literary news from Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the world report on book-crafting as political resistance and new poetry anthologies in Puerto Rico, a controversial book fair in Hong Kong, and the recovery after decades of a lost manuscript by a major literary figure in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Puerto Rico

The poets Nicole Delgado and Xavier Valcárcel founded Atarraya Cartonera in 2009. Making books out of discarded cardboard boxes was their response to the economic crisis just beginning to hit Puerto Rico—the result of more than a decade of neoliberal policies and obscene corruption. In the 1990s, neoliberalism had left its mark on the book market with the arrival of the gigantic US chain Borders, whose monopoly forced many small independent bookstores out of business. Borders sold books mostly in English, which clashed with the reality that Puerto Rico’s first language is Spanish and most of the population is not bilingual. In their stores, Puerto Rican literature was showcased in a small shelf under the headline, “Of local interest.” Nicole and Xavier paid frequent visits to Borders but through the back door. They took the stores’ discarded cardboard boxes to handcraft Atarraya’s own “of local interest” books. Thus, they turned book-crafting into a political gesture by looking at the neoliberal crisis, as Nicole puts it, “not as an obstacle but rather as a material to work with.” The press participated in a larger web of cardboard presses in Latin America, each in its own way a response to a national and global crisis. Atarraya was hence an effort to connect with literary movements in other parts of Latin America, something that has always been hard in Puerto Rico because of the trade limitations imposed by the US. Active until 2016, Atarraya published a total of twenty-four poetry titles, all of which are now available for free as pdfs on its archival blog.

Nicole and Xavier have continued collaborating––and dream of reviving Atarraya one day. Last month, they co-hosted a virtual editing workshop at La Impresora, a publishing press and Risograph shop founded in 2016 by Nicole with fellow poet and editor Amanda Hernández. La Impresora recently received a grant from Proyecto Inversión Cultural, which has facilitated, among other things, the offering of free workshops. The first, addressed to emerging writers without a published book, tackled the ropes of the editorial process. Together with the ten participants who were all in their early twenties, Nicole and Xavier rehearsed what goes into bookmaking, including content, conceptualization, and production. The result is a collaborative, forthcoming anthology including poems from each of the attendants. The title, Ese lugar violento que llamamos normalidad (That violent place we call normality), reveals how things have and have not changed in the ten years since Xavier and Nicole edited a first poetry anthology, back with Atarraya Cartonera. The latter’s title was Plomos (Lead Sinking Weights), a loaded word that simultaneously alludes to the small weights used for sinking the fishing net, to water contamination by lead, and to gun violence––part of Puerto Rico’s “normality.” As Nicole and Xavier write in the blog, “any relationship between that word and the violent circumstances of the country or with the contamination caused by certain heavy metals, is absolutely intentional.” Back in 2012, there was room for metaphoric language. In 2022, an emerging generation of writers names violence with even more earnest precision.

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What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2022)

August 4, 2022 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

What has our literary powerhouse of a crew been up to this past quarter? Read on to find out!

Editor-at-Large for the Philippines Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s original cross-genre work (part poem, part essay) will come out in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Virginia, USA: Stillhouse Press), which is now available for pre-order. Their translation of Filipino transgender writer and past contributor Stefani J Alvarez’s short prose has also been published in the first issue of the Oxford Anthology of Translation and their book review of Shuntaro Tanikawaz’s anthology The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952-2009 (tr. Takako U. Lento, Cornell University Press) appeared in the eleventh issue of Tokyo Poetry Journal.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently presented a #GraphPoem computational performance at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2022, #DHSI22, and contributed an article on the #GraphPoem poetics of “network walks, stigmergy, and accident in performance” to the latest issue of IDEAH.

Blog Editor Erica X Eisen has found an agent to represent her debut novel, I Come from a Cold Country. An excerpt will be published in Guernica in August 2022 under the title “To Kill a Horse.”

Incoming Nonfiction Editor Ian Ross Singleton’s novel Two Big Differences will be featured alongside The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry on Punctured Lines, the blog for post-Soviet literature.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a review of Kjell Askildsen’s “Everything Like Before” out in Full Stop and an appreciation of Aimee Bender’s short story “Off” in Fiction Writers Review.

Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis recently reviewed Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda (tr. Alison Watts), Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizu (tr. Louise Heal Kawai), and Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino (Giles Murray) for Asian Review of Books.

Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant, has translated a chapbook for Strangers Press as part of their +SVIZRA series focusing on Swiss literature. Her translation is an extract of In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic by Usama Al Shahmani, a memoir of his experiences as an Iraqi refugee newly arrived on Swiss soil.

Translation Tuesdays Editor Shawn Hoo‘s translation of Singapore Literature Prize-winning writer Wong Koi Tet’s “Turtle Fever” was recently published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation. Shawn’s debut chapbook, Of the Florids, has also recently been published by Diode Editions and is available to order here.

Interested in joining us behind the scenes? Good news: We’ve just released our final recruitment drive of the year—check out the newly available openings and submit an application today! READ MORE…

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Lee Yew Leong

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French
Japanese

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What's New with the Crew

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

August 1, 2022 | in News | by Darren Huang, Erica X Eisen, and Xiao Yue Shan

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 29, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Julia Sherwood, and Peera Songkünnatham

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

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

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

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All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

July 28, 2022 | in News | by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature

You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”

The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.

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Lee Yew Leong

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 22, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Josefina Massot, Kristina Tatarian, and Rubén López

Literary news from Argentina, Armenia, and Guatemala!

In this week’s round-up of global literary goings-on, our editors report on efforts to highlight queer Armenian literature, plurilingual Argentine writing, and a Guatemalan festival that seeks to redress fragmented memories through art and literature. Read on to find out more!

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last Thursday, New York-based writer and critic Sylvia Molloy passed away at the age of eighty-three. She was, among other things, a pioneer—the first woman to gain tenure at Princeton University back in the seventies, the first person to found a U.S. writing program in Spanish, and, perhaps most notably, the first Argentine author to really tackle LGBTTIQ+ culture in her work; her debut novel “En breve cárcel” (1981), an icon of queer literature, was written during the Argentine dictatorship and first published in Spain to avoid persecution.

Molloy established a fruitful link between queer themes and translation: “queer means twisted, weird, out of place, and if people think my texts deviate from the norm, so much the better,” she once said. “I’m interested in texts that take unusual turns, including those that go from one language to another. I’ve always had that sort of linguistic conflict, because I write in Spanish but will often explore phrases in other languages.”

Translation at large was central to Molloy, who grew up speaking Spanish, English, and French. Her short essay collection Vivir entre lenguas (Living Between Languages) is an attempt to portray this plurilingual experience. While her own English version of the work hasn’t been published in full, an excerpt did run in Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue; meanwhile, her brilliant Desarticulaciones will be released by Charco Press in both Spanish and English.

As we bid adieu to one of our greats, we also welcome a newcomer—the latest press to sprout up in Argentina’s bustling indie ecosystem. Sergio Criscolo’s Híbrida has just published its first four titles, all by South American authors: Aspas by Belén Zavallo, El placer de abandonar by Schoë Blintsjia, El corazón adelante by press co-editor Humphrey Inzillo (all three of them, Argentines), and Elis Regina, una biografía musical by the Brazilian Arthur de Faria. The first is a book of poetry; the second, a debut novel; the third, a collection of journalistic columns; the fourth, a translation into rioplatense (rather than neutral) Spanish. READ MORE…

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A Burning Poet
Centroamérica Cuenta
Charco Press
International Armenian Literary Alliance
PEN Armenia
PoLitPEN
The Hy-Phen Mag

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 15, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Eva Wissting, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in world literature from Sweden, India, and Vietnam!

This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!

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

As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.

Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 8, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Andriana Hamas and Charlie Ng

Literary festivals and publications from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the world report on literary celebrations in Bulgaria and historical archives of Chinese literature in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Plovdiv, one of Bulgaria’s oldest cities and the European Capital of Culture for 2019, recently hosted the twentieth anniversary edition of its renowned literary festival: Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”). For twenty years, the month of June has seen both established and up-and-coming authors sit side by side, trying to unravel the mysteries of the written word. Among the most notable participants this year were Zdravka Evtimova, winner of the Chudomir National Award; the writer and translator Chavdar Tsvenov; the literary historian Cleo Protohristova; the critic Boris Minkov, known for his masterful editorial skills; the publisher Svetlozar Zhelev, who takes pleasure in mediating literary friendships; and the experimental writer Rene Karabash.

Over the course of approximately two weeks, the various hosts and their audiences reviewed some of the best that contemporary Bulgarian fiction has to offer. However, the festivities weren’t restricted to the local literary stars, but also included prominent international guests such as the Ukrainian novelist Haska Shyyan—who commented on her new book in light of the dreadful developments in Ukraine that have shaken the world over the past few months. Another event of note was the special talk devoted to the twentieth-century Bulgarian poet and translator Atanas Dalchev, and the relatively unfamiliar circumstances surrounding his life in Thessaloniki and Istanbul.

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Andriana Hamas
Charlie Ng

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Chinese

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Hong Kong

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 1, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Amaryllis Gacioppo, and Katarina Gadze

The latest in world literature from Italy, the Philippines, and Croatia!

This week, our editors on the ground are bringing you news of summer literary festivities, publishers fighting back against silence, gatherings of award-winning writers, translation exhibitions, and more!

Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor, reporting from Italy

Italians are known for their ability to delight in la dolce vita, and this exuberance is never more evident than in the summer season, when the entire country throws itself into festivities. The Italian literary world is no exception: from June 9 to June 12, indie publisher festival Una marina di libri held its thirteenth edition in the massive open-air courtyard of Palermo’s Villa Filipina. Along with an indie book fair—which included publishers such as Edizioni E/O (Elena Ferrante’s Italian publisher), Iperborea (an Italian publisher specialised in translations of Northern European literature), La Nuova Frontiera (a Rome-based publisher focusing on Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language translations), and famed Palermitan publisher Sellerio—festival-goers were treated to poetry readings, music, wine, pizza, and magazine launches—such as that of Arabpop, a beguiling Italian magazine on its second issue, which is devoted to Arab art and literature. This year’s festival was dedicated to both Pier Paolo Pasolini and the thirty-year anniversary of the Capaci massacre (in which one of Palermo’s famed and beloved anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone, was murdered by Cosa Nostra, along with his wife and three police escorts). One such event featured theatre and music students from Teatro Biondo and Palermo’s Conservatory giving music-accompanied dramatic readings of pieces by Pasolini, Giuliana Saladino, and Leonardo Sciascia at various times and locations around the festival. Others featured educational talks for young people about famous anti-mafia figures including Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (Falcone’s friend and fellow beloved magistrate, murdered with five police escorts by Cosa Nostra less than two months after Falcone), and the presentation of Pietro Grasso and Alessio Pasquini’s new book Il mio amico Giovanni, in which the former spoke about his friendship with Falcone.

In other news, the shortlist for Italy’s most prestigious prize for book-length fiction, the Strega Prize, was announced on June 8. Among the nominees are Marco Amerighi, for his second novel Randagi (Strays); Fabio Bacà for his second novel Nova; Alessandra Carati for her first novel E poi saremo salvi (And then we’ll be safe); prior Strega nominee Mario Desiati for Spatriati (Patriates); Veronica Galletta for her second novel Nina sull’argine (Nina on the riverbank); Claudio Piersanti for Quel maledetto Vronskij (That damn Vronkskij); and Veronica Raimo for Niente di vero (Nothing true). I found the nominees list to be exciting, with many up-and-coming writers unearthed, along with more established writers that have yet to be appreciated in the Anglophone world. With the exception of Desiati, Piersanti, and Raimo, most are relative newcomers on their first or second book, and—with the exception of the latter two—have yet to be translated into English. READ MORE…

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Adarna House
censorship
children's literature
European Capital of Culture
Festival of the European Short Story
Goran's Spring
government attacks against bookstores and publishers
historical revisionism
independent bookstores
kleptocracy
La Solidaridad Bookshop
Literary Festival
literary workshops
Martial Law Literature
Monte Librić
online disinformation
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Popular Bookstore
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Strega Prize
Ukrainian literature
Una marina di libri

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 24, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Carol Khoury, Nestor Gomez, and Peera Songkünnatham

New poems, book fair discussions, and online publications from Thailand, El Salvador, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on an international poetry volume in support of human rights, an author talk between two Salvadoran poets, and an online exploration of the history of Jerusalem that includes a wealth of Palestinian literature. Read on to find out more!

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

Five Thai poems got a chance to shine in the company of poems in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Swahili. On June 15, the Human Rights Defenders Poetry Challenge, organized by Protection International together with its partners from ProtectDefenders.eu and the University of York, concluded with an awards ceremony and a booklet launch. As part of the #StayWithDefenders campaign, the challenge called on “all creatives, activists and advocates for human rights” to submit poems honoring those who “have suffered, succeeded, fought and fallen.” The top three winners were announced from a pool of thirty finalists, five from each of the languages. You can read the booklet here; every poem not originally in English is accompanied by an English translation. How nice it is for poets to slip through the political and poetical confines of their countries into an ad-hoc international space, at least virtually on Zoom and in translation.

“To be a poet in this country is like being in a cage,” stated Mek Krueng Fah about Thailand upon winning third place overall. His poem “Remember, we’re all by your side” (โปรดจำไว้.. เราต่างอยู่ข้างเธอ) manages to console even as it stares into an unrelenting bleakness: “On the road of fighters that will know no end, / The ones who came before lie dead, uncovered; / Their bodies caution ‘watch your step, my friend,’ / And nightly, to protect, their spirits hover.”

First place went to “The Full Truth” (Ukweli Kamili) by Martin Mwangi from Kenya. The poem deftly impersonates the flippant attitudes of shrewd politicians who speak in half-truths: “Welcome, it is here that we will give you vegetable rice while we eat pilau rice / then if you complain we’ll say be thankful at least you ate. / However, for how long shall you live with these half-truths of at least? / I don’t know, answer that yourself.” Second place was awarded to María del Campo from Uruguay, whose “To Those Afraid of Windmills” (A quienes les temen los molinos) will make human rights defenders—“those who slip through the cracks and pose a threat to the wall as bridge, brick, step, door”—feel seen and touched. READ MORE…

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 17, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Eva Wissting, and Jacqueline Leung

New books, events, and publishing houses from the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the world report on new acclaimed translations from the Philippines, Hong Kong writers discussing art-marking during political restrictions on their freedom of expression, and a new publishing house in Sweden focused on investigative journalism and books translated from Swedish. Read on to find out more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Literary translation in the Philippines is more alive than ever. Asymptote contributor Bernard Capinpin won the 2022 PEN America’s Heim Grant for his translation of the late Edel Garcellano’s sci-fi novel Maikling Imbestigasyon ng Isang Mahabang Pangungulila (Kalikasan Press, 1990) [A Brief Investigation to a Long Melancholia]. Also, obstetrician and travel writer Alice Sun Cua’s landmark project with Sto. Niño de Cebu Publishing House “ferried” post-Spanish Civil War novelist Carmen Laforet’s Nada into Hiligaynon language.

Aimed at enhancing the Filipino “diasporic cultural footprint around the world,” the country’s National Book Development Board offers translation grants to authors and publishers of children’s literature, classical and contemporary prose, graphic literature, as well as historico-cultural works written in Philippine languages (Ilocano, Cebuano, Waray, Hiligaynon, Meranaw, Tausug, and Kinaray-a) and foreign languages (German, Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese). This year, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts also conferred the Rolando S. Tinio Translator’s Prize to SEAWrite awardee Roberto T. Añonuevo for his translation of the late National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista’s phenomenological study Words and Battlefields: A Theoria on the Poem (De La Salle University Publishing House, 1998) [Mga Salita at Larangan: Isang Pagninilay sa Tula] from English.

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