News

April 2025: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

April 13, 2025  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

From translation workshops to potential grants, we bring you the latest of this month's opportunities in translation.

EDUCATION

BRISTOL TRANSLATES

It’s that time of year again – applications are now open for the 2025 Bristol Translates Summer School!

Bristol Translates participants will have the opportunity to engage in translation workshops from a variety of languages into English, as well as a few for those working out of English. This year’s session will also include a brand-new set of workshops for translators working out of Urdu and Swedish. Another new offering this year includes the option to attend the school’s professional development sessions, even if you aren’t attending the language workshops themselves. The Summer School is aimed at translators of every level, as well as those who are simply passionate about literary translation.

Comma Press will also be presenting their 2025 Emerging Translator Award. The award is open to Bristol Translates participants working on Chinese, Urdu, and Japanese. The winning translator will be considered for publication in a future Comma Press anthology.

The sessions will take place from July 7th-11th, 2025. You can find more information on how to apply to both the workshops and the professional sessions on the Bristol Translates website. The application closes May 7th.

 

BCLT RESEARCH SEMINAR: PARATEXTS AS POLITICAL PRACTICE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA

Europe’s tides of revolution in the 18th and 19th century gave birth to new, radical translation practices—translators sought to integrate ideas of equality and freedom into new contexts within the fast-paced world of revolution, and reimagined the relationship between source and target cultures in the fight for universal rights. What emerged from these new ideas was an image of translators as agents of political and social change who actively worked to change the shape of history.

At this research seminar hosted by the British Centre of Literary Translation, Rosa Mucignat, a Reader in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and co-editor of Comparative Critical Studies, will present her research on radical translators. She is the author of  Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies and co-editor of Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives. Her work on the project ‘Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture Between Britain, France and Italy, 1789-1815’ led to a co-edited special issue of the journal History of European Ideas. The co-edited volume Radical Voices and Revolutionary Discourses of Translation is forthcoming from Routledge.

The seminar will take place Wednesday, April 30th at 4p.m. BST, and can be attended in-person or online. Register here.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 11, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, MARGENTO, and Zohra Salih

Literary updates from Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain, and India!

In this week of updates from around the world, our Editors-at-Large in Bulgaria, Ireland, and India cover events and awards around key figures in their countries’ respective literary traditions, from the legacies of monumental writers to the emergence of new and impassioned voices. 

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

I discovered Viktor Paskov, a Bulgarian writer and musician, in my early twenties. His books, which without fail reminded me of harmonically complex jazz compositions, left me enthralled and, unsurprisingly, with a wonderful melody stuck inside my head. Despite Paskov’s untimely passing at the age of 59 in 2009, his legacy is very much alive, and his work continues to inspire and stimulate the minds of his readers.

A recent example of his lingering influence is The Literature and Translation House’s announcement of the official launch of a new translation award under his name. The initiative has been made possible through a collaboration with Sofia University and, specifically, its Master’s degree program in translation and editing. According to the organizers, among them Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, a French translator specialized in the Bulgarian language, “the award’s goal is to honor texts that demonstrate an excellent command of the Bulgarian language in all of its expressive possibilities, coherence, and an ethical approach to the original text—to its rhythm, language(s), registers, historicity, images, and worlds.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 4, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Charlie Ng, and Sofija Popovska

A growing boycott movement in the Philippines, Macedonia's most prestigious poetry award, and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival!

This week, our editors bring you the latest on a prestigious poetry award in North Macedonia; a Filipino comics movement leading the boycott of the Frankfurt Book Fair; and Hong Kong’s ever-exciting and evolving international intersections in letters.

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

Throughout the years, the main event in the Macedonian literary scene has been the Struga Poetry Evenings’ awarding of the prestigious Golden Wreath, which has gone to lauded writers such as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes. This year, the prize is given to the Slovak poet Ivan Štrpka; the decision to crown him as this year’s laureate was unanimous, for his “rich, authentic and significant poetic corpus created over six decades.”

Štrpka, born in 1944, has maintained an engaged approach to art from the beginning of his career, committing himself to both moral and aesthetic values and continually incorporating contemporaneous cultural themes. In the 1960s, together with the poets Ivan Laučík and Peter Repka, he founded the poetry group Osamelí bežci (Lonely Runners), and together they composed a manifesto celebrating “freedom of thought . . . individual responsibility and the rejection of communist dictatorship and censorship”—which  was subsequently banned. (For those interested in finding out more, a documentary titled Lonely Runners: Moving On!, directed by Martin Repka, was released in 2019 and focuses on the friendship of the three members.)

Štrpka’s priorities are embodied in his writing, which illuminates—in the words of poet and member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts Katica Kulavkova—“everyday life . . . fragments [of] interpersonal relationships, the relationships between man and woman . . . individual and society . . . the physical and the emotional.” Kulavkova also notes that the “intimate, meditative, communicative . . . dimension” of Štrpka’s work is in many ways achieved via his poetic style, which she describes as “unpretentious [and] subtle” and “filled with detail.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by René Esaú Sánchez, Sayani Sarkar, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Kenya, India, and México!

This week, our editors-at-large take us to India, Kenya, and México. From a cross-cultural poetry retreat to a crime writer’s conference, read on to find out more!

Réne Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from México

Not so long ago, I was talking with some friends about the Guadalajara International Book Fair and how, for many locals, an event like that was actually their only chance to find certain books, meet certain authors and even reflect upon their literary activities. Despite the importance of the Fair, literary circulation remains centralized in Mexico City, while book commercialization in other places like Guadalajara, Monterrey, or Oaxaca is always secondary.

This is why I find it important to celebrate events like the Yucatán International Reading Fair (FILEY), which will conclude this Sunday, March 30. This year, it has hosted important authors including Cristina Rivera Garza, Verónica Murguía, Brenda Lozano, Jorge Comensal, and Xita Rubert. At the Fair, the 2025 José Emilio Pacheco Award for Excellence in Literature was presented to Alberto Ruy Sánchez, a prolific novelist who, in his unique style, shared the reasons behind his writing:

I write to know, to explore vast dimensions of reality that only literature can penetrate. I also write to remember, but no less, I write to forget. I write to extend my body, my senses, to experience the sensuality of the world day after day. I write for pleasure, for desire, for rage. To expose the falsification of icons, the abuse of public power. I write to be hated and to be loved, more so, to be desired. I write to propose new spaces in this world, to create places.

As its name suggests, FILEY has also been a space to reflect on why, how, and from where we read, something essential if we want to address the problem of cultural centralization. As María Teresa Mézquita, the Fair’s director, said in her opening remarks at the festival, beyond numbers and sales, the event is driven by a desire to foster personal growth, learning, and a cultural environment enriched precisely through reading.

It is good, as Ruy Sánchez’s remarks suggest, to know why we write; just as important is knowing why we read.

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large reporting from Kenya READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Eva Wissting, and MARGENTO

The latest in literary news from Japan, Sweden, and Scotland!

This week, the Asymptote team takes us across the globe for updates on all things literature. From the inaugural launch of a book fair in Japan, to the appearance of a popular novelist and throat singer at a book festival in Sweden, to the commemoration of a prolific poet and dear friend in Scotland, read on to learn more.

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Tomorrow, March 22, Kobe, Japan will see its first ever KOBE BOOK FAIR & MARKET, held on Rokkō Island with over sixty vendors, some bookish and some local food booths. While the majority of participating booksellers and publishers are based in the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan district, companies from across the country will amass tomorrow to promote literature and reading as part of the Kobe BOOK Culture Revitalization Project, created in response to the dwindling number of bookstores in recent years.

The fair will feature four panel events, including a tell-all on the nitty-gritty of running a bookstore and a deep dive into the production of local magazines. The former will bring together three booksellers working in markedly different environments: Tatsuya Isogami from toi books, a small local bookstore, Osamu Horiuchi from the gargantuan bookseller Junkudo, and Takashi Sesako from Page Pharmacy, a half-pharmacy-half-bookstore designed to encourage more random encounters with literature for his patients. The three will share the challenges and rewards of their respective environments and together ruminate on their role as booksellers. Later in the afternoon, Chief Editor of SAVVY and Meets Regional magazines Masaki Takemura will sit down with Youhei Sanjou of ORDINARY BOOKS to discuss the status of bookstores in the Kansai region and the intricacies of editing a magazine rooted in local life. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Ibrahim Fawzy

The latest from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Egypt!

This week, our editors report on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a profound new collaboration drawing attention to the “obliteration” in Gaza, and a movement highlighting women writers and creators in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

Last month, the six-book shortlist for the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) was announced at a press conference held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. The honored books includes two authors previously recognized by the prize: Azher Jirjees, shortlisted in 2023 for The Stone of Happiness after being longlisted in 2020, and Taissier Khalaf, longlisted in 2017 for The Slaughter of the Philosophers. Ahmed Fal Al Din, Mohamed Samir Nada, Nadia Najar, and Haneen Al-Sayegh are first-time IPAF nominees.

The shortlist for this eighteenth edition of the IPAF was revealed by this year’s Chair of Judges, Egyptian academic Mona Baker. She was joined by fellow judges—Moroccan academic and critic Said Bengrad, Emirati critic and academic Maryam Al Hashimi, Lebanese researcher and academic Bilal Orfali, and Finnish translator Sampsa Peltonen—as well as IPAF Chair of Trustees Professor Yasir Suleiman, Prize Administrator Fleur Montanaro, and Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Professor Ahmed Zayed. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Mary Noorlander

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from the Philippines to the United States for updates on literature around the globe. From an eclectic and exciting annual book festival to the grand re-opening of a local queer-owned bookstore, read on to learn more. 

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

The 2025 Philippine Book Festival (PBF) is set to take place from March 13-16 in SM Megamall’s Megatrade Hall in Mandaluyong City of the country’s capital region.

While I’m particularly excited to dive into Ang Propeta (Southern Voices, 2023), Layla Perez’s Filipino translation of Kahlil Gibran’s book of prose poems, The Prophet, the 2025 PBF lineup offers something for every participant: a cosplay event of characters from Philippine literature, panel discussions of contemporary queer and women writers, and a book talk on graphic novelist M.A. del Rosario’s Gods of Manila. The festival’s itinerary also includes a crime fiction panel, workshops on zine-making, book illustration, and writing in Baybayin (the script used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Luzon), and sessions on pitching stories to filmmakers (led by studios Gushcloud Philippines and J Creative Entertainment). Festival-goers can enjoy a poetry slam, a Balagtasan (Filipino debate using rhymed verse), and book talks with authors of boys’ love (BL) and girls’ love (GL) fiction.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Kenya, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

This week, our editors-at-large report on clashes between writers and politics, recent awards, and exciting events. From Pippi Longstocking’s 80th birthday to a brand-new book fair, read on to find out more!

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

Venko Andonovski was recently named the most influential writer and educator of 2024 by TRI, the renowned, Skopje-based publishing house. Andonovski, whose novels and plays have been translated into twelve languages, is known as “the most widely read Macedonian writer and the most performed Macedonian novelist in the last twenty years.” Despite his fame, he is generous with both the public and his colleagues: he taught six writing workshops in 2024 and made a statement congratulating fellow Macedonian author Rumena Bužarovska on being named TRI’s most-read author of 2024, and condemning the “culture of silence” surrounding the accomplishments of domestic authors in the same breath. Andonovski termed the disinterest demonstrated by Macedonian politicians towards the literary scene “an embarrassment”, adding that the situation is exacerbated by authors who are equally silent about their colleagues’ attainments, and whose “bodies are 80% water and souls are 80% vanity.” Adding that “if we remain a culture of silence, our culture is bound to remain in silence [on the world stage]”, Andonovski posed a question that is both incisive and (unfortunately) relevant: “If we do not appreciate ourselves, who will appreciate us?” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

Our editors bring you the latest from India, Mexico, and Romanian letters.

A vital new project to resurrect the works of a great Romanian poet in the English language, a slew of ambitious and global-minded book festivals in India, and a fair to highlight Oaxacan writing and languages in Mexico—our editors are bringing you the latest from a literary landscape that continues to expand in richness, variety, and intercultural exange.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

In 1889, Mihai Eminescu—the iconic late romantic/early modernist Romanian poet—died at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind only one published collection but tens of thousands of unreleased manuscripts. As they were gradually unearthed and released over the decades following his death, the posthumous publications only increased Eminescu’s fame and critical acclaim. Despite this unparalleled stature in Romanian literary history, however, the poet is relatively unknown to English-language readers—an issue that paradoxically has nothing to do with a lack of translations. In fact, a sizeable portion of Romanian and Anglophone translators and writers have tried their hand at this hugely demanding task, but they’ve all largely failed in two essential respects (to smaller or larger extents): first, in rendering the oceanic vastness and depth of the oeuvre, and, second, in capturing the exquisite euphony to an extent by which a non-Romanian reader could sense the original’s inescapable fascination.

One of the most important recent events in Romanian letters has now set out to address both those shortcomings in a spectacular fashion; K.V. Twain (Diana Cârligeanu’s pen-name), a young poet, writer, and translator educated in the US and Japan, has undertaken the task of translating Eminescu’s collected poems in an eight-volume series to be published by Eikon Press, and the first instalment was launched in January under the aegis of the Romanian Literary Translators Association in Bucharest. The association’s director, multilingual poet and performer Peter Sragher, was the event’s enthusiastic host, while literary critics Christian Crăciun and Vianu Mureșan contributed generous praise for the project.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Eva Wissting, and Miranda Mazariegos

Dispatches on the latest in literature from Palestine, Sweden, and Colombia!

In this week’s roundup, from Palestine is a report on the recent raid of a Palestinian bookstore in Jerusalem; from Sweden, the nominees for a prestigious literary award; and from Latin America, coverage of the most recent edition of the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias.

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

In a striking escalation of censorship and cultural suppression, the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem—a revered institution for intellectual exchange and a cultural cornerstone for Palestinians—was the target of an Israeli police raid. Exactly three years ago (read the AWS dispatch here), this gem on Salah al-Deen al-Ayoubi street was celebrated for its role in publishing the first-ever Arabic edition of Granta, titled “Escape.” Today, however, the narrative has shifted from escape to arrest.

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…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 24, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Linnea Gradin

The latest in literary updates from Sweden and Bulgaria!

In this week’s roundup of global literary news, our Editors-at-Large from Sweden and Bulgaria report on controversial translation practices and changes in reading preferences over the past sixteen years. Read on to learn more!

Linnea Gradin, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Sweden

Last week, the translation of American historian Timothy Snyder’s latest book, On Freedom, was published in Sweden to mixed reviews. Perhaps more interesting than the book itself, though, is the debate that the translation has caused, because, as reported by SVT, the Swedish translator has both changed the meaning of certain words and added an entirely new clause to a section on Nazism—without consulting the author.

The original:

The boys threw off what they were wearing, pushed their arms and heads into their new shirts, and suddenly looked like a team.

The Swedish (in my translation):

The boys tore off their own shirts, threw on their new ones, and suddenly looked like one “body,” in the same sense that the Nazis saw the German people as one body.

READ MORE…