Happy Friday, Asymptote! Did you miss the roundup last week? The podcast went up instead, and if you missed it, take a listen (especially recommended for traffic jams and spring cleaning sessions). This episode features highlights from our fifth-anniversary New York event—FOMO, begone. READ MORE…
News
Weekly News Roundup, 18th March 2016: We Verb Hard
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Weekly News Roundup, 4th March 2016: PEN my Heart
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote readers! This week’s a doozy. It’s Women’s History Month in the United States, and to celebrate, here’s an article on translating women from the Middle East—why does it matter? (Do we even need to ask?). Sort of related: seven badass women you didn’t learn about in history class, including my favorites, Maria Sibylla Merian and Yaa Asentewaa. READ MORE…
For his collection of short stories, 37 Bridges, contributing editor Aamer Hussein won the KLF/Embassy of France prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival.
Contributing editor Adrian West’s translation of Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny (of which the first chapter appeared in Asymptote in January 2013) has just been published by David R. Godine. Read Adrian’s Q&A with Scott Esposito and his interview with Pere Gimferrer himself for World Literature Today.
For his translation of Viola Di Grado’s Hollow Heart, contributing editor Antony Shugaar was shortlisted for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize.
Brazil editor-at-large Bruna Lubato wrote an essay about the literary significance of postcards for the Ploughshares blog and also contributed to a feature, “Reading the World,” for the book review supplement of China’s Economic Observer.
Drama Editor Caridad Svich had the world premiere of her play Agua de Luna (psalms for the rouge) at Matrix Theatre in Detroit under Sherrine Azab’s direction. Find out more here.
Contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursac recently published two reviews: one of Miljenko Jergović’s The Walnut Mansion, and the other one of Julian Borger’s The Butcher’s Trail: The Secret History of the Balkan Manhunt for Europe’s Most-Wanted War Criminals. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 26th February 2016: Digi-Musee
This week's literary highlights from around the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote. We missed it last week, but here it is: friend of the blog (and source of a great deal of the roundup’s news), Michael A. Orthofer (of the Complete Review) is finally recognized as the meticulous literary heavyweight he is.
Is the future now (or never)? Here’s what robots might learn from literature, according to the Guardian (harumph). And in Paris, France, the City of Light (and Egregious Museums) is set to open a “museum of digital reading” (harumph, indeed).
In Iran, forty different media outlets have (allegedly) pooled money for British author Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, adding over six hundred thousand (!) pounds to the already-hefty sum. Meanwhile, here’s Rushdie on literature and politics—in his own words. The “Free the Word!” event at PEN International might be worth a gander for all this censorship. (Meanwhile, at the Eurovision song contest: is the Ukraine‘s submission an attack on Russia?).
Every once in a while, the non-translation media makes a revelation we knew all along. This time, it’s what we can learn by comparing translations of the Bible (via an interview with Aviya Kushner, author of the absolutely awesome translation memoir, The Grammar of God). Speaking of non-translation (but translation-friendly) texts: Lispector translator Idra Novey’s first novel, Ways to Disappear, features a “disappearing translation superhero.” And the Armenian Weekly emphasizes the point: here’s why it’s important to translate (and re-translate!) the country’s most foundational texts.
In India, there are so, so many literary festivals—about 100! The New York Times argues that these fests are more than strictly literary affairs, but occasions in which “India talks to itself.”
You may have caught the blog’s recent graphic novel in translation—here’s another kind of translation, namely that of culture shock and pictograms, by Chinese visual artist Yang Liu living in Berlin, Germany.
Happy Friday, Asymptote! This week feels like a doozy, and it was. If you’re Berlin-based (Hi, Florian!), you likely saw Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s impressive refugee-commemorating installation at the city’s Konzerthaus, furnished with lifejackets provided by the mayor of Lesbos. In that same city, in this same week (!), Berlinale, the city’s famed film festival, raises the question: why aren’t German films as good as they used to be? READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 12th February 2016: Circonflexing Muscles
This week's literary highlights from across the globe
Happy Friday, Asymptote people! Use the weekend to study for an up-to-date spelling test. This week witnessed a tragic end to that inexplicable squiggly line above (certain) vowels: the circonflexe mark (as in “î” or “û”) is going to be removed from official French orthography. And other weird French spellings (“oignon”) are going to be changed in the interest of logic (becoming “ognon”). Unsurprisingly, this #ReformeOrthographe has sparked quite the lively conversation… READ MORE…
Is Italian Literature Having Its Moment?
"...it’s worth noting that Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstein, a writer for the New Yorker, has become a household name among literary types."
Last year, a hashtag became wildly popular in the American literary scene for an author no one has seen and who writes in a foreign language.
This year, a different author—one whom everyone knows because she’s won a Pulitzer Prize, among other honors—is taking the nearly unprecedented step of publishing a memoir called In Other Words in dual language format. And—wait for it—the part of the book that contains her original manuscript isn’t in English.
The two authors have something in common: they both write in Italian. That, and they could be presiding over a renaissance in Italian literature (Well, they may be, if publishers, cultural organizations and/or the Italian government exploit this convergence. More on this later).
The first writer is the mysterious Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, celebrated on Twitter by the slogan #ferrantefever, and the second is Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born, American citizen who decamped to Rome in 2012, with the unusual project of ceasing to read and write in English. (The two have something else in common: Ann Goldstein is their Italian-English translator).
One author shooting to prominence, and shining a spotlight on Italian literature from the inside, the other already enjoying almost unparalleled prominence in American letters, choosing to embark on a courageous path—one which will almost certain provoke curiosity about Italian among non-Italian readers.
Is Italian literature, both in translation and in original form, having its moment? Oh gosh I hope so.
Weekly News Roundup, 5th February 2016: Brick and Mortar? Doubt it.
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Hi, February Asymptote friends! Can you believe we’re already a whole month plus into the New Year? (No). This week also marks the inaugurating week of Indonesia editor-at-large (and blog contributor!) Tiffany Tsao’s debut novel, The Oddfits—give it a look, and we’re sure you’ll like what you find.
You can read Tiffany’s book for free (!) if you have Amazon unlimited, but if you’re of the more old-fashioned sort, search for one of these wacko litmobiles across the globe. Meanwhile, no one seems to believe that Internetty rumor that the Internet’s best/wort behemoth, Amazon, is really planning on building hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 29 January 2015: Great on Paper
This week's literary highlights from across the world
What’s up, Asymptote friends? We’re nearing the end of January, which means this is the time for checking in on those good intentions. You might want to consider a well-intentioned check-in at Asymptote blog columnist Anaïs Duplan’s awesome Kickstarter campaign for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Iowa City. Take a look, and support friends (and friends of friends) of Asymptote blog!
Speaking of sponsorships: Scotland has inaugurated its first translation fund, which mean that English-speaking readers can expect some literature from Macedonia, Albania, Norway, and Spain (among others). And our friends at Words Without Borders have opened up nominations for the 2016 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature (past winners include Carol Brown Janeway and Sara Bershtel).
Weekly News Roundup, 22 January 2015: Armchair Travel, Twilight Bio
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote readers! If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you might be itching for warmer climes—though budgetary constraints mean that armchair travel‘s your only option. Take to this list of the Guardian‘s best-of world literature if you’d like handheld globetrotting.
We frequently report on literary awards here at the roundup—in fact, it seems like every week there’s a new accolade—but rarely do these awards go to books published over a year before. Not so for scholarly translations: an 80-year-old work of journalism and ethnography by Russian writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Moscow and the Muscovites, has snagged the 2015 AATSEEL Award for Best Scholarly Translation into English (the translator is Brendan Kiernan). Congratulations! READ MORE…
Our January 2016 Issue is Live!
Blog editors Allegra Rosenbaum, Patty Nash, and Ryan Mihaly share their favorites from our glittering 2016 issue
It’s that quarterly, magical time of year again, guys: Asymptote is loud and proud with a stellar January issue. And this is not just any issue—it’s our fifth anniversary issue, “Eternal Return,” and that means Asymptote is practically old enough to head off to kindergarten and start finger-painting and writing poetry (after winning an award a the London Book Fair and becoming a member of the Guardian books network, of course).
It couldn’t be more fitting, then, that this issue features some of our most inventive, thrilling work to date: interviews with Yann Martel and Junot Díaz, a really, really cool experimental translation feature, work and an interview with Caroline Bergvall, and writing from authors that will be sure to capture your literary imagination—like Olga Tocarczuk, who was featured on the blog in a gripping essay by her translator Jennifer Croft—or this fascinating anonymous story called “The Legend of the Dakini Ray of Sunlight (White Tārā),” handily translated from the Mongolian by Ottilie Mulzet. Really, you can’t go wrong, but we can still try to point you toward our favorite issue picks this time around: READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 15th January 2015: Hardy-Har, Mordor
This week's happy literary highlights from around the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote! Biggest big deal this week: our new issue, which features so. many. literary standouts and standouts-to-come—an interview with Junot Díaz, an essay by Ingo Schulze, writing from Sibylle Lacan, and on, and on. As per tradition, we’ll be sharing our bloggy favorites here on Monday, but you could click blindfolded and come across a gem. Happy reading!
If you’re a translator in 2016 (!), you’re sure to have a fraught relationship with Google Translate. On one hand, the mystic algorithmic Googlic properties of the service provide for an interesting alternative to the usual bilingual dictionaries we translating folk tend to turn to, but on the other hand, Google’s app supposedly threatens to bully us into irrelevance. And that’s why this glitch—in which Google Translate translated every instance of “Russia” into “Mordor,” as in The Lord of the Rings, is especially hilarious. READ MORE…
Asymptote Blog wants YOU to write on topical issues!
Asymptote blog seeks new contributions on current cultural events and political issues.
“Look at the rose through world-colored glasses,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote. In this spirit, Asymptote is now seeking (translated) poetry and nonfiction directly responding to global issues and worldwide cultural events for publication on our blog.
Subjects can vary widely: the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, the Paris attacks, the work of recent prize-winning writers, anniversaries of significant cultural events, even the release of the new Star Wars film. From politics to pop culture phenomena, we are looking for new writing on the most up-to-date global events.
Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that is translated into English, or consider how translation plays a role in these events.
The goal of this new blog series is to share responses to the most current matters from all over the world, not just its English-speaking territories, and to encourage writers of all stripes to engage with these issues and events.
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Recent highlights from the blog include:
Alberto Chimal’s essay on Star Wars (aka La guerra de las galaxias [War of the Galaxies]) in Mexico, translated by George Henson
Allegra Rosebaum’s “Spectacle Shopping,” her analysis of Black Friday through the lens of Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle
“Say Ayotzinapa,” a special feature in which David Huerta’s poem “Ayotzinapa,” written in response to mass kidnappings and killings in a small town in Guerrero, Mexico, was translated into 20 languages
Jennifer Croft’s “When an Author You Translate Gets Death Threats,” a comprehensive essay which detailed the intense online criticism of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk and Nobel-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s defense of Tokarczuk
Ryan Mihaly’s “Translating Indigenous Mexican Writers: An Interview with Translator David Shook,” posted on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which discussed the controversial holiday
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Non-fiction submissions should be no more than 1500 words. Translations into English are preferred over submissions originally in English. Send your submissions, pitches or queries to blog editors Ryan Mihaly and Patty Nash at blog@asymptotejournal.com. Send us your best, most critically engaged and creative writing on the important matters of the day. Rolling deadline.
Weekly News Roundup, 8 January 2016: Happy New Year!
This week's literary highlights from all across the world
It’s the first news roundup of the new year—and I’m still stuck in the last one: I very nearly typed “2015.” Lots of good things happened since we last caught up—not least of which that Asymptote happily reached its Indiegogo goal (“Indiegogoal?”)! This means you can look forward to our fifth-anniversary celebrations in fifteen events happening all across the globe between now and April. And don’t forget: we’ve extended the deadline for our translation contest—scramble your materials and get it together by February 1st for a chance at literary wealth, fame, and renown!