Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! Another day, another dollar, another slew of literary prizes to report. This week, the PEN prizes were of special interest: Two Lines Press’ translation of Baboon, written by Danish author Naja Marie Aidt with translation by Denise Neuman has snagged the PEN Translation Prize (for a short-story excerpt from Baboon, click here!—or better yet: read Eric MIchael Becker’s exclusive interview with the author here). Meanwhile, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (for translations of German-into-English) is slated to go to Catherine Schelbert, for her translation of Hugo Ball’s Flametti. And the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize has announced its shortlist, which includes our own friend of the blog (and Tiff-ster) Susan Bernofsky, for her translation of German writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (coincidentally reviewed here in our latest issue). READ MORE…
News
Weekly News Roundup, 15th Mary 2015: PEN or Sword, Too Many Prizes
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Weekly News Roundup, 8th May 2015: Finnegan’s Woke, Emoji Language
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! While you are struggling to convince your chapbook-making friend to publish your manuscript, in Iceland there’s the opposite “problem:” are there too many books being published? (I have a hard time believing such a thing exists). Meanwhile, the International New York Times wonders who publishes the most foreign fiction stateside (answer: Amazon. But you knew that already).
Like translations? Like the Internet? We forgive you for never having completed Finnegans Wake by Irish legend James Joyce—especially since the confounding book is confounded by an exciting and experimental turn in collaborative translations and readings: take a look at Waywords & Meansigns (and keep an eye out for an interview on the blog!). It’s a book designed for the Internet, after all. Asymptote alum, contributing editor, and all-out translator celebrity Adrian Nathan West has got a new book forthcoming: The Art of Flying by Spanish graphic novelist Antonio Altaribba. Check out Words Without Borders for ten tantalizing sample pages. And if you’re interested in re-iterations of epic tomes and animation, check out these animations of Crime and Punishment, by Russian lit-demigod Fyodor Dostoyevsky. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 1 May 2015: PEN or Sword?
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy first of May, Asymptote readers! On this first of May, readers and observers are reeling at a bit of a scuffle around awards (this happens more rarely than you’d think): a few authors, among them Michael Ondaatje, Rachel Kushner, Salman Rushdie, and Joyce Carol Oates have formally withdrawn from a gala event honoring the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo with its Freedom of Expression award, citing discomfort with the periodical’s inflammatory depictions. If you’re interested in an insider look at the controversy, here’s the letter between the PEN exec and a dissident. Meanwhile, French cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo says he’s withdrawing from depictions of Mohammed altogether, for reasons you may not anticipate. And altogether less contentious is the PEN Manheim award for translation, given to Chinese and Japanese scholar/translator Burton Watson.
Weekly News Roundup, 24th April 2015: Don’t Do This Title
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote readers! We say this every week, but perhaps some new vocabulary might spice up your reading experience. We can certainly say that for short stories—steer clear from these overused titles (I’ve certainly read at least five pieces titled “Hunger”).
So many of us battle with the canon—or struggle against it. At the Millions, a piece about reading (and not-exactly re-reading) Russian behemoth’s epic literary tome, War and Peace (wonder what translation she was using?). In present tense, Joseph Brodsky is still making waves: here’s a look at his bestselling biography. And finally, if contemporary Russian literature’s more your thing, be sure to check out this bloggin’ run-down of recent Russian book prizes. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 17th April 2015: International Excellence!
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! We’ve announced it on the blog already, but still can’t stop celebrating at Asymptote having won the London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for International Literary Translation Achievement. After Indiegogo campaigns, calls for submissions, and projects spanning the entire globe in words, it feels good to be honored.
The prize—and big-time book event in London—couldn’t come at a better time, especially with the slightly disheartening release of translation statistics in the United Kingdom via Literature Across Frontiers. And at the NYBlog, Tim Parks asks if there simply is too much published fiction nowadays—one thing is certain: there isn’t enough translated literature in the English-speaking biblioglobe (not in the slightest!). And if we’re going to data-analyze the literary scene, why not the literature itself? Here’s how computer-driven literary analysis is changing (and how it’s still limited). READ MORE…
Asymptote Honored at London Book Fair 2015
Spoiler alert: we won the International Translation Initiative Award!
Greetings from sunny London!
This week is shaping up to be very exciting for Asymptote, as yesterday evening we were honoured with the 2015 London Book Fair’s International Literary Translation Initiative Award. This is undoubtedly a very momentous occasion for us, both personally and professionally, as this prestigious prize recognizes excellence in the field of literary translation, awarded to an organisation that has “succeeded in raising the profile of literature in translation, promoting literary translators, and encouraging new translators and translated works.” Not only is this the first time a Singaporean organization has been honored at the London Book Fair, but also the first time Singapore has been represented altogether. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 10th April 2015: BTBA vs. VIDA vs. IFFP?
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happy Friday! The time has finally arrived for the Best Translated Book Award longlist… After weeks of blog- and social-media hype, both the fiction and poetry longlists have been announced, and we can’t say we aren’t impressed! The lineup includes, among others, several Asymptote friends, like Faces in the Crowd author and blog contributor, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, blog interviewee and Translation Tuesday featurette Danish author Naja Marie Aidt, deceased Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (featured in another Translation Tuesday dedication), Chinese interviewee and Nobel-deserving Can Xue, and many, many more. It’s definitely worth taking a peek through the list—I’ve no idea how the judges managed to narrow it down (at Three Percent, Chad Post laments the books he thought would make it—but didn’t), nor how they’ll be able to pick a winner from such a strong group. READ MORE…
The Return of the Flood: How ISIS is Destroying Iraq’s Literary Heritage
Paul M.M. Cooper assesses the damage done to Iraqi literature and heritage by ISIS’s destruction of thousands of undeciphered cuneiform tablets.
ISIS continues to shock the world with calculated acts of cultural vandalism: taking sledgehammers and electric drills to the millennia-old pieces of art held at Mosul Museum, bulldozing the archaeological sites of Nimrud and Dur-Sharrukin, and most recently releasing a video showing the destruction of artefacts at Hatra. While the predictable images of gleeful vandalism circulate on social media, archaeologists took stock of the antiquities destroyed: statues of the kings of Hatra that form “the finest of all the sculptures unearthed” in the region, several enormous winged bulls with human heads known as lamassu, and assorted irreplaceable relics of the Babylonian, Persian and Roman Empires.
ISIS’s goals are clear: to destroy anything that hints at the region’s pluralistic past, and to strike a blow full of impotent cruelty against the Iraqi government and international organisations such as the UN and UNESCO. Against this backdrop and coupled with the stunning callousness of the group’s ongoing humanitarian atrocities, it has been easy to overlook another loss, one felt particularly acutely by lovers of international literature the world over: that of the still-undeciphered cuneiform tablets caught up in ISIS’s frenzy of destruction. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 3rd April 2015: Judges Bicker, Joke’s on You!
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Happiest of Fridays! Hard to believe we are already entering the fourth month of 2015. But this stretch of spring means we’re well into literary awards season, as well as awards-speculation. Close to our heart, Three Percent‘s Best Translated Book Award is just iiiiinches away from announcing the long-awaited longlist. Want some clues? Tickle your curiosity here and here. And the judges for the United States-based National Book Award have been announced. And in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books, judge Steven Merritt has ruffled feathers with disparaging reviews of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light we Cannot See. READ MORE…
Weekly News Roundup, 27 March 2015: The Knausgaard/Ferrante Personality Test, Leo’d Be Proud
This week's literary highlights from around the world
Whoop, whoop, blog fiends—it’s Friday! You’ve probably already partaken in your fair share of literary personality quizzes (they provide a cheap alternative to psychoanalysis when your insurance goes bad, and it’s always heartening to read you’re more of a Dumbledore than a Malfoy), but the New Yorker‘s article contrasting Italian recluse Elena Ferrante with Norwegian road-tripper Karl Ove Knausgaard is of particular interest to those of us interested in more international literary trends. (Meanwhile, if you’re excited for the English-language release of Book 4 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, you can read an exclusive excerpt here). READ MORE…
The Latest from Our Editors & Contributors
Updates from Asymptote’s international team: new publications, plays, and exhibitions for the curious reader!
Past contributor Aya Ogawa is proud to see her play Ludic Proxy near its world premiere at New York’s The Play Company. Each act of this multi-media play centers around a distinct story: Act 1, in the past, takes place in Chernobyl; Act 2, in the present, is about Fukushima; and Act 3 takes viewers to the future. The play explores our relationship to technology and is a “beautiful, haunting and magical piece that pulls you into uncharted territory where memory, fantasy and virtual reality swirl together.” First previews begin April 1, and the not-to-be-missed play runs until May 2 at WalkerSpace in TriBeCa, 46 Walker St, NYC.
“The surreal atmosphere of Self-Portrait in Green began to create disturbances in my own reality,” writes assistant editor Erin Gilbert in her review of Marie NDiaye’s obsessive memoir, now up on Brevity. She also has a poem in Issue 13 of Structo.
Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood saw her and Peter Sherwood’s translation of Ilona: My Life with the Bard published by Calypso Editions. The duo deliver a “superb translation [that] renders faithfully the sense of a woman’s world around the nostalgic period of the fin de siècle,” according to Martin Votruba of the University of Pittsburgh—just one bit of the extensive praise that Jana Juráňová’s novel-in-English-translation has received.
Weekly News Roundup, 20th March 2015: London Nominees, PEN Nominees!
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Yay, it’s Friday! Here at Asymptote we are especially giddy this weekend because of a gosh-wow shortlist nomination from the London Book Fair—alongside two other notable organizations, Asymptote journal is nominated for an International Excellence Award, for Initiative in International Translation. Keep your fingers crossed for us!—but really, it is such an honor to be recognized for the hard literary work we do. And the PEN Awards longlists have been announced—of special interest to us, of course, are the poetry in translation and fiction in translation categories (we’re happy to note that Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, blog interviewee, has been nominated—read a selection of Baboon, featured on Translation Tuesday, here)!
Weekly News Roundup, 13th March 2015: Germans hit the Prizes, Hobbit in Hawai’i
This week's literary highlights from across the world
Is it spring yet? It’s certainly Friday, and awards season at the very least: one of our favorite worldwide translation-friendly prizes, the International Foreign Fiction Prize, has announced its longlist, and we’re happy to see some familiar names on the list—of the fifteen nominees, a whopping five of them were translated from the German, including Asymptote friend and alum Susan Bernofsky! German poet Jan Wagner also snagged the top prize for Belletristik at the Leipziger Buchmesse this week, quite the feat in competition with the language’s admittedly high-powered prose! In an altogether more Anglophone bent, the National Book Critics Circle has announced its award-winners, and the list includes Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in the poetry category and LIla by Marilynne Robinson for fiction, and the United Kingdom’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced its impressive longlist. READ MORE…

