What’s New in Translation: May 2025

May 12, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fani Avramopoulou, Jason Gordy Walker, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Nichole Gleisner, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, South Korea, Greece, and Poland!

This month, we’re introducing thirteen new publications from eleven different countries. A strange and visceral collection of poems that distort and reimagine the body; a contemporary, perambulating study of the contemporary city; a novel that forsakes linearity for a complex exploration of chance and coincidence; a series that splits the act of storytelling—and the storyteller—into kaleidoscopic puzzle-pieces; an intimate and unflinching look at motherhood and its disappearance of boundaries; and more. . .

Transparencies 2025 PROMO COVER

Transparencies by Maria Borio, translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2025

    Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Italian poet Maria Borio’s English debut, Transparencies, transports us to an Italy defined as much by glass, screens, and holograms as it is by history and landscape. Divided into three sections—“Distances,” “Videos, Fables,” and “Transparence”—Borio presents a world where past, present, and future converge toward an audible silence, where the self presents itself as genderless, morphable—the I becomes you becomes we becomes they—and the poet plays not a character nor a confessionalist but an airy, elegant observer, as illustrated in “Letter, 00:00 AM”:

At the end of the video, soundless voices,
hollowed-out faces scroll like the ground stumps
of legend: even people with desires

emptied like furrows in tar can carry
a fable. The screams are timbers, old water
they turn to bark, white knots, even.

Danielle Pieratti’s translations preserve the glassiness inherent in the Italian originals; she has strived for accuracy of voice and image, as evident in “Green and Scarlet” (“Verde e rosa”), an eight-part poem that considers natural, national, and human borders: “Between the trees there’s the border’s furrow / the heavy sign that stopped them / all around shapes spring up like nations.” In an interview at Words Without Borders, Borio recalls how she and Pieratti chose to use “scarlet” instead of “pink” when translating “rosa”: “ . . . in English it’s literally ‘pink,’ but . . . the color referred to the luminous atmosphere of a sunset in the woods, so ‘pink’ would have given too sharp an impression . . . Danielle came up with the word ‘scarlet,’ which . . . feels softer, more delicate, with a gradual outpouring . . . .” Such close attention to diction permeates the collection.

Although the book examines the modern world and its technology—recordings, photos, videos, cellphones—Borio refuses to be glitzy (she’s no Twitter-verse poet). Describing the London Aquatic Centre, she pens lines like, “The transparent organs overhead open / become a soft line chasing itself, / cleansing the breath’s dark colors . . .” and “Life is everywhere, in the curved line / we inhabit as though thinking.” Simultaneously detailed and abstract, her verse brings to mind Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, two influences that Pieratti mentions in her illuminating translator’s note—although there’s some European surrealism rolling through her veins, too: “The cactus spines clench their vertebra of water.” Such accents only add to her poetry’s dreamlike magnetism, its cultured mystique. READ MORE…

May 2025: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

May 10, 2025  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

An invitation to the Griffin Poetry Prize readings, as well as this month's latest opportunities in world literature!

EVENTS

GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE READINGS

The Griffin Poetry Prize, established in 2000, is the world’s most generous award for a first edition poetry collection written or translated into English. This year’s shortlisted authors—selected by judges Nick Laird, Anne Michaels, and Tomasz Różycki—along with the Lifetime Recognition Award recipient Margaret Atwood and the Canadian First Book Prize winner, who will be announced on May 21, will be invited to read at the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings on June 4 at Toronto’s Koerner Hall—an annual highlight for poetry lovers.

With C$130,000 awarded to the winner, and generous prizes for all shortlisted and recognized poets, the Griffin Poetry Prize continues to elevate exceptional poetry from around the world. Join us at Koerner Hall or tune in on YouTube and witness the world’s finest poets take the stage. Tickets to the event are available here, and you can find the livestream at this link.

 

READING AND Q&A WITH KIM HYESOON AND DON MEE CHO

The British Centre for Literary Translation invites you to an evening of reading and discussion with poets Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi on June 23rd, 2025.

National Book Award winner Don Mee Choi is a translator of the work Kim Hyesoon, one of South Korea’s most foremost feminist poets. The two will read from Hyesoon’s Griffin Prize-winning collection Autobiography of Death, which has been published in English by And Other Stories, and will discuss their work together with BCLT professor Cecilia Rossi. You can register for the event, which will take place in person, here.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 9, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from the Philippines, Canada, and Guatemala!

This week, our team members report on writers resisting governmental oppression, newly collected poems, one of the largest multilingual literary festivals in North America, and more!

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

Writer, translator, and Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women organiser Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, whose imprisonment PEN International has denounced as ‘a stark reminder of how governments silence female voices to suppress dissent’, has rolled out an unprecedented bid for the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman student council while incarcerated under questionable charges.

The 36-year-old Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Malikhaing Pagsulat (Creative Writing in Filipino) student was arrested in 2020 for alleged illegal possession of firearms—an allegation she and several civil liberties organisations say is made-up. Amanda continues to write and translate behind bars, publishing her collection of poems, prose, and plays, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation, Gantala Press) in 2023, and receiving fellowships from writing workshops like the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (which she attended virtually) in 2024. READ MORE…

The Working Class Literature Festival: Forms Worth Fighting For

May 8, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Working-class literature, then . . . confronts us not with surrender, but with the need to react.

The Working Class Literature Festival, now in its third year, is looking towards the future: one of continual resistance against capitalist oppressions, global cycles of exploitation, and the exclusivity of cultural capital. With the themes of the first two editions being Genealogies and Geographies, the varied and passionate programme of 2025 is focused on Perspectives—corralled by a defiant and buoyant slogan at its center: “We will be everything.” This year, Veronica Gisondi reports from the Festival in Florence, the persistence at its core, and the contemporary context by which writers must address our classist social reality.

A spectre is haunting a factory on the outskirts of Florence. It is the spectre of class struggle, of community, of collective care: the life force with which Campi Bisenzio’s ex-GKN factory has been brimming since the mass dismissal of its workers in 2021. Home to the longest factory occupation in Italian history, the automotive components plant has been lending its premises to the Working Class Literature Festival since 2023. With more than seven thousand people attending this year’s festival, held from April 4 to 6, the popularity of Europe’s largest working-class cultural event can be read as a symptom of our time, where a widespread sentiment of distrust and frustration toward Italy’s famously conservative literary industry meets a shared need to carve out a space to reclaim, discuss, and problematize the power of working-class writing—a writing whose words are never given, but fought for—and a strong desire for unity and change.

The three-day initiative brought together blue-collar workers, trade unionists, writers, researchers, and a diverse range of publishing industry professionals to celebrate the power of class struggle, in the factory as much as on paper. Rather than being industry-backed, state-funded, or sponsored by banks (as is usually the case for major Italian literary events), the Working Class Literature Festival is independently subsidized. Thanks to the joint efforts of Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN, SOMS Insorgiamo, Edizioni Alegre, and Arci Firenze, in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the factory was transformed from a self-contained, closed-off world into a porous space for concrete action—a space, as artistic director Alberto Prunetti said in his opening speech, “for poetry,” that is, poiesis: a process of emergence through which “things are made” and “new imaginaries” can be built. “It is our duty,” he added, “to create a future where factory work and literature can once again converge.” Inspired by the impact of the GKN workers’ ongoing struggle, the festival aims to break the boundaries of individualism and subjectivation to encourage collective forms of debate and active dissent that concern work, culture, and the publishing industry alike. As Prunetti wrote on Jacobin Italia, “one of the festival’s features is that it crosses literature and politics, and makes literature a political act.” READ MORE…

The Body as Project : A Review of Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal

May 7, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Miranda Mazariegos

Hilal’s genre-bending text is an invitation to face our fears—so that we can finally stop projecting them.

Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal, translated from the German by Elizabeth Lauffer, New Vessel Press, 2025

I have a memory. I’m about twelve years old, standing in front of a bathroom mirror, looking deeply at my body, and making a mental list of everything I could do to “improve” it. The list was ranked by struggle: the easiest came first—tasks that were beyond my control but were relatively simple (get my braces off); followed by items that would require significant effort (lose twenty pounds, maybe more). Mostly, the list lived in my head only to be recited incessantly whenever I saw myself in the mirror. Straighten curly hair. You could call them affirmations, albeit not positive ones, and always in a future tense: I will be pretty. I will be liked. Everything I hated about myself could be altered and remedied, and through this list, my body became a project.

The idea of bodies as projects is central to Moshtari Hilal’s new book, Ugliness, translated into German by Elisabeth Lauffer and published by New Vessel Press in early February. As a woman of Afghan descent now living in Berlin, Hilal examines and takes apart what she calls “the cartography of her ugliness,” an outline similar to my preteen list of remedies. “I divided my small body into enemy territories,” she writes, conducting a clinical analysis of her body and emphasizing what she considered faults. A pointed nose, an incipient mustache, a large head. The accompanying shame. However, contrary to my persistence towards the future, Hilal thoroughly stares at the past. The book begins with an all-too-common experience: childhood bullies. Looking at her school-age photos, Hilal reminisces and makes us think: Who hasn’t felt ugly at one point or the other?

Yet as the book moves forward, Hilal employs her clinical skills to take apart the concept of ugliness, leading us to its birth and attempting to understand how some of these unforgiving Western standards were created, as well as how they contribute to rejection. Sections are titled after body parts or features that can be changed, altered, modified, and reimagined to fit unattainable standards—which Hilal clarifies as being deeply entrenched in colonialism. “The notion of physical self-optimization functions as a technical extension of an ideology that upholds the necessity of shaping people into civilized modern citizens,” she writes. Blending scholarly research, sociology, history, memoir, poetry, and photography, Hilal turns her cartography (and my list) on its head, leading us down a thoughtful and compelling path. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Light in the Wound” by Evgenia Bogianou

May 6, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Gina Scarpete Walters

The fire burns within N. It burns without guilt in the wounded body.

“She was confirming her existence through pain.” With these words, Greek writer Evgenia Bogianou vividly illustrates the mind of her unnamed narrator, a small girl playing a field at the edge of town, only moments away from witnessing an encounter that will mark her for the rest of her life. Watching a man from her village make love to an unknown woman, the injured girl begins to discern the pain inherent to all desire, the wound in her knee giving way to the lifelong wound of love itself, ever present and impossible to satisfy. Rendered here in a luminous translation by Gina Scarpete Walters, this story is sure to leave you, like its narrator, caught in an impossible position: wanting to persist in a moment that must surely end. Read on!

Ν. was playing in the empty lot. She had scraped her knee, fresh blood on top of the scab. Her hand rebelliously scratched the wound. She felt pleasure from it even though she was in pain. Sometimes, the wound hurt so much that she felt the pain all the way to her head. N. wasn’t worried. She made sure that her body, her knee and everything else was hers, that’s why they hurt. She was confirming her existence through pain, despite the fact that the only thing she was doing was scratching the wound.

The empty lot was just outside the village, in an uninhabited area. If she could, N. would stay there until dawn, scraped knee and all. It was spacious there. In the village, everything was cramped—voices could be heard, the roofs were low and hung to the ground, cutting off the air, cutting off the light. But in the empty lot, the light was abundant. In the afternoons, the light fell sideways on the low fields of grass. In those moments, the grass ceased to be grass and the light, unimaginably brilliant, ceased to be light; it became something else.

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Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

May 5, 2025  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Daniel Yadin, Hilary Ilkay, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, Sauvryn Linn, and Sayani Sarkar

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

READ MORE…

Yiddish in the South: An Introduction

May 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Claire Breger-Belsky

This collection from the Yiddish Book Center highlights Yiddish works that expand the global geography of Yiddish literature to all points south.

Yiddish literature is marked by migration, yet it often finds itself deeply rooted in place—whether the place of its present or echoes of its past. Much of the Yiddish literature available in English translation centers around Eastern Europe and New York, but the geographical breadth of Yiddish speakers and writers stretches far beyond those points; as Yiddish speakers migrated beyond the language’s origins, New York was far from their only destination. In 2023 The Yiddish Book Center put out a call for submissions for new translations of Yiddish literature that would help to turn our gazes to all points south, exploring and drawing attention to some of the further locations of Yiddish-speaking diaspora. The protagonists of the translations collected here find themselves in the American South, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand—just a sampling of the many places Yiddish speakers landed—and each translation is in some way grounded in its setting.

Mina Smoler’s “Wandering,” translated by Joseph Reisberg, and Ryan Mendias’s translation of an excerpt from Peretz Hirschbein’s travelogue present temporary voyages into strange-to-them new places. Elisheva Rabinovitsh’s “The Reconciliation,” translated by Avi Blitz, reveals how different generations relate to a place where some seem far more comfortable than others. Yoske, the protagonist of Moyshe Rubenstein’s story “Mixed Blood,” translated by a trio of Avi Blitz, Deborah Hochberg, and Eric Lerman, falls comfortably into a life cut off from his past until it comes back to haunt him. And the three pieces set in Argentina—Berl Grynberg’s “Game of Life,” translated by Edith McCrea; a chapter from Mimi Pinzón’s The Courtyard without Windows, translated by Jonah Lubin; and my own translation of two poems by Yankev Flapan—portray communities and relationships that exist entirely in their present time and place. In each translation, authors and their characters explore their homes and encounter both new and familiar tensions, personal and societal.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 2, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Mary Noorlander and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary updates from the United States and North Macedonia!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on the publishing industry across the globe, from the United States to North Macedonia. In the United States, book co-op Tertulia’s virtual reading lounge features four new and exciting titles, and in North Macedonia, the latest novel of German-Macedonian author, philosopher, and artist Kitsa Kolbe sustains the momentum of the publishing scene. 

Mary Noorlander, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the United States

In a seasonal, virtual event from the Tertulia book co-op called the “First Dibs Salon,” readers from across the United States gather on Zoom to hear from the acquiring editors of notable forthcoming books. In the spring edition of this salon, editors presented four titles: Yoko by David Sheff (Simon & Schuster, March 25); Zeal by Morgan Jerkins (HarperCollins, April 22); The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (W.W. Norton, May 6); and Gulf by Mo Ogrodnik (Summit Books, May 6).

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Elementalia: Chapter IV Air

May 1, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

There was more to the word than Indra thought. There was more in the air.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Inspire, from the Latin inspirare, in- + spirare, to breathe.

 

* READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire

April 30, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

A dark chorus . . . unfurling a portrait of an unraveling community.

In Ecuadoran writer Natalia García Freire’s latest novel, A Carnival of Atrocities, rising from the landscape is a swirling, multivocal, and vivid portrait of a small town torn apart by prejudices and suspicion. There may be something rotten buried deep in the earth—but perhaps it is history itself. With an expert, distinguished lyricism translated melodiously by Victor Meadowcroft, García Freire aims her incisive sights on the violence and hatred that pervade amidst dissenting belief systems, gesturing towards the ways a limited, desperate existence can further inhibit our shortsighted perspectives.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft, World Editions, 2025

There is something about a fictional town that allows their inventors to bend the rules of everyday life—to infuse these imagined destinations with magic, tragedy, and often fear. In novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the respective towns of Macondo and Comala have become canonical spaces to reflect on death, family, faith, tradition, and the world itself. Natalia García Freire’s A Carnival of Atrocities is no exception: in the fictional town of Cocuán, myth, brutality, and poetic cruelty intertwine.

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Translation Tuesday: “An Autumn Evening’s Tale” by Okamoto Kanoko

April 29, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Elena Paulsen

...Their neighbors naturally did not suspect a thing, so they treated Father as a little girl and regarded Mother as a boy.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Okamoto Kanoko, one of several notable feminist writers who flourished in Japan’s prewar period. In “An Autumn Evening’s Tale,” translated from the Japanese by Elena Paulsen (and edited by Ella Campbell), when a family pauses on their journey back to their hometown, the parents take it as an opportunity to reveal a long-held secret. As they recount their pasts with a mixture of nostalgia and resignation, their children begin to question the underpinnings of their seemingly conventional lives. Okamoto’s equally elegant and playful tale unravels notions of gender, identity, and love against a backdrop of familial pressures and societal expectations. In doing so, she presents a vision for living true to a fluid self which is sparklingly radical even today.

A middle-aged father and mother went on a trip with their son and daughter, who were in their early twenties. 

They took lodgings at almost exactly the halfway point of their trip, a quiet hotel in a lakeside town. It was somewhere between the capital city of that country and the countryside village they had come from, a distance of one hundred and fifty leagues. 

I say “of that country”—but is it Japan or a foreign country, in the present or the past? What will the author decide? But really it doesn’t matter whether it happened in Japan or elsewhere, recently or long ago. The fact of this story, the truth of it, rides upon the craft of the author without a care for those details, and the truth is what I would like to convey to the reader. But it’s hard on anyone who might try their hand at illustrating this story, as they haven’t a clue whether to draw black eyes or blue, curly or long, straight hair. Actually it need not even be humans, it could be grass or trees or wildlife or flowers. Anything at all is fine, so long as it corresponds to the feeling that arises when reading this story. With that said, surely the skill and sensitivity of an artist is such that even with no further instructions the illustrator will be able to convey the essence of the story and have it ring true—so, with your permission, I will go ahead and begin. 

The season was autumn. The harsh evening wind had completely died down, leaving the quiet atmosphere from before what little foliage remained was jostled by the wind. The moon, bright but not too bright, came into view on the peak of the night-time mountain. From the hotel window only the edge of the lake was visible. Yet the complete serene clarity of that edge was enough to give an impression of  jade-like translucence to the whole vast surface, soothing the eyes of the four members of the family. Served in the many dinner plates that the waitstaff set upon the table were fresh, fragrant fish only just taken from the waters of the lake. Here and there amongst the plates were figs picked from the surrounding mountains, the ripe flesh of the fruit seeming fit to burst, barely covered by the glossy skin. The fruits were placed in large bowls and carried out together with strong, aromatic tea. 

—— Father. Tonight we should tell the truth about ourselves to the children, don’t you think? 

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To Neither Master Nor Be Mastered By Language: An Interview with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

April 28, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Catherine Xinxin Yu

Ghosts cross into my porous peace and poetry all the time, without my control.

“Isn’t language this delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams hovering about our eyes, this mantle, this riddle, of lifelong sleep?” writes Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng in “A Poetics of Sleep #2: the (no) center of writing,” one of two poems by the writer and translator published in Asymptote’s Winter 2025 issue. The poems, which were self-translated by the writer, inhabit shifting, liminal spaces—between sleeping and waking, between one language and another. In her translator’s note, she writes, “Self-translation is a flexible zone where I hope neither language settles into conclusiveness.” That resistance to conclusiveness is one of the joys of her poetry. In this interview, Asymptote’s Assistant Fiction Editor Catherine Xinxin Yu speaks to Nguyễn-Hoàng about the poetics of hauntings, visual symbolism in her poems, and living vigorously in translation.

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): Your poems in our Winter 2025 issue absolutely blew my mind with their oneiric flow and virtuosity. Is A Poetics of Sleep an ongoing series?

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (QNH): “A Poetics of Sleep” is sort of a triptych. The two poems on Asymptote are two out of the three panels of this sleep triptych that I wrote one sleepless night not long ago. The writing felt like one flow of breath. It was winter. I was in bed, under my soft blanket, cradled on the edge of sleep, a kind of open-eyed sleep, a very wakeful kind of sleep. So, in a way, this poetics is ongoing within me whenever I recall this strange consciousness of the body and mind falling into sleep while still writing, rambling, chanting sleep into literature.

CXY: What are the differences between translating yourself and others, and between translating into English and into Vietnamese? On a more personal note, what kind of relationship do you have with the languages you know, and what role do bilingualism and code-switching play in your life?

QNH: When I translate others, I can’t alter their original; it’s not allowed and I also don’t wish to alter the texts I translate. But when I translate myself, I often compulsively, happily, sometimes carefully, sometimes carelessly change my ‘original’ words. So, in my zone, translations and original writings live on rather permeable lands.

I speak Vietnamese and English, both of which seem to stray further and further away from my grasp the longer I live with them. Which is to say, I master neither of them. With a dictionary, I can read a few lines of Chinese and French, two languages that influenced the formation of Vietnamese, two former masters you could say. It’s hard to summarize one’s relationship with language, but since I brought up mastery, I suppose one ongoing question, for me, is how to neither master nor be mastered by language. When I write in a state between sleep and wakefulness, it feels like a way of joining the power, the magic, of language without having to work out the question of mastery, which, for me, often seems to narrow instead of expanding the heart.

CXY: I was intrigued by the recurring allusions to the supernatural and the subconscious in A Poetics of Sleep: hauntings, divination, ghost ships, ceaseless phantoms, poetry-sutras and poet-chanters, angel-ancestors + other electric apparitions, dewdreams and feverdreaminess and sleeptalking. . . Could you talk more about the poetics of hauntings and liminality in your writing?

QNH: A mouth holds many hauntings, a mouth holds many ghosts. Familial ghosts, national ghosts, literary ghosts, art historical ghosts, war ghosts, immigration ghosts. All these ghosts cross into my porous peace and poetry all the time, without my control. Ghosts and I, we learn to live together. Which I guess is what many humans do. We are remembered and joined by ghosts, which flow through us. The pains and joys of the past don’t die; they go on. They eat with us, work with us, mess with us, play with us.

CXY: I love the visual symbolism in your use of the connective/cumulative + sign and the centripetal potentiality of “the O”. How did you come up with them? Also, you marked stanzas in “a river secretes many mouths” with ascending then reversing numbers. What’s your thinking behind this?

QNH: The “O” can be the moon, the seed, the mouth, the bindi, the gourd, the belly, the omelette, the tired curl of the body asleep, all kinds of zero-degree releasements, all manners + mantras of forgetting, all the ways of tracing + saying nothing + everything at the same time. I wonder how readers mouth the “O” in their own different way. When I was a teenager, I used to smoke, and the “O,” back then, was simply the unstable shape and silent sound I made when I exhaled smoke rings into the air on some afternoon of adolescent ennui. A shape of aimless dreams. A circular shape can hold many memories.

The + sign, as a connective and cumulative kind of tissue, came from many memories and influences, one of which is the work of Rose B. Simpson, where the + signs are directional stars, efficacious as amulets. I also think of them as the memory of wounds that unmake us, the sacred scars that grow to protect us.

CXY: Could you share some works that have shaped your translation practice?

QNH: My translation practice is shaped partly by my family of polyglots. I grew up in the nineties listening to my father speaking and bowing in Japanese at work, watching my aunt and uncle reminisce about studying abroad in the Soviet Union, wondering about the life of my grandfather, an occasional translator, who co-translated Sholokhov into Vietnamese from not Russian but French. Meanwhile I myself was learning about conjugation in English from my stay-at-home mom, both of us living vigorously in translation without ever naming it as such.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer-translator and occasional art curator born in Vietnam. She is the author of Masked Force (Sàn Art, 2020), a lyrical pamphlet interleaved with the war photographs of Võ An Khánh. Her translations include Chronicles of a Village (Yale University Press, 2024) by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện and https://everything.is/ by Samuel Caleb Wee (AJAR Press, 2024). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Jacket2, Poetry, and other venues.

Catherine Xinxin Yu (she/they) is a literary translator working with English, Chinese, and Italian. She is interested in literature from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Italy, especially works that explore ecology, gender, indigeneity, and diaspora. Her translations and writing appear or are forthcoming in Asymptote, The Oxonian Review, This Is Southeast Asia, La Piccioletta Barca, and Full Stop Magazine. More about them @riso.allegro on Instagram and on www.cxxyu.eu.

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 25, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sayani Sarkar, and Wambua Muindi

The latest on book festivals in Nairobi, a spotlight on Indian crime fiction, and changes to publishing norms in Sweden.

In this round-up of literary news, our editors inform on the dialogues and contemporary themes surrounding literary festivals in Kenya; an event celebrating genre fiction in India; and what publishers are doing to switch things up in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

Book festival season is back in Nairobi, and first in line is—as always—Alliance Française’s Nyrobi Book Fest. The fourth edition of this festival, held from April 11 to 13, was a vibrant celebration of Kenyan storytelling, drawing a significant attendance under the theme “A Decade of Kenyan Stories: Past, Present and Beyond.” The festival offered a rich program, including writing masterclasses, storytelling sessions, book launches, and engaging panel discussions, between which attendees had the opportunity to connect with a diverse array of exhibitors such as Writers Space Africa-Kenya, eKitabu, Mvua Press, NAICONN, Mystery Publishers, NuriaBookstore, Writers Guild Kenya, and Jahazi Press, as well as interact with acclaimed authors like Peter Kimani, author of Dance of the Jacaranda; Billy Kahora, editor of Let Us Conspire and Other Short Stories; Iman Verjee, author of Who Will Catch Us if We Fall; Wangari the Storyteller; Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust; and Remy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One. The three-day festival particularly celebrated the creativity of young Kenyan writers, fostering inspiring conversations and discussions that underscored the dynamic landscape of Kenyan literature.

Following the Book Fest, Nairobi’s literary scene will continue to thrive with the fourth Nairobi Litfest, a festival of ideas by Bookbunk and Hay Festival, which is scheduled for June 26 to 29. Curated by Wanjeri Gakuru under the compelling theme of “exploring alternative knowledge systems,” this year’s edition will activate public spaces across the city, taking place at the McMillan Memorial Library, Eastlands Library, and Kaloleni Library. Building on the success of previous NBO Lit Fests, this edition promises a “thrilling experience” that will gather readers, thinkers, and writers for deep reflection, radical imagination, and collective action, addressing the urgent need for fresh perspectives in today’s world. READ MORE…