Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from The Elements

June 17, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Michelle Clayton

I said I wished I had voted, and the three of them burst out laughing.

Pedro Mairal’s 2005 El año del desierto [The Elements] is a novel for our times: a beautifully-written, grippingly-narrated, and lucidly-plotted story of how easy it is for a civilization to fall back into barbarism. It begins in an Argentina in the grip of the financial, political, and social crisis of December 2001, and it goes on to narrate the collapse of civil society: a collapse that takes place over the span of a calendar year, but that involves the implacable unraveling of some five hundred years of history. As history and geography rewind beneath the feet of the nation’s horrified inhabitants, one woman lives through its regressive stages, just barely surviving to tell a tale that resonates with dystopian imaginings everywhere. It is told from a resolutely female perspective, that of the clear-eyed and plain-spoken heroine, Maria Valdés Neylan, the descendant of Irish immigrants to Argentina. (Not just any immigrants: her great-grandmother is the title character of James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” – left on the docks by Joyce, but imagined here by Mairal as having traveled on to Argentina). Maria’s narration alternates between the laconic and the lyrical, testifying in vivid and moving but never salacious ways to the violence she sees unfolding around her, and that is visited on her own body – as we see in this excerpt, in which she thinks back over the line of fierce female figures from whom she is descended, in ironic parallel with the unraveling of women’s rights in a society barreling backward.

—Michelle Clayton, translator

“The Comet”

I wasn’t able to bathe until the third day. There was a tub with cold water in a tiny room at the back of the house with a bolt on the door. It wasn’t the cleanest, and of course it was hard to see anything, but just to have some privacy felt like luxury to me; I could finally cry without being seen, not to mention take my clothes off and let down my hair. It had been months since I had done either: I always felt like I was being spied upon, with unseen men milling around me. Now I bathed standing up in the big metal tub; I washed my hair with soap, luxuriating in it despite the freezing water. Other residents sometimes left a garden hose filled with water coiled in the sun on the patio through the day, so as to have lukewarm water when they bathed in the evening. But I didn’t wait to heat up the water; as soon as I learned that the bath was free, I went straight in.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 13, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and Latin America!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on the global literary scene. In the Philippines we celebrate the anniversary of the country’s most significant superheroine, and in the United States scholars of Latin American and Caribbean literature convene to discuss methods of promoting alternative and countercultural literary production.

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

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the Philippines’ iconic komiks superheroine Darna, honouring a dramatis personae turned cultural cornerstone. Created by writer Mars Ravelo (1916-1988) and artist Nestor Redondo (1928-1995), Darna debuted on 13 May 1950 in Pilipino Komiks #77 during the ‘Golden Age of Comic Books.’ The character has since headlined fifteen movies, four primetime television series, stage plays, video games, and more, securing her status as a queer pop icon and an emblem of the nation’s unyielding spirit.

The story centres on Narda, a working-class girl with mobility impairment who transfigures into a flying superheroine by swallowing a stone carved with ‘Darna’ and shouting her name. The stone, originally from another planet, remains in her body, with only her grandmother and younger brother Ding, her sidekick, knowing her secret. José B. Capino, in Contemporary Asian Cinema (2006), outlines Darna as ‘arguably one of local cinema’s most popular and representative figures,’ comparing her with America’s Wonder Woman. Unlike Diana’s aristocratic (even demigod) roots, Narda’s working-class, disabled background reflects her Global South origins. READ MORE…

When There’s No Fog: Translating Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Rosa Mistika

June 12, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Jay Boss Rubin

I have to look back across a foggy channel of my own to explain how I came to translate this classic Swahili novel. . .

Tanzanian writer Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020) was a pioneer—for being one of the first Swahili poets to publish a collection in free verse, for greatly influencing the direction of the novel’s development in East Africa, for his efforts to “dismantle the resemblance of language to the world” by creating “a language whose foundation is being.” However, among East African readers, he is perhaps most known for his 1971 novel, Rosa Mistika, and the controversy that followed its publication; despite addressing the urgent themes of sexuality, violence, and women’s liberation with deftness and complex imagery, the book was temporarily banned due to its lack of moralizing on the part of the narrator. Now, over fifty years later, the English-language world will finally be able to read this stirring, poignant tale in Jay Boss Rubin’s deeply considered translation, out June 17 from Yale University Press.

In the following essay, Rubin ruminates on the iconic opening sentence of Rosa Mistika and takes us through some of the twists and turns in his translation process—illuminating also the long journey that each translator takes through the landscape of their vocation.

READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: My Tender Matador

June 11, 2025  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Georgina Fooks, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Xiao Yue Shan

Lemebel clearly also believed in the power of the image . . . but the film does have to contend with a material reality. . .

Pedro Lemebel, the iconic Chilean activist, essayist, and artist, wrote only one novel in his lifetime: My Tender Matador, a gloriously romantic narrative of repression, radicalisation, and infatuation. It tells the story of a trans woman—named only as the Queen of the Corner—and her brief love affair with a leftist guerilla named Carlos, taking place amidst the waning years of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime. Juxtaposed with comic passages that satirise the shallowness and greed of the dictator and his wife, the novel is a bold expression of selfhood and resilience that incisively wields Lemebel’s entrancing prose against the ugliness of tyranny.

Nearly two decades later, in 2020, Rodrigo Sepúlveda took this subversive novel to the screen, with Alfredo Castro starring as the exuberant Queen. Commenting on the material’s continual legacy and relevance, the director decisively noted Lemebel’s revered status and pivotal role: “If civil unions exist today and gay marriage is being discussed in Chile, it’s because of how Lemebel fought during the dictatorship.” One year after the film was released, Chile passed its legislation of marriage equality with an overwhelming majority.

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we discuss these two works in conversation, conjunction, and deviation, with the mediums of literature and cinema making their distinct determinations on the narrative’s conceptualisations of beauty, politicisation, and imagination.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): My tender matador! From the original Tengo miedo torero, Katherine Silver gives us an English title that preserves sound over literality, with the Spanish meaning something more like: ‘I’m afraid, bullfighter.’ These beautiful [t] and [m] alliterations anticipate the lush whirl of images that unfurl in both Pedro Lemebel’s 2001 novel—’Like drawing a sheer cloth over the past, a flaming curtain fluttering out the open window of that house in the spring of 1986. . .’—and Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s 2020 film adaptation.

Like Silver’s title, the film’s opening scene translates Lemebel’s plot for beauty over ‘faithfulness’: the scene is Sepúlveda’s own creation. It starts in media res with a drag performance in a discothèque in Santiago, Chile—all sequins, jewel-toned light, and close-ups of the enraptured, laughing audience. They include our protagonists, the Queen of the Corner and the young, mysterious, militant Carlos, who meet for the first time later that night when he saves her during a police chase.

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Talk about an elegant set-up: Sepúlveda effectively foregrounds the story’s central conflicts—on both personal and political axes—within the context of queerness and resistance in Pinochet’s authoritarian Chile, in less than a minute and in a setting that Lemebel did not write, but left to the reader’s mind. The beauty of Sepúlveda’s translation for the screen, a medium that serves visibility, hearing, and action, is also its concision. What other methods have you noticed Sepúlveda use to translate Lemebel’s text? How else has My Tender Matador molded to film?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Proper Lady” by Arbër Selmani 

June 10, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Suzana Vuljevic

Come with us, let’s shapeshift, let’s resist the expectation to be beautiful in front of the cameras

“A proper lady” (Zonja, in Albanian) is many things, but more than any other, she is expected to be obedient. For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an incendiary prose-poem against the patriarchy, written by the queer Kosovar poet Arbër Selmani and translated by Suzana Vuljevic. In this mordant poem, a chorus of unnamed women turn society’s expectations upside down, their harsh refrain of “if we were proper ladies” calling attention to the abuse and exploitation inherent in the class aspiration of being “a proper lady.” In the words of the translator: “Proper ladies in the context of the poem largely refers to the kind of women that are forced to follow the rules as it were, becoming inured to male dominion, fulfilling a submissive, obedient role, and falling prey to misogynistic men. At the same time, there is an overtly rebellious undercurrent that calls out the indecencies of societies that take advantage of, abuse and demean women.” Implicit in the poem’s collective point-of-view is an alternative aspiration, a solidarity that can resist the oppression of a misogynist society. Read on!

If we were dignified ladies, we’d have to wake up at the crack of dawn and wash the feet of the patriarchy. If we were proper ladies, we’d be off filling jugs with water, heating them up with the dark bits of our souls. If we were ladies, we’d have to be sure not to make a sound at night. We’d have to fake orgasms, swallow the pain, and then go on to tell ourselves we had it coming. If we were the kinds of ladies society wanted us to be, we’d be in the habit of rolling our eyes and accepting our husbands’ slaps like ordinary boxes of chocolate. If we were ladies, we’d have to cook around the clock to fill the hairy bellies of wretched husbands—husbands long ago turned masters.

READ MORE…

A Metaphorical Middle Finger: A Review of Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

June 9, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Linnea Gradin

She rejects the roles typically thrust on disabled people, refusing to be either an inspiration or a villain. . .

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Hogarth, 2025

Saou Ichikawa is the first disabled author to win the prestigious Akutagawa prize. The protagonist of her prize-winning novella, Hunchback, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, is Shaka, a woman who shares the same disability as the author herself: myotubular myopathy—a condition where the muscles can’t grow, preventing heart and lungs from maintaining normal oxygen saturation levels. The parallels between Shaka and the author don’t stop there but Hunchback is far from autobiographical. According to Ichikawa’s own calculations, only about 30% of the plot is based on her life; a mathematical balance that lends true authenticity to the writing, while also leaving plenty of room to push the boundaries of what the characters can say or do. And it is this blending of fact and fiction that allows debut author Ichikawa to engage in the interesting philosophical quandaries that Hunchback posits, offering a nuanced and transgressive take on disability rights, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and class. In a society that largely ignores the existence of disabled people, Hunchback demands to be heard and serves as a start to a much larger conversation about how to reconcile the freedom of choice with the freedom to a dignified life—and who gets to define what that means.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 6, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

In this week’s round-up, our editors discuss the continual relevance and essentiality of literary criticism, new projects to promote literature in translation, and a memoir that reneges on skepticism to embrace interconnectivity. 

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting for China

Last week, the ceremony of the fourteenth Tang Tao Youth Literary Research Awards took place in Shanghai, honouring five young scholars and their articles in the field of criticism, with subjects ranging from the re-interpretation of classics to the analysis of contemporary intersections between textual practice and artificial intelligence. The list of awardees included Li Jing on academic systems and knowledge transformation in the digital age; Wang Xuesong on visual forms and the construction of new poetic genres; Han Songgong on the works of novelist Bi Feiyu and their analysis of human nature; Wang Bingzhong on Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q and the procession of character development through spiritual awakening; and Li Zhuang on Cai Chongda’s “Hometown Trilogy” and the potentiality of literature being a point of stability amidst a fractured era.

The award, established by the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature and given annually to scholars under the age of forty-five, has done much to nurture emerging critics and academics since its inauguration. Named after the great twentieth-century essayist, historian, and Lu Xun expert Tang Tao, the prize aims to promote innovation and passionate diligence in the field of literary studies—qualities that awardee Wang Xuesong saw as emblematic of youth itself, commenting that scholars should continually aim for the same persistence, enthusiasm, and warmth with which they began their careers (presumably before they’re crushed by the relentless pressures and depressions of academic bureaucracy).

Literary criticism can seem elitist at best and masturbatory at worst, but anyone who’s a fan will likely understand that the hermeneutics and analysis of texts are in fact interpretations and inquisitions into our most basic interests: life, reality, and the human desire for creation. To see how we continually re-engage with classical works and their sociohistorical context with the illumination of contemporary understanding, or to gauge how our faculties of intelligence and critical thinking may be altered or recalibrated with technological developments—these are pivotal questions that move beyond the page to address themes of social conflict, societal evolution, and the ever-changing modes and methodologies of expression. In substantiating the importance of these practices, judge and professor Chen Sihe noted: ‘AI has created a greater expectation for the humanities, and only when our studies prove themselves to be irreplaceable, can they have an independent and individual existence.’ It calls into question what would qualify literary criticism to be seen as irreplaceable in the greater scope of things; anyone reading this, or anyone present for Chen’s speech that evening, would certainly agree that these studies already are irreplaceable—after all, what’s more worth studying that our most integral art of communication?—but as the underfunding of the humanities continues the legacy of scholars working in uncertainty and abject poverty, and the monstrous figure of AI continues to encroach, the growing smallness of our minority cannot be denied. READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter V Space

June 5, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Drawing the sun and the moon at the same time, drawing emptiness and fullness.

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. 

Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Space. Fall in.

 

*1

*

Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.

But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?

Yes.

–Kimura Kyoho in Kenjutsu Fushigi Hen (On the Mysteries of Swordsmanship), 1768, epigraph found
in Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style

 

Drukpa Kunley, the Master of Truth, himself said,
‘If you think I have revealed any secrets, I apologise;
If you think this a medley of nonsense, just enjoy it!’
Such sentiments, here, I fully endorse!

–The Divine Madman, The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley, compiled by Geshe Chaphu,
translated from the Tibetan by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor

READ MORE…

Death Will Come in a Single Reckoning: An Interview with Oisín Breen on the Irish Avant-Garde

June 4, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

People do, in fact, want to read and hear work that is pursuing art, first and foremost. . .

Irish poet and performer Oisín Breen’s second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was released in 2023 by Downingfield Press and has been highly praised by World Literature Today, The Scotsman, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. The collection draws on the sagas of the goddess Étaín from Irish mythology, weaving together a brocade where the mythic past meets an experimentalist future. Breen describes his work as employing ‘a smattering of other languages’ alongside English, most notably his Irish native-tongue.

Born in Dublin, Breen has established himself as a prominent voice in the Irish avant-garde, with his work featured in more than a hundred literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across over two dozen countries. He is a poet at home in the so-called ‘world republic of letters’, connecting the local with the universal. His next book, The Kerygma, is due in September through Salmon Poetry.

 In this interview, I spoke with Breen, currently in Edinburgh, about Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, his creative process, his use of language, and the intersection of myth and modernity in his work.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was re-released last year by the Melbourne-based Downingfield Press. Could you tell me about how you wrote the title poem?

Oisín Breen (OB): The title poem, ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín’, owes its genesis to the moment the curtain fell at the committal of my oldest and dearest friend’s mother.

My friend was so strong throughout the day, and in the run-up, joking, sharing, helping, always there for all those who loved his mother—including many who knew the iterations of her long before my friend was a glint in her eye. She was wise, kind, deeply loving, spiritual, playful, cheeky, mischievous, and passionate. Yet when the curtain fell, well, I saw my friend shatter, briefly, into so many pieces; but it was the way he shattered that was astoundingly beautiful. The word that came immediately to mind was ‘Godstruck’.

I knew then that I had to write this physical reality, this metaphysical reality. It had the awe of a medieval painting. It was inspiring in the truest sense of the word. So, write it I did, in my own way, weaving together myth, narrative, and a long meditation on the way in which iterations of ourselves through time form a communal being that perennially negotiates its own status as an identity creature/function/process. And then juxtaposing that with the total awegrief at a funeral, at a death, when one is present to a whole human for the first time, as they cohere slowly into a single vanished point that then branches out again into so many new forms. The fact that she who had passed was not only a mother, or a friend, she was a lover, she was sexual, she was playful, she probably carried a million doubts, and a million seeds of friendships, some of which bloomed, and some that didn’t—it is all this that I worked to try and capture, to hew and to weave, and I do hope that, in some small measure, I did. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Park Ju-taek

June 3, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Heinz Insu Fenkl

In the night, all arustle with flights of falling leaves, / the wind opens its mouth to read my eulogy / and blows my will away.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we’re presenting two highly evocative poems by Korean poet Park Ju-taek. The first, “Missteps”, portrays a group of men, “hard as insomniac stones”, whose fragile companionship seems to be threatened by an overwhelming yet nebulous existential dread. “I Am Not an Atheist” forcefully buffets us with its speaker’s emotional turmoil; a hyperawareness of “the cyanic death that comes with mortality” provokes a confrontation with the divine. But the poems escape clear interpretation, and perhaps feel most similar to paintings—the mysterious cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico or Edward Hopper come to mind. Heinz Insu Fenkl’s sensuously renders Park’s distinctive atmospheres, bringing his unsettling afterimages into high relief.

Missteps

No one kept track of the time.
The men who needed a long talk did not return to their homes.
A car drove by, its headlights on.
And then—those men of few words—disappeared into a bar;
a brief silence settled in.
It was a starless night,
our natures hard as insomniac stones
and tainted, just like the world.
One man stepped out of the bar,
and as he walked along the visible street—
the dark street, with its open lips—
he saw shadows still trapped in the bar
and insects dead on the cement floor.
The wind blew. The remaining men all rose.
Afterwards, darkness engulfed
the street toward which they walked,
their many hands fluttering in the air.

READ MORE…

Thinking through Labour: A Review of The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati 

June 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

Fortunati sweeps us into understanding the re/production economies of the housewives, the prostitutes, and the workers.

The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati, translated from the Italian by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, Verso, 2025

Earlier this year, Indian Twitter spiralled into a full-blown meltdown after Mrs., the Hindi remake of the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, was released pan-India on the streaming platform Zee5. The film provides a picture of the world of Richa, a well-educated woman who recedes into the drudgery of housework; after marriage, her dreams and desires suffocated. I could not bring myself to watch the film, but I devoured the reviews. Many hailed the movie for its realistic rage against the patriarchy, but the bones of contention that the audience picked with the film were many. One Twitter user casually remarked that if the husband is the breadwinner, the least one may expect from the wife is to do the household chores. Reading these reviews and blithe takes, I was livid, and I could not quite put a finger on why.

I found the answer, cosmologically-willed, in Leopoldina Fortunati’s work L’arcano della riproduzione (first published in 1981), rendered into English by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono as The Arcana of Reproduction. Fortunati was a key member of Lotta Femminista, initially called Movimento di Lotta Femminile (Women’s Struggle Movement), and then finally Movimento dei Gruppi e Comitati per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Movement of Groups and Committees for Wages for Housework). English-speaking countries are more familiar with its alternative name: the network of Wages for Housework. As the name suggests, the international movement had a militant and anti-capitalist dimension, and its goal to secure pay for housework aligned much with the struggles for wages that were playing out in factories and universities at large. Together with companions Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, she wrote texts that reflected the movement’s goals and ideology; her Arcana of Reproduction emerged from these reflections. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 30, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest literary news from India, Bulgaria, and Mexico!

This week, our editors-at-large interview an Indian translator to better understand the local impact of international prizes, report on the opening of an Umberto Eco-inspired bookstore in Bulgaria, and celebrate a major 20th-century writer in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kolkata

The literary community in India has been celebrating this week because Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize. This marks the second time that a book translated from an Indian language has received this prestigious award. The first was Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, which won in 2022. Anton Hur, one of the judges this year, described Heart Lamp as “daring, textured, and vital.” I wanted to find out how the book has been received in the translation community in India, so I briefly spoke with Sayari Debnath, a culture journalist at Scroll and a translator from Bengali and Hindi to English.

I asked her how the translation of Heart Lamp stands out to her compared to other recently translated books in various Asian languages. Sayari mentioned that she was quite surprised by the translation when she first read the book. “There are plenty of phrases that were translated literally and Deepa Bhasthi chose to retain some of the Kannada words too,” she said. “It took some time to get used to but as I read on, I realised what it was doing to my own tongue – there was a “chataak” in the language, or what one could also call spice/sourness/pungency. My mouth was imbued with a flavour I couldn’t really place. I thought that was quite an interesting feeling. However, I did tell Deepa that at first, I wasn’t sure about what she was trying to do. She told me she ‘translated with an accent’ — that’s new, I think.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler

May 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Gänsler compellingly blurs the lines between heroine and villain, as well as between compassion and self-preservation. . .

The still-young genre of climate fiction—or ‘cli-fi’—dreams of inspiring change, yet critics have pointed out that its overwhelmingly dystopian narratives are more likely to trigger paralysis or apathy; if we’re doomed, what’s the point? Within this contemporary affliction of passivity, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer juxtaposes its burning world with a potent human story of choice, stasis, and compassions, cementing its varied cast in an unmistakably contemporary mode, yet with the same ethical conundrums that have confounded us since time immemorial. The sheer breadth of our current problems can wither us into an insular complacency, but Gänsler powerfully points us towards the matter of our freedom. We’re delighted to present this timely novel as our Book Club selection for the month of May—it’s a hot one.

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.   

Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler, translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, Other Press, 2025

Once upon a time, the promise of an eternal summer may have seemed idyllic. In the popular imagination, the season has so often signified carefree vacations, sandy shores and glittering waters, balmy nights and languid mornings, the well-deserved time-out from a life of hard work or study. But it’s 2025. Summers have become increasingly hot. And long. And dry. I can vividly remember the eerie smog and the smell of smoke in the air as the 2019-20 bushfires raged across the southeast of Australia; even though I was hundreds of kilometres from any active fires, I had my first, pre-COVID experience of donning a mask for daily activities. Holidays were cancelled. New Year’s celebrations abandoned. Beach towns evacuated. This is the summer of our times—and sometimes even winter, too; just this January, southern California saw wildfires spreading into urban areas, decimating homes and taking lives and livelihoods, while less well-publicised infernos have also blazed through parts of South Korea and South Africa.

Somewhere in what seems to be Bavaria, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer is sweltering a few years from now, in a future where the climate target of a 1.5°C threshold is no longer a goal even for activists. It’s October, and an empty spa resort is being threatened by the fires raging through the nearby conifer forests for the fifth or sixth year in a row. It all seems hard to keep track for Iris, who is living out her own lonely summer days in this hotel that she inherited, sunbathing and checking the latest weather warnings—but only when the situation isn’t so dire that they’re played over roaming loudspeakers: ‘Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home.’ Although she’s aware of the danger and trusts the climate science, her physical and economic precarity—hotel bookings are no longer allowed, even if anyone actually wanted to take the waters in this water-restricted spa town—are not enough for Iris to leave. She has no one and nowhere to go to. READ MORE…