Translation Tuesday: “The Mighty Gaucho” by Tamara Silva Bernaschina

February 18, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Tim Benjamin

For Vicente, the mighty Gaucho is all the terrors of this world in a single individual.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant story of youth, manhood, and mental illness by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, translated by Tim Benjamin. Young Vicente lives with his family in a small town, right across the street from the Gaucho—”all the terrors of this world in a single individual”—a gigantic man famed for his physical strength and rumored cruelty to children. Yet even as Vicente’s uncle and mother threaten him with stories about the Gaucho, the only violence Vicente has seen from him is self-directed: he has repeatedly attempted to hang himself from the tree outside his house. When the Carnival comes to Vicente’s town and Vicente finally experiences the violence and recklessness that have made the Gaucho a figure of local legend, he makes a choice that, small as it may seem, will change both their lives forever. Read on!

They’re going to ask me why.
—José Watanabe

I
He liked to wonder if the moments when his dad had to sprint across the street, wrestle down the enormous Gaucho from the tree from which he’d once again hung himself, were moments of life in the world, or of death. There must have been minutes that ticked by in which more people were born than died. And vice versa. Someone, somewhere, must be keeping count. This is what he thinks, he’s got an image in his head of a little bead with the Gaucho’s name on it attached to a wooden abacus, swinging back and forth between dead and alive. He watches the Gaucho through the kitchen window, big, gigantic, now crumpled in the dirt and gasping for breath, like Aunt Ermilda’s epileptic dog. His mother and Uncle Thomas are there too, standing behind him, breathing down his neck as they watch his dad and the Gaucho disappear into the little shack across the street, and then they all sit back down at the kitchen table and wait for him to come back with the details. His father comes through the door in a state, sweat soaking through the front of his shirt, glazing his brow. He wipes away the sweat and they all stare at him as he mumbles an I’m coming or something like that but none of them totally understand what he says, and nobody responds. Finally, he sits back down at the table, takes a knife to the food on his plate.

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Complex Entanglements: A Review of Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo

February 17, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Lian Sing

Arasahas shows us not just how to hold multiple truths at once, but also how to embrace uncertainty. . .

Arasahas by Jaya Jacobo, translated from the Filipino by Christian Jil Benitez, PAWA Press in association with Paloma Press, 2024

My initial encounter with Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas (Savage Mind Books, 2023) was primal. The title, a Bikolano word deliberately left unchanged by Christian Jil Benitez in his debut translation with PAWA Press, depicts a sensory experience; roughly translated from one of nearly two hundred languages in the Philippines, arasahas describes the warm, humid weather central to life in the tropics. My skin tingles when I read the word, and I recall the inescapable, invisible stickiness that life in the Philippines is steeped in. To the English reader, the word arasahas hisses, sizzles—even without its meaning, its sound, by virtue of the repeating a and s, coils and lingers in the ear. It clings.

A sharp poetic decision by both author and translator, the title invites the reader back into their body, and it is from the body that we approach the text. This is vital, because Arasahas is a collection that dances around what is almost, if not absolutely, unnamable but deeply palpable. It is a book of vivid, concrete images—a perfume bottle breaking, a bird’s nest delicacy, the tugging of “something within”—to allude not just to the abstract, but also the spiritual. In these acts of gesturing is the sense that there is something more, be it the supernatural or divine, that seeps into and transforms the everyday. I am reminded of how humidity, the invisible but ever-present water in the air, is fundamental to the proliferation of life. Similarly, Jacobo’s allusions and references perforate the text, and within these chasms are the hints at meaning that Arasahas alchemizes. Boundaries are challenged; left porous. In Arasahas, this simultaneity of meaning is not mere technique, but a sensibility formed by the lived experience of the poet. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Ten Thousand Burdens: Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ on the Hanmun

February 13, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the language is not working in a literal sense; it’s trying to evoke an imaginary landscape, and do so aesthetically.

Translators Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ have forged a remarkable partnership in bringing the timeless beauty of classical Korean poetry to English readers. Their work spans centuries, breathing new life into poetic masterpieces originally composed in hanmun, or ‘literary Sinitic’, the written language of Korea’s past. Together, they have delivered evocative English renditions of Borderland Roads (2009) by Hŏ Kyun and Magnolia and Lotus (2013) by Hyesim—both of which were catalogued in The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (2022). Their more recent projects include Ch’oŭi’s meditative An Homage to Green Tea (2024) and the eagerly anticipated Spring Mountain (forthcoming June 2025) by the poet Nansŏrhŏn, all from White Pine Press, a New York-based publisher.

Through their Korean Voices series, White Pine Press has long been a bridge between Korean literary tradition and global readership, featuring works by writers Park Bum-shin, Ra Heeduk, Park Wan-suh, Shim Bo-seon, Eun Heekyung, and translators Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee, Suh Ji-Moon, Kyoung-Lee Park, and Amber Kim, further cementing its role as a vital conduit for transcultural dialogue.

In this interview, I spoke with both Ian, based in Ramstein, Germany, and T’aeyong, in Pusan, Korea, on translating poetry originally written in hanmun, as well as the historical and contemporary divides between what’s revered as cosmopolitan and what’s relegated as vernacular—in language and broader cultural contexts.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): For readers who can read Korean literature only through translation, could you briefly explain what hanmun is? Why did Korean poets, before the invention of the Korean script (kungmun or chosŏnmun) in the mid-fifteenth century, write in this orthography? Additionally, how distinct are classical and contemporary language, ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ language, and written and spoken language in the modern Korean literary landscape?

Ian Haight (IH): Hanmun is the Korean use of classical Chinese to write literature. Kungmun is an older term for what we now call hangul in South Korea, which is the contemporary written language of South Korea. Chosŏnmun is pretty much the same thing as hangul, but it is for North Korea. There are some regional dialectical differences between chosŏnmun and hangul, and owing to the political ideologies of North and South Korea, there are also some differences in the words and how some words are written.

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Mario dell’Arco’s Colossal Miniatures

February 12, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jason Gordy Walker

. . . dell’Arco has no problem poking fun . . . but as with the best comics, an edge of seriousness lurks under the poetry’s surface gloss.

Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems by Mario dell’Arco, translated from the Romanesco by Marc Alan Di Martino, World Poetry Books, 2024.

In his homeland of Italy, Mario dell’Arco’s stature rivals that of the greatest Romanesco poets: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Cesare Pascarella, Crescenzo Del Monte, Trilussa, Giggi Zanazzo. Despite this, he has long been ignored in the English-speaking world, but that is due to change with World Poetry’s recent release of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems, a healthy folio of work that spans the poet’s twenty-nine collections, starting with 1946’s Red Inside and ending with 1991’s Roma Romae. All translated by Marc Alan Di Martino (a talented poet whose most recent collection is Still Life with City), the poems are by turns lively, melancholic, curious, strange, beautiful, humorous, sardonic, and pithy, rendered in a way that moves the reader to savor them like a fine Genzano wine—or, if you prefer, “the whole green meadow” of a pistachio ice cream.

In 1905, Mario dell’Arco was born as Mario Fagiolo. Around age seven, he began writing poems in his native Roman dialect, and placed his first piece—a sonnet—in Nino Ilari’s L’Amico Cerasa when he was just a teenager. Later, as he became an architect and helped design such structures as the post office in Piazza Bologna and the Zodiac Fountain in Terni, he invented a pseudonym that would reference this vocation: “Archi-tect, arch, dell’Arco.”

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Translation Tuesday: “I Wonder Whether” by Anita Harag

February 11, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess

I don’t know whether I’m in love. I do know where these words must appear in a sentence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a captivating short piece by Anita Harag, translated from the Hungarian by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry. Although our narrator is immersed in the bliss of romance, she finds herself relentlessly questioning the foundation of her happiness. Does her partner truly love her, though he appears to be drawn to other women? Does she genuinely love him in return? More fundamentally, how can she even be certain of her own feelings? Her efforts to impose a logical structure on the messy, unpredictable nature of love disrupt the lushly intimate moments she shares with her lover. With its playful linguistic twists and staccato rhythms, “I Wonder Whether” masterfully captures the sensation of being both within and without, suffused with pleasure and unease.

His hands are warm, my thighs cold; I’m chilly. It’s autumn, the AC is on. The cinema is full, I’m sitting on the aisle; the cool air is blowing on me. He asks me whether we should switch seats. I like to sit on the aisle; I don’t want to switch. I would like his palm to be bigger, to warm a bigger area of my cold thighs. I like it when he doesn’t only touch my thigh, but my shoulder and my behind, too. When he takes my hand on the street, in a store or on the bus. He takes my hand anywhere and at any time. Mine is cold; he warms it. His is always warm, mine always cold. At the bus stop he breathes on my neck, so that I won’t be cold. Women stare at him. When I look at them; they turn their eyes away.  

There are handsome men. This sentence is declarative. “Handsome” is the adjective attached to men. Not to all men, that would be “men are handsome”. Not all men are handsome; for me only the ones with prominent noses and muscular calves. In this I differ from my girlfriend, who likes men with strong arms and blue eyes. Those are also handsome; yet I don’t like them. I should say: I like some men, and some I don’t. The ones I don’t like, my girlfriend might. It’s also possible that we both like the same man, with blue eyes and muscular calves; that’s a problem.  Fortunately, my girlfriend doesn’t like men with prominent noses. They repel her; I think the reason for this is to make sure we won’t end up liking the same man, even by accident. Sometimes, I find a man with blue eyes and strong arms attractive. That makes me feel bad, and I try to find fault with him. Some of them can look at me with those blue eyes and make me forget to speak. Him, too, he hasn’t got a prominent nose nor muscular calves, yet I like him. He likes women with brown hair and brown eyes, like me. He also likes women with green or blue eyes, with large or small breasts. He finds something pretty in each of them. I can see myself falling in love with several women at the same time, he says. This is a declarative sentence. It doesn’t contain “perhaps” nor “maybe”, nor anything conditional. “Perhaps” and “maybe” are modifiers expressing uncertainty and possibility. Perhaps I could fall in love with several women, at the same time.  

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What’s New in Translation: February 2025

February 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eamon McGrath, Marcel Krueger, Rosalia Ignatova, and Xiao Yue Shan

February's latest in translation.

In this month’s round-up of recent translations, we present eleven titles from Japan, Iraq, Colombia, Indonesia, Austria, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Slovenia. From neorealist postwar fiction to the graphic novel, stories capturing the tides of time and the turbulent eras of violence, narratives of migration and mystery, innovations of the short fiction form and unconventional looks into classic tales . . . these titles are invitations into hidden places and profound sights, stark realities and dreamy visions.

aperfday

A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Other Press, 2025

Review by Rosalia Ignatova

Nanae Aoyama’s short novel, A Perfect Day to Be Alone, is the English-language debut of its lauded young author, offering a delicate exploration of existential drift through the eyes of Chizu, a restless twenty-year-old, and Ginko, her elderly relative who takes her in for a year. While the narrative is sparse on action, it is rich in atmospheric detail, focusing on the quiet moments that shape their unlikely cohabitation.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Ibrahim Fawzy, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Egypt, and the Philippines!

This week, our team members take us to festivals around the world — from comics in France, to Filipino children’s literature in Italy, to Bedouin poetry in Egypt, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

A little over a year ago, I wrote a dispatch for this column about the 2024 Festival Internationale de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême, an annual celebration of the art of the graphic novel. Visual storytelling has always been a staple of French literature, going as far back as Renaissance-era illustrated manuscripts, but the modern art of the bande-dessinée (often referred to as the Ninth Art) is thought to have taken root in the early 19th century.

In countries like the US, graphic novels are often considered to be for children, which is a shame because they have the potential to add a fascinating element to storytelling. As someone who is incredibly passionate about the genre, I was thrilled to see the festival come back in full swing this past weekend for its 52nd year. As one of the largest comics festivals in the world, it hosted hundreds of thousands of participants and countless illustrators and authors for a weekend of workshops, exhibitions—including one on the work of last year’s Grand Prix winner, Posy Simmonds—and industry discussion. READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter I Fire

February 6, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.

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 blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.

/

*

Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”

The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”

– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film

It was the hour before the Gods awake.

– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१

agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01

– The Ṛgveda

/

*

Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.

Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.

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Seeing and Unseen: Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio

February 5, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Getting a child narrator right is no easy task, and Saisio executes it perfectly.

Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio, translated from the Finnish by Mia Spangenberg, Two Lines Press, 2024

When Pirkko Saisio’s father passed away near the end of the millennium, she decided to write a book that explored her history; what resulted was an autofiction that follows the only daughter of communist parents as she comes of age in 1950s Finland. First published as Pienin yhteinen jaettava in 1998, it is now out in a superb English translation by Mia Spangenberg as Lowest Common Denominator. The first of three thinly veiled autobiographical novels, it is preceded in the Anglosphere by The Red Book of Farewells, and the third, Backlight, will soon follow. It is hard to believe that someone who is so critically acclaimed in her native language—with a writing career spanning five decades—is being translated into English only recently. The hope is that this is just the beginning.

With the death of Saisio’s father at its root, Lowest Common Denominator focuses on our narrator’s childhood and is essentially plotless, with vignette-like chapters arranged in achronological order. The majority of the chapters take place in the past, while the few sections set in the present follow the narrator in the days leading up to her father’s demise, as well as the aftermath. Most of the former are on the shorter side, focusing on a particular incident, event, or person, while the longer chapters explore a certain aspect or individual over an extended period of time. These usually take the form of character studies or personal histories of extended and far-flung family members. Throughout, Saisio’s prose remains straightforward though formally fluid, capably mirroring the narrative’s varied directions. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from “Alone” by Nesrine Slaoui

February 4, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frances Egan

She was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from “Alone,” Nesrine Slaoui‘s intricate portrait of immigrant life in modern France, translated by Frances Egan. In these three spare, plainspoken vignettes, the lives of two women intertwine: Anissa, the child of two Moroccan immigrants in the Argenteuil banlieue, and Nora, a Maghrebi businesswoman in Clichy. Despite their various attempts to assert control over their own lives—despite Anissa’s attempt to bond with a new classmate, despite Nora’s attempts to stand up for herself and advocate for change in her workplace—their actions are continually circumscribed by greater social forces, by the historical inertia manifest in the petty cruelty and unexamined prejudice of their classmates and colleagues. What follows is a forceful examination of racism and economic inequality in modern France—and a challenging reminder that none of us is as free as we would like to believe.

3 September 2021
Cité Champagne, Argenteuil

In Marseille’s Quartiers Nord, Bricarde and Castellane, the drug dealing hotspots where a kid dies every fortnight from a Kalashnikov bullet, the windows offer a dreamy and unobstructed view of the Mediterranean Sea. A tease, an enviable and deceptive skyline, since the only place you can actually access the beach is from one small spot at L’Estaque. Here, in the much quieter cité Champagne, about twenty kilometres northwest of Paris, the balconies of the social housing block offer a panoramic view of the capital and its monuments, the Eiffel tower, sparkling at night, in prime position. The day they moved in, Karim kept this view until last, as a surprise for his wife Yamina. They had both been amazed that such luxury could penetrate this isolated spot. It made you wonder if the town planners and architects of these housing estates were trying to maximise the contrast between here and there, or if they wanted to soften the dreary dereliction of this Argenteuil ghetto. Perhaps they imagined the residents gazing into the distance and forgetting the reality at their feet: the broken lifts, the lobbies smelling of urine.

On the ninth floor of her tower, Anissa wasn’t thinking much about the skyline. Locked away in her room, she was trying to take a photo of herself on her phone. But even standing on her tiptoes, so that her legs looked longer, and arching her back, to emphasise her bum, she didn’t have one shot she could post on Instagram. And that’s despite knowing every tip there was to enhance your figure: stand slightly side-on, tuck your tummy with a hand to your waist. Expression wise, she made sure not to smile and kept her mouth slightly open to hold her delicate features in place. All those hours spent scrolling social media, day after day, meant she followed the rules without even realising it. But it didn’t matter. The reflection in the rectangle mirror in her bedroom wouldn’t do what she told it to, and she couldn’t make her body match the profiles that flitted across the screen. Without filters, without tricks, her body and her face were ordinary; her imperfections, her asymmetries were there for everyone to see. None of it looked like the calibrated social media ideal, like the apparitions, the fantasies. She couldn’t compete, she couldn’t fight. And she was tormented by the gap between what she wanted to look like and her modest and underwhelming reality. The only thing she liked was her flat teenage stomach. Everything else was too small, too skinny, not woman enough.

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Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

February 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Anna Rumsby, Carissa Coane, Daniel Yadin, Devi Sastry, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sayani Sarkar

Dive into our new issue with these choice recommendations from our amazing intercontinental team!

Translated by Samuel Bollier, Jurj Salem’s “At the Circus” is a discombobulatingly charming, disarmingly hair-raising tale that elides joy and frustration, obfuscates reality and performance, and makes irony sincere. Things are not what they seem, which renders Bollier’s excellent translation of Salem’s easygoing prose all the more stirring; there, suited in the circus, we must imagine S. happy.

I’ve had the chance to read Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s breathstopping beautiful self-translations in The Margins before; these two pieces in the new issue exude that same intrinsic conscience of precarious simultaneity, numbered and reversed, punctuated with “+” signs, a “delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams.” Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng’s wordly creations turn from imagistic manifestation into pure interpretation.

Samuel’s parodic brilliance in his essay “Poets of Mirror Hatred” yields real laughter in an entirely serious, paradoxically internal essay about the division between the social and the cultural in poetic personas. What language exists for that which must not be expressed, at all costs, lest the self split? How must the reader read repression? Linking Kafka to two generations of modern Korean poetry, Samuel ends by critiquing the bright, hegemonic Asian American discourse of pain, transformed by their loudness into white noise: “To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage.”

When Brandon Breen translates that “writing is obliquitous, but also ubiquitous,” I return to Ubah Cristana Ali Farah’s original contrast, “obliqua” versus “ubiqua,” in “The House of Termites,” a juxtaposition that encapsulates the attractions of Ali Farah’s style. By obliquely rebounding between various writers of exile, from Baldwin to Said to Kristeva, Mernissi, and Zambrano, Ali Farah’s essay makes a sensual ubiquity of this obliquitous displacement. To misappropriate Baldwin, you need strength to live in the “house of termites”; another kind of strength to let the termites get at it. Both strengths inhabit this essay.

Zhou Junyi’s conversation with filmmaker Tan Pin Pin crystallizes a certain vision of Singapore: a prism of public languages, spaces, and systems that shift as the microwave’s glass plate spins. I particularly love how the interview conveys the sounds of Singapore, and how we intellectualize it through subtitular structures, and formal and editorial decisions. Tan’s work lies in the instant before the intellectualization: “People will always know when a guest of honor arrives, but they don’t know what it feels like before the guest of honor arrives or even question why we have a guest of honor in the first place.”

—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Senior Assistant Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 31, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, René Esaú Sánchez, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Hong Kong, Mexico, and Kenya!

This week, we mourn the loss of one of Kenya’s boldest voices in non-fiction and reportage, look in on multimedia and interdisciplinary revivals of literary works in Hong Kong, and celebrate the poetry of one’s native tongue in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

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

In Kenya, the year began on a sombre note for writers and readers, as on January 11, Rasna Warah breathed her last. Her prolific and bold body of work includes Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self-Discovery (1998), Mogadishu Then and Now: A Pictorial Tribute to Africa’s Most Wounded City (2012), War Crimes: How Warlords, Politicians, Foreign Governments and Aid Agencies Conspired to Create a Failed State in Somalia (2014), and Unsilenced: Unmasking the United Nations’ Culture of Cover-Ups, Corruption, and Impunity (2016)—this latter work stemming from her stint as an editor with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. A Kenyan of South Asian extraction, Warah was a committed social critic and brought this fire to her journalism and writing. Her courageous journalism, passionate writing in local dailies, and numerous X quips on national, regional, continental, and world politics endeared her to the digital public, where she remained active before and during her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2022. The loss of her voice and talent is immense, demonstrated by the outpouring of grief and reverential eulogies, and standing as a testament to the power of the pen. Among others, this grief was  displayed in the tribute poem by writer Tony Mochama, celebrating Warah’s career and detailing her courage and commitment to social justice. Rest in power Rasna Warah! READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović

January 30, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

[W]ith their youthful waywardness, the children in the novel subject their dolls to some of their most whimsical and anarchic impulses.

In the evocative, unexpected world of Underground Barbie, Croatian author Maša Kolanović merges the technicolor hues of childhood play with the startling and violent reality of her nation’s War of Independence. Instead of portioning imagination and historical fact as discrete realms, Kolanović aptly maps the whimsical trajectories of youth as they blur and subvert the sights and sounds of conflict, plotting out a sensitive, humorous, yet undoubtedly grounded view of how toys can give reign to both conscious and subconscious knowledge. We are proud to present this thought-provoking work as our Book Club selection for February, telling as it is about those phantasmagoric, shifty early years, where we all commence our becoming.

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.   

Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović, translated from the Croatian by Ena Selimović, Sandorf Passage, 2025

“Until that day I thought you could only hear such a sound at an air show, when the planes in the sky left blue, white, and red trails and the pilots performed breakneck stunts like Tom Cruise in Top Gun,” so the narrator in Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie marvels at hearing and seeing planes whirring past her roof. Yet, on that particular day, “all the Tom Cruises were wearing the olive-green uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army.” As the narrator observes the transformation of the “Tom Cruise” figure—the unruly, rough-edged aviator and his indelible presence—into a token of power and destructiveness, her readers are asked to assume the perspective of a country on the precipice of seismic change.

Croatia in the 1990s held war at its epicenter, and the narrator—anonymous throughout—was then a young girl living amidst intermittent air raids, political campaigns, and displaced communities. Accumulating Barbies, whose glamor and rarity constitute a source of longing, she and her friends often took them to play in the underground basement of her apartment building, and soon enough, the narrator’s reflections turn to the various scenes that had been staged by the children. The romantic escapades of the Ken doll Dr. Kajfěs (who is named after an anti-snoring aid commercial) aside; a Barbie presidential election featuring a standoff match between Dr. Kajfěs and the much-coveted Barbie of the narrator’s friend; and more. The imitation and invention present in the girls’ everyday games gesture toward a world-making in which the old rules are dismantled, recalibrated, and improvised upon—a world in which nothing yet everything is at stake, because it is at once rooted in and removed from the material reality. Translated into English for the first time by Ena Selimović, Kolanović’s novel offers an incisive reflection on childhood play, whereby the act embodies the power of imagination that transcends socio-political codes in times of violence, uncertainty, and scarcity. READ MORE…