galáxias, a book-length poem by the Brazilian avant-gardist Haroldo de Campos, is composed of fifty intertextual constellations that traverse multilingualism, incorporating slippages of word play in melody-harmony, explicitly in tune with the Poundian concept of “make it new” and Campos’s own “transcreation.” In August of 2024, Ugly Duckling Presse published his groundbreaking text. With the work of five translators, responsible in varying degrees for different portions of the text, the volume brings Campos’s “planetary music for mortal ears” to an English-speaking audience. Here, Asymptote is excited to present a roundtable featuring three of the co-translators: Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone (Christopher Middleton and Norman Maurice Potter have passed). Below, we speak about their individual encounters with Campos, their translation of the constellations as a collaborative and iterative process, and what they discovered in their translations.
Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to each of you?
Odile Cisneros (OC): For me, literary translation stems from curiosity and the desire to share a literary work with others. At least, that’s how it started for me. In the early 90s, I lived in Prague, where I learned Czech, a language that hardly anyone outside the Czech Republic speaks. When I left to go to graduate school in New York, a friend gifted me a beautiful facsimile edition of a modernist poetry book: Na vlnách TSF, by the Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert. I fell in love with Seifert’s whimsical, surprising poems and wanted to share them with my friends, but alas, they didn’t speak Czech, so I figured I’d try my hand at translating some. A Czech friend helped out.
For me, then, translation emerged from friendship—friendship with a text, friendship with a language, friendship with others. My forays into other languages and texts, primarily Portuguese and Brazilian poetry, had similar origins, which we can talk about more.
As to what the act of literary translation is, there have been countless discussions. I always think of translation as a kind of puzzle that needs to be figured out by first taking the text apart in the source language and then putting it back together in the target language. There are many ways to do this, but some are better than others. The process is both challenging and rewarding. READ MORE…
Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025
Reviewing the manifold interpretations and curiosities in our Winter 2025 issue.
In a new issue spanning thirty-two countries and twenty languages, the array of literary offers include textual experiments, ever-novel takes on the craft of translation, and profound works that relate to the present moment in both necessary and unexpected ways. Here, our blog editors point to the works that most moved them.
Introducing his translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in 2012, Breon Mitchell remarked that with every generation, there seems to be a need for a new translation of so-called classic works of literature. His iteration was radically adherent to the original manuscript of The Trial, which was diligently kept under lock and key until the mid-fifties; by then, it was discovered exactly to what extent Max Brod had rewritten and restructured the original looseleaf pages of Kafka’s original draft. It is clear from Mitchell’s note that he considers this edit, if not an offense to Kafka, an offense to the reader who has lost the opportunity to enact their own radical interpretation of the work: an interpretation that touched Mitchell so deeply, he then endeavored to recreate it for others.
In Asymptote’s Winter 2025 Issue, the (digital) pages are an array of surprising turns of phrase and intriguing structures—of literature that challenges what we believe to be literature, translations that challenge what we believe to be originality, and essays that challenge what we believe to be logic. I am always drawn to the latter: to criticism, and writing about writers. As such, this issue has been a treat.
With the hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death just in the rearview and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Trial looming ever closer, the writer-turned-adjective has not escaped the interest of Asymptote contributors. Italian writer Giorgio Fontana, in Howard Curtis’s tight translation, holds a love for Kafka much like Breon Mitchell. In an excerpt from his book Kafka: A World of Truth, Fontana discusses how we, as readers, repossess the works of Kafka, molding them into something more simplistic or abstract than they are. In a convincing argument, he writes: “The defining characteristic of genius is . . . the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express.” READ MORE…
Contributors:- Bella Creel
, - Meghan Racklin
, - Xiao Yue Shan
; Languages: - French
, - German
, - Italian
, - Macedonian
, - Spanish
; Places: - Chile
, - France
, - Italy
, - Macedonia
, - Switzerland
, - Taiwan
, - Turkey
; Writers: - Agustín Fernández Mallo
, - Damion Searls
, - Elsa Gribinski
, - Giorgio Fontana
, - Lidija Dimkovska
, - Sedef Ecer
; Tags: - dystopian thinking
, - identity
, - interpretation
, - nationality
, - painting
, - political commentary
, - revolution
, - the Cypriot Question
, - the Macedonian Question
, - translation
, - visual art
, - Winter 2025 issue
, - world literature