Place: France

Memory Personified: A Review of Ballerina by Patrick Modiano

April 23, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sophie Benbelaid

Modiano’s work engages with literary traditions and themes innate to autofiction: identity, the passage of time, fragmented recollections.

Ballerina by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, Yale University Press, 2025

Patrick Modiano’s latest work, Ballerina, takes its readers to a Paris that feels uncertain, still marked by the shadow of the Second World War. Like most of the author’s other publications, so too is this novella written as autofiction, with the main perspective being that of the same young man who normally figures in his writing. Over the course of his story, we float from recollection to recollection, following the narrator’s attempts to capture the memories of his youth in 1960s Paris—during which he finds himself admitted into a ballerina’s circle.

Despite the title, the eponymous dancer herself feels less like a central figure than what we might be led to expect. She is, of course, present and recurring in the narrator’s focus, acting as the glue between him and the other characters, threading connections that are introduced over the course of the novella—but as we read through the story, we feel as though we are trying to catch hold of an ever-elusive spirit, rather than an actual person.

It is at this point that one comes to consider the metaphor of dancing and ballet, and how it further feeds into the ballerina’s enigmatic character. While the novella’s title bears her epithet (which is also her nickname), this is as much as we receive in terms of her identification. In contrast, every other figure, barring the narrator, is named: the ballerina’s son, Pierre; Hovine, whom the ballerina had known ‘since childhood’; Verzini, the narrator’s landlord and the ballerina’s friend; and Kniaseff, the ballet master, to name but a few. In this way, nearly all the characters are rendered concrete and tangible, not only through their names, but also the short physical descriptions which accompany them. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 18, 2025  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Kathryn Raver, and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest literary news from Palestine, France, and the United States!

This week, our editors take us behind-the-scenes at book festivals, from a festival spotlighting Latin American literature in Los Angeles to Paris’s Festival du Livre. From workshops on reimagining fairytales to a look at the only Palestinian-owned publishing house in America, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

Beneath the glittering glass ceiling of the Grand Palais, Paris welcomed over 114,000 attendees for its fourth annual Festival du Livre last weekend. The festival is a hub for publishing professionals and book lovers alike, promoting both Francophone and international literature to French-speaking readers and offering insights into the literary and cultural landscape of today.

Among an extraordinarily diverse selection of programming, a few of my personal favorites included a workshop on reimagining classic fairytales and a seminar on resisting the language of fascism—an examination of far-right language and how it is actively influencing popular discourses “blurring traditional political markers and weakening collective memory.”

Thousands of authors and publishers took part in the festival, as they do every year. Among them was Moroccan-French author Leila Slimani, whose previous works have been highly praised and have even been awarded prestigious prizes like the Prix Goncourt (Chanson douce, 2016). Slimani’s newest novel, J’emporterai le feu, was released in January of this year and concludes her Le Pays des autres trilogy.

In fact, Moroccan literature was the festival’s special cultural focus this year. Thirty-two publishers of Moroccan voices were present at the festival, most of them taking part in one of the many events offered at the Moroccan Pavilion—a dedicated space designed to highlight the country’s multilingual literary tradition and its “image as a cultural crossroads between tradition and modernity.” The events included a number of creative writing workshops, author talks, and even a seminar on translation and cultural reception of the Moroccan novel.

The Festival du Livre wasn’t the only event on which French readers could slake their thirst this month. Hors Limites, a festival hosted by the Association Bibliothèques en Seine Saint-Denis, seeks to highlight contemporary literature and address reading as a dialogue between creators and consumers. This festival, though smaller, still featured dozens of workshops and author meetings in Ile-de-France.

Among the authors present was Palestinian author Karim Kattan (whose 2021 interview with Asymptote can be found here). Kattan’s most recent novel, Eden à l’aube, was recently awarded the 2024 Prix de la Cagnotte. An English translation of his first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, was recently released by Foundry Editions. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

April 17, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What’s the antidote to a world of trade wars and closed borders? Quite possibly our Spring issue, celebrating the free circulation of ideas!

What do we need from each other? What do we gain if we give? At the dawn of a new age of tariffs, the dominant mode of exchange has become a kind of brute transactionalism—before one hands over anything, one must demand something of equal value in return. But what if simply giving is the better way to flourish—the way to a richer commons? It is in this spirit that we proudly unveil “The Gift.” Gathering new work from as far afield as Paraguay, Lesotho, Senegal, and Guyana, our Spring 2025 edition centers the generosity of translation—an act that Youn Kyung Hee, invoking Paul Celan, rightly compares to a gift: “For Celan, the event of poesis goes beyond receiving a gift from some unnamed sender; it also comprises the work of sending it out once more, a transmission bottled in glass.” How fitting, then, that our interview section, which usually features major authors in the world literature canon (such as the recently deceased Mario Vargas Llosa, in our Spring 2018 issue), cedes the floor to two of the most prominent practitioners of the art working today: Robin Moger, acclaimed translator of contemporary and classical Arabic literature, and Anton Hur, who went from debuting as a translator in these pages nine years ago to becoming the Booker International Prize-nominated voice in English of Korean authors like Sang Young Park. Hur’s interview pairs perfectly with our Korean Literature Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, whose many highlights include Jeong Ho-seung’s bittersweet “sorrow by special delivery” and talented director-writer Lee Chang-dong’s absurd comedy in which a scrounging couple on vacation return to find their house burgled.

blog_Spring_2025_issue-announcement

Elsewhere in this edition beautifully illustrated by South Korean guest artist GLOO / Yejin Lee, the theme of gifts—often passed down from the generation prior—persists. The opening trio of pieces (Men and Bread, Long Shadows, and Taxidermy) each consider the tendrils of paternal legacy, but the title of most dad-haunted narrator might be a contest between Pierric Bailly tracing the real-life events leading up to his father’s death in the woods and Song Seung Eon’s imaginary fisherman addressing his macabre haul (“Skull, are you my father? Are you something that was my father?”). In Christopher Carter Sanderson’s sparkling update of Anton Chekhov’s drama The Gull, by contrast, Treplev wrestles with having a celebrity for a mother. (“On her own, she’s a sexy young actress. When I’m near, she looks like a soccer mom.”) Monica Ong—whose visual poems drawing on astronomy have been featured in  Scientific American, among other places—likens her parents to intrepid “cosmonauts” for migrating from their native Philippines to a new home in the US. Finally, against the backdrop of brutal deportations from the US, poet Judith Santopietro calls attention to the gifts inherent even in the most dangerous of international journeys, juxtaposing a glimpse of black orchids from atop a freight train with the eventual hardship of “distributing food and christmas gifts” in a foreign land. Too often portrayed as mere victims, Santopietro’s poem reminds us of the agency of immigrants, inviting us to recognize their journeys as choices they have made, and to consider that these, too, may be gifts, if we allow that possibility.

If Asymptote has been a gift to you, consider helping us stick around so that it may be a gift to others down the road. Remember: the best way to support us is to join us as a sustaining or masthead member (and signing up only takes three minutes, but the good it does reverberates through time).

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The Movement of Language: Matt Reeck on the Best Unexpressed

April 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

But holding two languages ‘open’ at once is imperfect . . . you can get lost in between these two natures.

Matt Reeck’s rich, sonically layered translation of Olivier Domerg’s psychogeographic writing, from Portrait of the Puy de Manse, was published in Asymptote’s January 2025 issue as part of its special feature on new forms. In the piece, we leap from prose to verse, stepping with each new utterance from alignment to alignment, just as the puy becomes a stream becomes another mountain. “Collapse: debris,” writes Domerg in Reeck’s precise, pensive hand. Does translation depend on a similar, geological rhythm of change? In this interview, Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor of Fiction Michelle Chan Schmidt speaks with Reeck about his translative art, the sonic aura of language and space, and the process of decolonising knowledge.

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): In an interview with Asymptote from 2014—eleven years ago!—you state that your translation philosophy is ‘best left unexpressed’. Yet in a brilliant 2019 essay for Public Books, ‘Translation’s Burden’, you highlight what you call the ‘Hermeneutic Truth’, deconstructing the cliché of ‘semantic invariance’, or the so-called untranslatable element—apparently intrinsic to each text—that causes their translations to wither. How would you express your translation philosophy today? What role might ‘unnecessary original language words’ play in translated texts?

Matt Reeck (MR): First, I have to say that while I know people use the word ‘philosophy’ in this context, I tend to avoid it; why does everything have to have a philosophy when ‘practice’ would do, when intelligence and sensitivity would do? That word also tends to make ‘practice’ appear uniform and to regularise what is naturally variable. Even if there are guidelines, choices are always particular and individual. I think that means translation is an art and not a philosophy (and is not governed by a philosophy).

These days, I think about the role editors take. (Patrick Hersant has a great essay forthcoming called ‘The Third Hand’, translated by me (!), that talks about the role editors play in the publication of translations.) I think about any book’s birth as a collaboration. So many people are involved, and the relationship with editors can be good or bad. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2025

March 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Eamon McGrath, Jonathon Atkinson, Matilda Nevin, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Xiao Yue Shan

Reviews of eleven newly published books from Argentina, India, Austria, France, Japan, Chile, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Denmark!

This month, our selection of noteworthy titles include a collection of revolutionary Hindi poetry, an erotic thriller from an extraordinary Chilean modernist, an incisive novel concerning the disabled body in contemporary Japan, an intimate socio-philosophical contemplation of a loved one’s life and death by one of France’s foremost intellectuals, and more. 

bazterrica

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Scribner, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

There’s something seductive about the nightmare, perhaps because fear is the most vivifying sensation, perhaps because beauty and horror are so finely intertwined. In Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy, the night-terror has never looked so exquisite, so shimmering. With an eye for the luminous and ear for the otherworldly, familiar gothic tropes are here relieved from their muted gloom; a chimeric language sings the shadows awake, and in this chorus even the most basic signifiers of darkness regain their fearsomeness, mysticism, sensual enthrallment. The cockroach has a gleam, a crunch; a derelict cathedral is as diaphanous as a dragonfly’s wing. There are the recognisable plot-pieces—violent sacraments, echoing halls, and a wasted world—but those who command fear’s aesthetic know that the most disturbing capacity of pain and transgression lies not in their repellence, but their strange and unpronounceable allure. It is not the torturous that Bazterrica is adept at bringing to life, but the smile that slowly creeps across the face of the tortured, when they are somewhere we can no longer reach.

The Unworthy is a post-apocalyptic convent story, wherein the only known patch of livable land is occupied by the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a cult that is at once spiritually vacuous and deeply devotional, with its faith reserved more for the House’s singular rites, rituals, and rules than any principle or entity. As is the standard for any secluded sect that positions oblivion as the only alternative to obeyance, the Sisterhood’s hierarchy is strict and immovable, the leaders are mysterious and merciless, the eroticism is violent, the violence is erotic, and the practices are senseless but methodical. The founder and head of the House is a man, but in the name of Sisterhood, all his acolytes are woman: some are servants, some are the Unworthy, some are Chosen, some are Enlightened—and only this latter group is given contact with the one known only as He. One guess as to what that means. Our nameless narrator wants to rise through the ranks, but stubborn fragments of selfhood prevent her from completely assimilating into the Sisterhood’s processions. She still has memories, desires—though they are but frayed remains. READ MORE…

Return to the Prodigal Country: Gilbert Ahnee and Ariel Saramandi on the Mauritian Novel

February 26, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

As a writer, translator and most of all reader, I appreciate it tremendously when I see characters speaking in a way that feels true to themselves.

In 1989, Gilbert Ahnee, a then-rising figure of Mauritian journalism, ventured into the world of fiction with the release of Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel to date. Published by Éditions du Centre de Recherches Indianocéanique, Exils is an intimate inquiry into self-banishment and belonging, described by Charles Bonn and Xavier Garnier in Littérature francophone: Le roman (Éditions Hatier, 1997) as a largely autobiographical novel that was written upon Ahnee’s return to Mauritius after a period of study in France, illustrating the sense of exile that is felt even by those living in the very heart of the homeland—the novel being an explicit cri d’amour, or cry for love, for the French language.  

Thirty-five years later, in 2024, Exils was introduced to the Anglosphere when The White Review, a London literary magazine, included a translated excerpt in an anthology celebrating fiction and nonfiction prose from across the world. The translator, Ariel Saramandi, is a British-Mauritian essayist whose book Portrait of an Island on Fire (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June 2025) was described as ‘a searing account of Mauritius’. Her translation offers a delicate rendering of Ahnee’s prose, sustaining its emotional nuances while opening it up to a new audience. 

In this interview, I spoke with Ahnee and Saramandi, both in Mauritius, on the resonances of Exils in today’s world and the evolving legacy of exile in Francophone Mauritian novels.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The excerpt of Exils (Exiles) published in The White Review’s ‘Writing in Translation’ anthology (in Ariel Saramandi’s translation) bespeaks alienation—cultural, geolinguistic, spiritual—mixed up with indifference, boredom, and frustration. I love that we have the character Jean Louise, in his quarter-life crisis, who embodies how exile gnawingly takes on different shapes:  

But I felt that true apathy of not being able to share in their pleasures. I was indifferent to the sea. The sea and its transient vehemence, always the same.

Gilbert, could you take us back to the years leading up to the novel’s publication in 1989? Could you share insights into your creative process?

Gilbert Ahnee (GA): When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, I was 16. I felt, deeply, that my generation would make an unprecedented, but as yet undefined, contribution to our country’s evolution. As a matter of fact, the most groundbreaking changes of the time—political, societal, cultural—were brought about by those who came back from university.  My high school classmates were preparing to go abroad, but my family couldn’t afford to sponsor my university education and so I landed a secondary teaching job as an undergraduate physics teacher. In class I taught physics to young boys and adolescents, but in the staff room I benefited from senior colleagues’ advice as regards to literature. I first started by reading nineteenth-century authors: a few English writers, but many more French and Russian novelists such as Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. That was my first real exposure to the novel. Over the years, I kept on consolidating that interest for novels from around the world, from Truman Capote to William Boyd, Mark Behr to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mario Vargas Llosa to Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk to Pierre Lemaitre. My curiosity for novels is unquenchable. I’m happy that readers noticed, in Exils, allusions to the world of Camus and Proust.

AMMD: Ariel, what inspired you to translate Exils, a French novel published nearly four decades ago, into English? What significance does the novel hold for you as a British-Mauritian writer who grew up in Mauritius?

Ariel Saramandi (AS): This is such a wonderful, intricate question! So perhaps, to start: I’ve used ‘British-Mauritian’ a lot in describing myself abroad, not so much out of a sense of dual nationality—though I am indeed both British and Mauritian—but because all the essays I produced until November 2024 were written under an autocratic government regime. Saying I was ‘British’, even if I never really felt British, was a way for me to signal—hopefully!—that I couldn’t be charged with defamation or imprisoned without the British embassy knowing about it. Asserting my dual nationality in that way felt like a ‘word of warning’ to Mauritian authorities, a ‘technique’ that felt ridiculous—I’ve never been to the British embassy in my life or know anyone who works there. But I’ve also never been troubled, politically, for my work. READ MORE…

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…

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.

READ MORE…

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…

Translation Tuesday: “A Stranger in Town” by Zinaida Shakhovskaya

January 28, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Theo Barnett

Chickens and vultures are all that’s left of the official bodies; as for this thing you’ve come up with, that’s news to me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a thrilling tale of international espionage and intrigue from Russian émigré writer Zinaida Shakhovskaya, deftly translated by Theo Barnett. Arriving in an unnamed country, veteran spy Loris feels completely secure—he speaks the language perfectly, can name every place of the town, knows exactly what he needs to do—that is, until he runs across an old friend. What follows lays bare the true conflict in Loris’s heart, a deep pessimism beneath the mask of a devoted professional. Yet even as Loris admits his despair, the world around him hums with activity: children at play, a girl meeting her partner in a restaurant, new foliage casts dappled shadows on the streets. Together, these moments paint a picture of the world in “its breathtaking benevolence and fixity,” which stands against Loris’s despair and finally empowers him to act. Read on!

Loris knew the town, where he was arriving for the first time, down to its last detail. He had undergone such extensive preparations before being sent there that he knew the place inside out: every bend in its labyrinthine streets, the name of every hotel and caffè, the address of every library, museum, tavern and concert hall in the town, of its every abattoir, square and monument. Any passer-by could ask him for any directions, and, with native fluency, Loris could supply them. He recognised all these things as he saw them for the first time.

On his way from the station, carrying a light holdall, he entered a hotel and requested a room (even his accent didn’t betray his identity). On a paper slip he wrote down his name (not his own), verifying this by making unsubtle glances at his passport (also not his own) … After a wash and a freshen-up, he left straight for the town.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2025

January 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

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…

Our Winter 2025 Issue Has Landed!

January 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

New forms abound in our bountiful 14th anniversary issue, from Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” to Elsa Gribinski’s absurdist diary entries. 

With Trump’s inauguration, the world’s strange turn continues apace in the new year and the old ways of apprehending reality are struggling, as ever, to keep up. As Olivier Domerg puts it succinctly: “What can language do face to face with the inertia and the power of something?” This pressing question finds an enjoinder in #NewForms, our 14th anniversary issue, featuring never-before-published writing from 32 countries, by some of the most beloved names in world literature—Osip Mandelstam, Natsume Sōseki, Andrey Platonov, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Damion Searls in our wildcard feature on new forms. Organized in memory of the recently deceased postmodernist Robert Coover, this Special Feature highlights works that transgress the boundaries of the literary form, opening our eyes to new aesthetic and ethical possibilities. From Robin Munby’s “parasite poem” whose hyperbolic language tests the boundary between translation and original authorship, to the laconic and darkly absurd diary entries of Elsa Gribinski’s “A Finger of Blue,” these pieces chafe against the strictures of traditional form (the poem, the journal, the letter) even as they pay homage to the artists who have shaped them.This spirit of formal ambition is by no means limited to our Special Feature. After all, “as the reality of each time changes,” says Fernández Mallo in an illuminating interview, “so does the notion of realism that the works of each era explore.” Thus, Vietnamese poet Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng splices words and fragments into a manifesto for a new writing and both Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska and Syrian author Jurj Salem put their fingers on an unexplored aspect of the contemporary condition—the urge to retreat from society—and envision new ways of being. Elsewhere in Fiction, Johanna Sebauer’s Pickled presents the anatomy of a cancelling in rural Austria, when a journalist splashed by acid pickle juice launches a media crusade against Big Gherkin. Notable among our nonfiction entries is frequent contributor Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s The House of Termites, a slow-burning, lyrical meditation on her “unstoppable nomadism,” which finds an echo in award-winning Singaporean director Tan Pin Pin’s many evolving versions of banjia (Moving House) from the Visual section. Finally, in our Criticism lineup, Tomoé Hill trawls the thrilling concepts—around truth, and storytelling, and immortality—buried in Douglas Penick’s The Oceans of Cruelty, while Samuel notes the arrival of a new wave of talented young Korean poets on the shores of the United States and distills the lessons their work might hold for their Asian American counterparts.

For all the world really. The lessons that Samuel comes away with apply just as well to those not writing from a hegemonic position but who have to pitch themselves to a readership unfamiliar with their culture. It’s a conundrum we know all too well, having been the first point of contact between countless authors and readers in our fourteen years’ of work in world literature. If you’ve personally benefitted from the “Asymptote effect” (which former President of ALTA Aron Aji cited in 2017 as one of the key factors contributing to the ever-growing reception of international literature in translation), we hope you’ll consider standing with us as we enter our fifteenth year. The best way to support us is to sign up as a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month. If you are able to afford it, come aboard as a masthead member, as wonderful readers like Yann Martel have done. Finally, if you would like to be part of an upcoming issue or even our dynamic volunteer team, check out our submission guidelines (Korean translators, take note: submissions to our upcoming paid Special Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, closes Feb 15) and our latest recruitment drive (we’re on a lookout for a new Nonfiction Editor, among others; deadline: Feb 2). Thank you for your readership and your support, which have made this all worthwhile.

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Voiding the Ego: Charlotte Mandell on Translating Paul Valéry

January 22, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Mia Ruf

It doesn't interest me, what [authors] did as people—it's the texts that really matter.

The body of work comprising Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste manuscripts represents some of his most illuminating and challenging ideas, condensed into an alter ego who could articulate an evolving analysis of poetry’s intellectual mechanisms, multivalent origins, and immovable rationality. In reflecting on the character’s origins, Valéry had pointed to sudden, surging, “strange excesses of self-awareness,” a rousing that stirred newfound doubts and investigations into his chosen craft, and thus a renewed inquisition into the very acts of thinking, imagining, and inventing. Monsieur Teste became then a companion that would walk alongside Valéry for the remainder of the poet’s life, leaving impressions and musings in the stray forms of philosophical texts, brief aphorisms, and fictional letters. An encompassing collection of these works are now available in a luminous translation by Charlotte Mandell, which we were proud to present as our December Book Club selection. In this interview, Mandell speaks to us about the challenge of working with Valéry’s occasionally-lyrical, occasionally-bareboned style, and what it means to meet translation as its own form of creation.

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.    

Mia Ruf (MR): I want to first talk about Valéry’s own notes in the preface to Monsieur Teste, where he discusses the difficulty of translating this text—in part because of the language he talks about devising. He refers to it as “forced and vigorously abstract” and “with a few traces of that vulgarity or triviality we allow ourselves.” Did you feel that way in translating it? And did you find those aspects to indeed be difficult?

Charlotte Mandell (CM): Yeah, because a lot of the aphorisms are so short. There’s not a lot of context to base the translation on, so you sort of have to guess what Valéry is trying to say. Also, when he talks about abstract words, you have to resist an urge to just be easy and translate whatever you think it is; you have to try to put yourself in his mindset, which is really hard—to see what he meant instead of what I thought he meant. It helped a lot to have the Jackson Mathews translation [Princeton, 1989], so I consulted that, but you made a good point in your review, which is that I tend to make the sentences a little bit longer than Mathews did. He often attempted to make the text a little bit “easier,” and shortened some of the sentences, but I tried to just stay as true as possible to the original—both in terms of the sentence length, and also the way by which the thought unfolds.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 17, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kathryn Raver and Sofija Popovska

The latest literary news from France and North Macedonia!

This week, our team members introduce us to a prize-winning short story collection and take us to a medieval library. From a debut that negotiates the complicated politics of nostalgia to an exhibition in the newly-restored Notre-Dame, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

To the delight of tourists, historians, and French natives alike, Notre-Dame de Paris reopened its doors to the public last month. The cathedral is obviously celebrated for its religious and symbolic significance – but it has a significant literary history that has gone rather unappreciated, too (and I’m not talking about The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Since the Middle Ages, Notre Dame has been not only a church, but a scriptorium and a library, filled to the brim with science, history, and other secular literature in addition to a wealth of religious texts.

To coincide with the cathedral’s opening, the Musée de Cluny and the Bibliothèque National de France have put together an exhibition featuring over 40 of these manuscripts – just a few of the 300 that are currently housed within the BnF itself. Having just recently had the opportunity to visit the exhibition myself, I can say that it is stunning. Not only are the manuscripts themselves beautiful (and fun to try and decipher, if you can read Old French), but they also provide a fascinating look at the functioning of medieval libraries, the transmission of knowledge, and the links between texts and cultural and religious heritage. The exhibition is open until March 16th. READ MORE…