Place: Germany

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain by Wilhelm Genazino

A look delivers the quickest verdict; its production requires no more than a second’s time.

“What do you do when you can’t manage to write a book? I’ll tell you: You make little notes, observations, anecdotes, sketch individual scenes. And then? You piece them together indiscriminately.” Thus wrote one irate critic of the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain—but they were wrong.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Wilhelm Genazino‘s mid-career masterpiece, translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. Here, the superficially aimless wanderings of our unnamed protagonist give way to a complex pattern of references and emotional resonances, his catalogue of observations accumulating into a vivid psychological portrait. What results is not a traditional dramatic novel, but rather, a powerful meditation on memory and loss. On the process of choosing an excerpt, the translator writes: “I had to make peace with the fact that I was doing a sort of violence to the text by snipping threads—visible or invisible—where they were not meant to be snipped. It felt worth it to give readers a sample of Genazino’s work, which with the exception of one novel remains untranslated into English.” Read on!

I step into the Rialto, the second-largest Italian café in town, and take a spot at the long counter, which reaches from the depths of the room up to the glass doors in front. I ask for an espresso and the telephone and dial Gesa’s number, although I’ll hardly say a word to her. The call is just a pretense. Gesa picks up. I say: I’m in the Rialto, do you want to hear Italy? She says: Yes. Then I am silent and hold the receiver towards the counter. From time to time, when she is sitting alone in her room, Gesa wants to be interrupted by the sounds of an Italian bar. She loves the quick setting of espresso dishes on the glass counter, the clacking of cups on the saucers, the laying of spoons beside the full cups, the snapping of the ice-cream scoop, the light sputter of the fruit press, the skating back-and-forth of metal ice-cream bowls on the counter, the pressure of freshly uncapped bottles, the opening and closing of heavy fridge doors, the clicking of ice cubes in slender glasses, the impact of a bottle opener on a marble slab, the hissing of the espresso machine, the dumping of coffee grounds into wooden trash bins. This is what she wants to hear: the sound of a more distant life that infiltrates her own for one minute, like a promise. After a while I ask: Is it good? Yes, it is good. Gesa laughs, and from her laugh you can tell that her life has rotated once around itself. I say: See you later. We hang up, I give back the telephone, pay and go.

READ MORE…

To Keep the Shimmer Alive: A Review of The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom . . . as an event within language.

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025

Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

Unhappy Ending: An Interview with Franziska Gänsler and Imogen Taylor

I wanted to connect my area with a more urgent threat of climate crisis.

A sweltering combination of domestic turmoil, existential ennui, and an increasingly threatening final disaster, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer presents the portrait of fractures both geographic and internal, translated with a natural erudition by Imogen Taylor. Set in a German spa town on the verge of being consumed by wildfire, the novel tells of a young woman who receives a pair of surprising visitors, and in this disruption of her melancholy routine, a spark of desire is awakened—something that could prove to be illuminating, or all-consuming. 

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.

Rachel Stanyon: Franziska, you’ve had a lot of success with this debut novel in Germany; translations and film rights have been sold, and it’s received some glowing reviews in the English-language press. And Imogen, you’ve got twenty translations under your belt. How did you each get where you are now?

Franziska Gänsler (FG): I always wrote. It was my main interest even as a child, but I never felt that it could be a profession—it’s so uncertain. I’m not from an artistic family, so I didn’t know how to get there. I ended up studying to become a teacher of art and English, and had stopped writing for a few years; I was painting and doing other things creatively, then somehow I took it up again. Then writing just took over all of my time. I was lucky because I was supposed to be painting, but my professor at university allowed me to write instead. She was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and couldn’t even read what I wrote, but she always signed off on everything. I started entering competitions, and from there my agent saw my work.

I actually wrote one book prior to this one, but nobody wanted to publish it. And then with Eternal Summer we came to Kein & Aber, which is my publishing house in German, and I’m still with them.

Imogen Taylor (IT): I think for me, it was a coincidence. I studied French and German, and then moved to Berlin after my BA in England. People started asking me to translate because they knew I could speak German and English, so I took odd jobs on for neighbours and friends. I was paid in bottles of wine for one of my first jobs. It wasn’t really very serious, and I carried on studying, with a master’s and a PhD. I was still doing some translation on the side, but not very much or seriously. And then I gradually realized that was what I really wanted to do, more than academic work. READ MORE…

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

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…

What’s New in Translation: May 2025

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

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

Transparencies 2025 PROMO COVER

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

    Review by Jason Gordy Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2025

A deeper dive into Rosario Castellanos, Liu Ligan, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in our latest issue.

There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.

A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”

As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her. READ MORE…

What’s New In Translation: April 2025

New titles from Brazil, Portugal, Switzerland, Colombia, Norway, Italy, Palestine, Cuba, Peru, Japan, Afghanistan, and Germany!

The brevity of a transcendent ecopoetics, a fierce diagnosis of the contemporary art world, the psychological torture of a toxic relationship, a gathering of formidable Afro-Brazilian voices. . . This month, we are delighted to introduce fifteen new works from around the world, from the intimate to the twisted, the reverent to the radical, of healing and breaking, of what goes on within us and between us.

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 Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández, translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia, World Poetry Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Rhythm in poetry, Yeats told us, serves to “prolong the moment of contemplation—the moment when we are both asleep and awake” by balancing a monotonous formula of language with the surprise of new images, ideas. In his metered perfection, he reminded us that we are innately rhythmic creatures, alive by the steady pace of breath and heartbeat, habit-forming and fond of repetition, and every interruption to this enduring pattern is a miniature shock, a fracture, a revival.

The hundred poems in Gastón Fernández’s Apparent Breviary are full of interruptions: huge, gasping chasms of silence throwing poetic rhythm into some archaic past. A few pages in, I understood why their translator, KM Cascia, had admitted that the poems made them “squirm.” They unsettled me too. With no guiding cadence to the words, no comfort of the steady pulse, with language disorientating in its skeleton arrangement, there is a sense of learning how to read again, examining each word set firmly on its own—rare stars in the page’s matte sky. Max Picard had once brought up the idea that language is too self-conscious: “each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front than to the silence.” In Fernández, this isn’t so; here, language is conscious of its origin and reverent of its silent surroundings, and as soon as one acknowledges this fact, the vacancy of the negative spaces on the page begin to seem inviting. Instead of being read as simply text, there is something of Apparent Breviary that demands to be interpreted as score, in which the nothingness is full of measures, divisions, momentum. The poet demands we notice that the emptiness is alive: it breathes. READ MORE…

Winter 2025: Highlights from the Team

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…

What’s New in Translation: January 2025

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite” by H.W. Burg

Over and over, I would anxiously ask myself: where did you get this queer desire to dress and act so femininely?

Just in time for the holiday season, we bring you a different kind of Christmas story for this week’s Translation Tuesday. “My Christmas: Memories of a Transvestite,” written by H.W. Burg and translated from the German by M.M. Pinky, was originally been published 100 years ago, but remains startling in its immediacy. Through a series of Yuletide reflections, the author, assigned male at birth, relates their lifelong journey of coming to terms with their innate femininity. The quest for authentic gender expression expands into a tender exploration of self-discovery, longing, and the profound human need for pure acceptance. In a political climate where transgender rights seem to be an increasingly easy target, this short memoir reminds us why fearmongering rhetoric obscures the simple truth of people who, like anyone else, are searching for connection and love.

It is Christmas Eve again. Alone, I stand at the window of my quiet bachelor’s room and look into the cold winter night. Hoarfrost covers the trees. Hedges and bushes glisten in the light of the streetlamps as if the sky descended to Earth with thousands of little falling stars on this holy night. How beautiful it is when nature unfolds its wonders and no human hand disturbs its mysterious play.

The sound of “Silent Night, Holy Night” floats by my ears from the neighboring house. Through the thin window curtains, I see the dark outline of a Christmas tree and the bright glow of its lights. I close my eyes and imagine how those gathered around the tree join hands in love, how the quiet happiness of peace transfigures their eyes. I know the people. Quiet, simple, content people, who help each other carry the heavy things in life. How beautiful it is when two hearts find each other and love lifts them up from the vices of everyday life.

On my table there too is a Christmas tree. It is small; I bought it today, ready-made with decorations and candles already on it. As I’m about to strike a match, a deep sadness creeps over me. I am suddenly gripped by a desolate loneliness with a force I haven’t felt for some time. Lighting the candles is impossible. My eyes fill with tears and I have to sit down with my head against the table. My deep misery grips me with terrible strength, and I begin crying, crying bitter tears, today—on Christmas Eve—while everyone rejoices and celebrates the season of joy. 

Once my tears dried, I sat dreaming, pondering before my Christmas tree, from which no light fell into my saddened soul. Memories from days long ago unfurled within me, memories of celebrations of Christmases past. In my mind they all lay before me, and of the long list, four stayed in my mind with particular clarity. READ MORE…