Place: Ontario

Fall 2014: Interlinked Dimensions of Spacetime

The Fall 2014 issue of Asymptote demonstrates an exceptional thematic cohesion across genre, language, location, and time.

Around this time, equipped with a new legal advisor (the extremely efficient Win Bassett), a small group is formally set up within our team to look into the feasibility of Asymptote becoming a non-profit organization in the USA. This makes most sense for tax-deductibility, since our largest readership, outnumbering the second largest demographic by a ratio of three to one, is American. It would take one and a half years for me to reach a definitive decision, but I decide in the end not to take the plunge. To become a non-profit, a board would first have to be formed, and all major decisions about the journal’s direction would have to be run by this board (which would mostly comprise Americans). Had I worked so hard for the magazine’s survival only to surrender its reins to others? Aren’t there already more than enough American mediators of otherness? I’m also wary because of what one board member of another online magazine has told me in confidence: being bound to a board has held that magazine back from reaching its full potential. We do, however, thanks to Win Bassett, Erin Stephens-North, Lynette Lee, and Eric M. B. Becker, succeed in acquiring fiscal sponsorship with Fractured Atlas on August 26, 2014. This is a breakthrough: For the first time, we are tax-deductible for American donors, removing one more barrier standing in the way of support. Here to introduce the Fall 2014 issue is Assistant Editor Erik Noonan.

Published in sync with the release of the inaugural episode of the Asymptote Podcast—whose producer Emma Jacobs suggests that the mythical stories we tell ourselves are really signs of “our inability to map our own minds”—the Fall 2014 issue of Asymptote sets the reader afloat through a tesseract located among the interlinked dimensions of spacetime.

In Shi Tiesheng’s “The Year of Being Twenty-One,” that mapless place masquerades in public life as a monotheistic deity: “I did see God, one day—but he went by a different name, and that name was the mind,” Shi writes. “In the hazy patches of science; in the chaos of destiny; you can only turn to your own mind. Everything we believe in—no matter what that might be—comes from the promptings and the guidance of our minds.”    READ MORE…

Stephen Henighan on Globalization, Translation, and The Avant-garde

Translation started not as a way of nourishing the avant-garde—it started as a way of bolstering national identity.

This interview marks the launch of a new series here at the Asymptote blog: “Meet the Publisher.” Every month, we will bring you an insider’s look at the world via in-depth, intimate conversations with publishers of literature in translation from around the globe. This week, contributor Sarah Moses brings us an interview with editor Stephen Henighan of Biblioasis in Ontario, Canada, on the process, politics, and passion of publishing translations.

Sarah Moses says: “Biblioasis started out as a bookshop in Windsor, Ontario in the late 1990s. In 2003, founder and owner Daniel Wells took an interest in publishing and, alongside editor John Metcalf, began to acquire, edit, and launch the press’s first titles. Biblioasis now publishes between twenty-two and twenty-five books a year divided between new literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, alongside reprints and regional-interest books. Biblioasis’s head office still includes a bookstore, and the press also runs a quarterly magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries. The Biblioasis International Translation Series, which accounts for four titles a year, includes works from French Canada and around the world, as well as books written in Canada in languages other than French or English. I sat down with series editor Stephen Henighan to chat about the press and literary translation in Canada.”                                                                                                                                    

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about literary translation in Canada. How would you say it differs from other countries?

 Stephen Henighan (SH): In other cultures—and Buenos Aires, where you’ve just come from, is a good example, if you think back to Jorge Luis Borges and his friends in the early part of their careers, but also in New York or London or Paris—translation was an avant-garde activity. It was an activity that might nourish national literary debate, but above all it was there to give you aesthetic relief from the national context.

I think what happened in Canada is that, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the literary elite was nationalist and therefore wasn’t all that interested in translation. There had been odd translations from French-Canadian literature to English-Canadian literature, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, but the real translation culture begins in the late 1960s in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where in the village of North Hatley writers of English and French were living side by side. That’s where Sheila Fischman, who has gone on to translate more than one hundred and fifty books, got her start.

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