Place: Taiwan

The Perennial Moon: An Interview with Li Zi Shu and YZ Chin on Mahua Fiction

September 22, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Mahua writers. . . have eschewed the “pure” language passed down through the eons in favor of depicting reality on the ground. . .

Mahua literature, or Malaysian Chinese literature, emerged in the early twentieth century, drawing inspiration from the Wusi (May Fourth) Movement and reflecting on localised identities, questions of belonging, and negotiations of culture within plurilingual, multicultural Malaysia. Often subjected to nationalist policies that prioritise creative works in Malay, Mahua literature occupies a liminal space, overlooked by Malaysia, mainland China, and the larger Chinese-speaking world, yet resonant in its transnational and Sinophone dimensions, according to scholar Cheow Thia Chan in Malaysian Crossings (2023). Many Mahua authors write in conversational Chinese (Bai hua) embedded with atmospheric Malaysian locality. Called a “transperipheral” formation outside borders by Chan, it navigates a global marginality with a style that’s almost an anomaly—and rightfully so.

Among these Mahua voices, Li Zi Shu stands out as a representative figure, along with King Ban Hui, Li Tianbao, Zeng Linglong, Ho Sok Fong, and Ng Kim Chew. Born in Ipoh, Perak in Malaysia, Li Zi Shu worked as a schoolteacher, dishwasher, shoe store salesperson, and then a journalist before dedicating herself fully to writing short novels. Eventually, she began writing longer works, including her celebrated first full-length novel The Age of Goodbyes, published in its Chinese original in Taiwan in 2010 and in mainland China two years later. Chosen as one of the best novels by Asia Weekly in 2010 and China Times in 2011, the novel was translated into English by Louise Meriwether Prize-winning Malaysian fictionist YZ Chin for Feminist Press.

In this interview, I spoke with Li (in West Malaysia) and Chin (in New York) in a conversation that spans Li’s novels, especially The Age of Goodbyes, the diaspora of Mahua writers and Malaysian Chinese communities, and what it means to not belong.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Zi Shu, your novel The Age of Goodbyes was described by Michael Berry in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2016) as “not only a new take on Malaysian Chinatown life during the 1960s but also a fresh use of the Chinese language, tinged with a neoclassical style, and a complex metafictional narrative.” Could you share how this novel come together over time?

Li Zi Shu (LZS): The Age of Goodbyes was written before I turned forty. At that time, I felt a sense of urgency—I had been writing for over a decade, mostly short stories and flash fiction. I was eager to try my hand at a longer form, or rather, I truly wanted to craft something more “grand,” something that could be regarded as a “great” work. Looking back now, I realize that was a somewhat naive perspective, and perhaps a misunderstanding of what literature is. Over the years, I have developed a much greater appreciation for the subtle and the minute. Nonetheless, before I turned forty, I held high expectations for this long novel. I wanted to pour all my knowledge and ideas accumulated over the years into this one work. The use of a metafictional narrative was a deliberate “device,” partly because it allowed the novel to have more space—much like adding an attic or a cellar to a house, enabling multiple layers of storytelling to coexist. At that time, I was eager to demonstrate everything I could do with a novel within a single piece. The structural choice of metafiction was driven by that desire.

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Magical Taiwan: A Literature Exhibition Bringing Myth, History, and Reimagined Futures to Osaka

September 8, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Mary Hillis

. . . a place where gods, spirits, and spectral beings coexist across layered landscapes and tradition.

From August 10 to 20, Osaka hosted “Magical Taiwan,” an exhibit featuring the breadth and deep lineages of divination, folklore, spiritualism, and the supernatural in Taiwanese literature. From genre mainstays to oral traditions to indigenous influences, the featured works and writers emphasized their unique cultural traditions, while gesturing towards an affinity and commonality with Japan’s own significant mythologies.

In Japan, the time of Obon is when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. In some regions, it is said that one’s ancestors travel between the realms on “spirit horses” fashioned from cucumbers and eggplants. This summer, however, right before the festivities, a different crop of guests crossed the threshold; from Taiwan to Japan, ghosts and gods traveled on the wings of the written word for “Magical Taiwan,” an exhibition of Taiwanese literature. The Special Room of the Osaka City Central Public Hall, with its frescos of Japanese myths and legends, provided an ideal locale for the event, which was curated by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and subtitled “The Enchanted Page: Folktales and Magical Realism in Taiwan Literature.” Time seemed to slow as people of all ages moved through the six themed areas, each a gateway to Taiwan’s literary enchantments, spanning the shimmering realm of magical realism, the chilling darkness of ghost stories, and the enduring influence of folkloric wisdom.

The exhibit began with “Indigenous Taiwan: The Inspiration Behind Myths and Magic,” in which three authors from Taiwan’s various indigenous groups showcased their works: 絕島之咒 (Curse of the Island) by Amis writer Nakao Eki, 巫旅 (Witch Way) by Puyuma author Badai, and 八代灣的神話 (The Myths of Badai Bay) by Tao/Yami writer Syaman Rapongan. Attendees could be seen paging through a copy of the latter, a collection of myths and legends important to the native people of Lanyu (Orchid Island), located to the southeast of Taiwan. Happily enough, the July 2025 issue of Asymptote features an excerpt from Rapongan’s Eyes of the Ocean (with an accompanying lesson plan in the issue’s Educator’s Guide); in it, Rapongan—who has been described as an “ocean writer”—recounts a scene from his travels to Greenland: READ MORE…

Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

August 4, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our bountiful Summer 2025 edition is filled with gems—as these highlights from our team show!

I have complicated feelings about Carolina Brown’s “Anthropocene” (tr. Jessica Powell). The brevity it accords its narrator’s transness is alternately touching and maddening, the fatphobia is at once completely spot-on for such a self-loathing narrator and at the same time it is pretty dehumanizing‚ but, ultimately, all that falls away in the ravaged face of a one-armed zombie jogging across the post climate-change Antarctic wasteland. A wonderful sci-fi tale.

I’d love Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of an Ocean (tr. Darryl Sterk) for the title alone, but fortunately, Rapongan seems like a strong contender for the title of the actual most-interesting-man-in-the-world. His play with words, his treatment of colonization and indigeneity, the kindness with which he talks about younger generations. I really needed to read something like this, after all the ugliness that’s been going on in my own country.

I love the gender-bender secret agent in Valentinas Klimašauskas’s Polygon (tr. Erika Lastovskytė) so freaking much. The concluding discussion of airplane spotters is a particular stand-out for its treatment of how individuals become conscious of their political power.

Refugees are human beings. Where Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’ “La Venezolana” (tr. Shaina Brassard) shines is in its steadfast refusal either to vilify or idealize them, to present them in all their messy humanity, and in its willingness to show how shameful the narrator’s behavior towards them.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Emmanuelle Sapin’s story “A Child Is Stolen” (tr. Michelle Kiefer) starts off with a swift, telling punch to the gut and builds from there.

Ahmad Shamlou’s poems in Niloufar Talebi’s lilting translation hover in waves of emotion and radiance: “Give me mirrors and eager moths, / light and wine…”

With playfulness and insight, Katia Grubisic sharpens the discussion about AI and translation by focusing on error in her piece “The Authority of Error”: “My argument is that AI makes the wrong kind of mistakes.  Mistakes breed resilience, and, most importantly, humility.”

Fawwaz Taboulsi, in Yasmine Zohdi’s translation, steers us directly into the sadness of Lebanon, 1982, and the time of the Siege of Beirut. His grief speaks with lucidity: “And, ever so slowly, the departing fighters peel away from the grasping, waving hands and from the embracing arms. Like skin peeling off its own flesh. They peel away from the farewells. From the prayers. From the promises.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers build characters. Jana Putrle Srdić’s poem “End of the world, beginning” in Katia Zakrajšek’s translation, does this in striking ways: ” Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind, / you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air, / spots of flickering light”

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

Our Summer 2025 Edition Has Landed!

July 24, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Alda Merini, Bassam Yousuf, Carolina Brown, and Daniel Saldaña París in our AI-themed Feature

Do other people have inner lives? Or are they just NPCs with no consciousness, no soul? We can’t know for sure! Philosophers call this “the zombie problem,” which also happens to be the tagline of our Summer 2025 issue. Not least because there is an actual zombie featured for the first time in our pages via Carolina Brown’s biting cli-fi; the “zombie problem” is also at the heart of any discussion about AI—the theme of this edition’s wildcard Special Feature. Alongside MARGENTO’s extraordinary hybrid human-AI work, we are proud to bring you an exclusive interview with acclaimed translator Boris Dralyuk, a dossier of poems by the beloved Italian master Alda Merini, an excerpt from Lithuanian novelist Valentinas Klimašauskas’s genre-bending Polygon, a pair of pieces by Anna Tsouhlarakis and Syaman Rapongan centering their indigenous worldviews, and our first article from the Azerbaijani amid new work from 32 countries—all of it movingly illustrated by Singapore-based guest artist Xin Lui Ng.

The question of consciousness takes center stage in our Special Feature on AI—not the ersatz sentience of AI itself, but rather the uneasy cognizance, among members of the literary community, of its disruptive potential this side of singularity—hence the Feature’s title, “What AI Can’t Do.” From Daniel Saldaña París’s incisive meditation on AI in translation to S. K. Birk’s tale of a fiction-generating chatbot forced into the role of a lonely girl’s eternal yes-man, these pieces highlight the limits of AI as a tool for transforming the more fundamental problems of a society that too often turns a blind eye to hegemony and suffering.

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Elsewhere, “the zombie problem” becomes grotesquely literal, from the undead trudging across post-climate change Antarctica in Brown’s “Anthropocene” to the humanoid fungi encountered by the hikikomori in Luis Carlos Barragán Castro’s intense mind trip of a story “Cephalomorphs.” One might turn into a zombie too, carrying out inhuman orders on behalf of an authoritarian regime as we see in Syrian writer Bassam Yousuf’s devastating real-life account of a childhood friend-turned-torturer. Even in more idyllic circumstances, one can suddenly discover that one is “no longer there,” that one has become “a suspended, emptied image, merged with its surroundings,” as Slovenian poet Jana Putrle Srdić puts it in “End Of The World, Beginning”; indeed, social norms can disfigure a person until they lead a life that is more performance than living. In Drama, Yannis Palavos gives us the story of a man dogged by crime and a daughter dogged in turn by his memory, her searching monologue part exorcism, part attempt to restore humanity to them both. Appearing in English for the very first time in our fourth Special Feature themed on outsiders, Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’s encounters with Venezuelan refugees unfold across a gamut of misadventures—but through it all he never lets us forget their humanity or his.

In light of the recent flurry of announcements surrounding AI-powered literary translation services, this seems as good a moment as any to gently remind our readers that Asymptote has, for the past fifteen years, been a painstakingly human endeavor. Nothing about our work—from the meticulous curation of each issue to the minutiae of holding together a far-flung, 100-strong virtual team—has ever been generated by machine or delivered at algorithmic speed. If the growing encroachment of AI into daily life has deepened your appreciation for human creativity and labor, we warmly invite you to support us by becoming a sustaining or masthead member. Long live human-powered literature!

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Taipei Travelogue: On the Taipei International Book Exhibition 2025

February 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

What historical and cultural pressures have shaped these literatures into their current forms and dynamics?

For its thirty-third edition this year, the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) filled a hall of the Taipei World Trade Center from February 4 to 9. The exhibition’s theme—「閱讀異世界」 ‘Follow Your Fancy in Reading’—celebrated the「異」or the ‘other’ in global literature, drawing authors from as far as Italy (this year’s guest of honour) and Czechia, and as near as Japan and Hong Kong. Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor for fiction, Michelle Chan Schmidt, was one of the translators, editors, publishers, and readers who flocked to the fascinating six-day event to learn more about Taiwanese literature in translation.

Alongside the meticulous preparations of lóo-bah and bah-sò rice, yamagawa pot, or the Taiwanese iterations of yōshoku curry, translation is one of the crafts in Taiwan Travelogue that combine to give Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novel the complexity and richness of a twelve-course feast. When our Japanese narrator Aoyama Chizuko arrives in Taiwan—a then-Japanese colony—in 1938, Ông Tshian-hóh, also known as Ō Chizuru or Chi-chan, is the young local woman assigned to serve as her Taiwanese interpreter. It takes only a quarter of the meticulously structured novel for Chizuko, increasingly enraptured with Chi-chan, to realize her hidden dream: ‘Wait, I know what your ambition is! It’s to become a professional translator—of novels, isn’t it?’

On the opening day of the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Yáng and Taiwan Travelogue’s translator, Lin King, spoke at length in Mandarin about the layers of translation saturating this brilliant novel, beginning with its ‘translate-ception’ structure: Yáng’s narrative masquerades as an original piece of 1930s Japanese travel writing that her authorial persona purports to have translated into Taiwanese Chinese. To write the novel, Yáng and her sister delved into the immense archives concerning the Japanese colonization of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, which enabled them to filter Taiwan Travelogue through Chizuko’s Japanese eyes. It was a kind of pain, says Yáng, to not be able to write in a Taiwanese voice in the novel. 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…

A Long and Winding Way to Go: Luka Lei Zhang on Working-Class Writings from Asia

January 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to use the framework of ‘working-class literature’ to explore the transformations and tensions in literary texts.

Through the lens of comparative literature, the ancestry of working-class writings and the literature of labour trails from Russian novelist Maxim Gorky’s Maть (Mother, 1906) to South Africa’s Black migrant theatre, from the oeuvre of Argentine poet Elías Castelnuovo to the biographies of working-class Irish writers, and includes the many proletarian writers collectives springing up in response to the social moment: France’s Socialisme ou Barbarie, Japan’s Puroretaria bunka undō and Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei, Sri Lanka’s Dabindu, and United Kingdom’s ‘The Fed’ or the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.

As Macau-based Chinese scholar-translator Dr. Luka Lei Zhang writes in The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (2024), the literary production of contemporary Asian workers ‘are often subjected to intricate social forces and power dynamics’, and it ‘would be a mistake to reduce these contradictions to simple good/bad, political/apolitical, and individual/collective oppositions’. It is this simplistic dichotomy that is contested by Asian Workers Stories, an anthology of fiction and nonfiction prose produced outside the fortresses of the canon, the middle-class literati, and the academe. Dr. Zhang, the anthology’s editor, brings her expertise as a scholar (and at-times translator) of working-class writers Chong Han, Tan Kok Seng, and Md Sharif Uddin of Singapore, as well as Mengyu, Wan Huashan, and Shengzi of China. In a 2023 interview, she confessed: ‘Personally and politically, working-class literature holds a special place in my heart’, going on to name Gorky, Annie Ernaux, Xu Lizhi, Takiji Kobayashi, and Filipino migrant worker-poet Rolinda Onates Española as her favourites.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Zhang on migrant workers writing from East Asia, Southeast and South Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the expansion of working-class writings within the larger body of the Asian literary canon.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Cheers to the anthology Asian Workers Stories! Apart from wanting to contribute a new dimension to Asian working-class literature (considering most existing books are either scholarly or poetry collections originally written in English), what are other motivations that impelled the creation of this anthology? 

Luka Lei Zhang (LLZ): I’ve worked on workers’ writings for several years and have encountered many great storytellers. Although several anthologies of workers’ poetry exist, short stories are translated and collected on a lesser basis. My main goal was to organise the writers in this region and, in this way, show that their work is valued and that they do not write alone. I am fortunate to know many Asian worker writers personally, which had allowed me to approach them and discuss the project, and their interest and encouragement motivated me to pursue the work further. I met Hard Ball Press’s publisher, Tim Sheard, at the Working-Class Studies Conference in 2019. He invited me to publish working-class writings with him—and that’s how it happened. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

December 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Len Sander, Liliana Torpey, and Regan Mies

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

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What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, New York  Review Books, 2024 READ MORE…

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

November 13, 2024  |  in News  |  by Georgina Fooks, Joseph McAlhany, Julie Shi, Mary Hillis, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Sauvryn Linn, and Thuy Dinh

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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What’s New in Translation: November 2024

November 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Jonathon Atkinson, Rachel Stanyon, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan!

In this month’s review of newly released titles, we’re looking at works from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan. From a haunting volume of ecopoetics to the first book in an acclaimed metaphysical septology, from powerful anticolonial verses to a meditation on the art of translating, read on for some of the best work being released now in English!

Balle CALCULATION vol1 rgb

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Review by Rachel Stanyon

After an unremarkable day spent on a business trip in Paris, Tara Selter is enjoying breakfast in her hotel when it strikes her that it is yesterday again. In the first book of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eighteenth of November begins repeating itself.

What possibilities exist upon the dawning of an old day? Are there wrongs to right, missed opportunities to seize, risks to take or temper? Balle’s heroine does not seem to perceive any such problems or desires; she likes her fairly routine job as an antiquarian book dealer, and works alongside her husband, Thomas, whom she loves. She does not seem to want for nor regret anything, and has blind faith in Thomas, who believes her when she tells him about her repeating days (at least the first umpteen times).

So why has her time “fallen apart”, and what can be gleaned from observing this procession of almost identical days—slowly, meticulously, rhythmically—through the diary Tara keeps? (In this version of eternal return, some of Tara’s physical imprints on the world remain indelible.) Book I details a year (the first of many?) spent haunting the all-too familiar patterns of her husband, all the while lost in loneliness and musing on the volume of her existence. Is she an all-consuming “beast, a pest” or a “tiny monster in an immense space”? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 21, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, Kathryn Raver, and Rubén López

The latest from Guatemala, Taiwan, China, and France!

This week, our editors take us through Central America, France, and China to explore the reaches of literature, from a transcendent event honouring the poems of Robert Bolaño, to the new World Book Capital in France, and works featuring vital new voices from the Chinese language. Read on to find out more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

When I entered the room, it looked like a coven: a group of people gathered around an edition of Roberto Bolaño’s Complete Poetry. Each member of the group would take turns to step into the centre, leaf through the text for a moment, and then recite one of the Chilean author’s poems at random, like a poetic Russian roulette. As I took my seat, one of the young men was reading the final verses of “The Romantic Dogs”. I had arrived at the event without much certainty about what it would be like; the poster from Perjura Proyecto, a cultural and artistic dissemination space, only said “The Poetry Came” and had a sketch of Bolaño’s silhouette. And, of course, it also mentioned the date and time—May 23, 17:00.

When it was my turn, I decided I wanted to read “Godzilla in Mexico”, my favorite poem by Bolaño. I clumsily flipped through the text while trying to make conversation with the rest of the participants, but I couldn’t find it. I apologised to the group because I would break the Russian roulette and put the bullet in the centre; I searched for it on my phone. As I recited “Yo leía en la habitación de al lado cuando supe que íbamos a morir”, I was overcome with a deep tenderness. I saw us, in the midst of a vertiginous and infamous city—a group of no more than ten people gathered to read Bolaño’s poems to each other. I thought about the infinite forms of cultural resistance in which we exist, all self-managed, all on the margins, all filled with beauty. READ MORE…

May 2024: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

May 12, 2024  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

From poetry readings to translation workshops—check out our compilation of some of this summer's latest opportunities in world literature.

SUBMISSIONS

THE VIEW FROM GAZA

The Massachusetts Review is calling for submissions for a special issue, The View From Gaza. Palestinian writers are encouraged to send their work—whether it be poetry, prose, essays, or art—for this special issue, which will commemorate those who have been lost in the genocide and celebrate the ongoing resistance and resilience in Gaza.

As Israel’s violence against Gaza continues, the Review “hope[s] to amplify the work of Palestinian writers that contributes to the theory and critique of Empire and settler colonialism.” Submissions in English, Arabic, and other languages are all eligible.

The deadline for submissions is June 15th. Submissions should be sent to themassreview@gmail.com.

EVENTS

2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE READINGS

On June 5th, 2024, the Griffin Poetry Prize invites you to join them for an evening of poetry and translation!

Awarded annually, the Griffin Poetry Prize is the world’s largest international prize for a book of poetry written (or translated into) English. At this celebratory event, this year’s shortlisted poets will read from their works at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto before this year’s winner is revealed. Readings will also be performed by the Lifetime Recognition Award recipient and the 2024 Canadian First Book Prize winner.

Tune in to the the Griffin Poetry Prize’s Youtube channel to watch a livestream of the readings on June 5th at 7pm ET.

GRANTS & FUNDING

GLOBAL AFRICA TRANSLATION FELLOWSHIP

The Africa Institute is welcoming applications for their fourth annual Global Africa Translation Fellowship!

This fellowship aims to celebrate works from the African continent, as well as from the African diaspora. Translators from across the Global South can submit their works-in-progress or potential projects to be considered for a grant of up to $5,000. Translations of previously untranslated poetry, prose, and critical theory works, as well as retranslations of older texts, are eligible. Submissions should be translated into English or Arabic, although translations into some other languages may also be considered.

The deadline for applications is June 1st, 2024. Find more information on eligibility and how to apply here.

RESIDENCIES & WORKSHOPS

BCLT ADVANCED TRANSLATION WORKSHOPS

Since 2021, the British Centre for Literary Translation has run annual advanced translation workshops to support the craft of literary translators and to bring together those with common language pairs. This year’s workshop will center on translators of Taiwanese literature.

Workshop participants will have the opportunity to work with other attendees to hone a sample translation for their chosen project. By the end of the program, participants will have a polished sample, as well as a pitch, that is ready to send off to potential publishers. Accepted applicants will need to choose a book from the Taiwan Literature Awards for Books longlists and obtain permission to translate the work.

The deadline for applications is June 2nd, 2024, while the event itself will run online during the 7th, 22nd, and 23rd of November. Read more here.

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Our mission here at Asymptote is to elevate the incredible work that translators do to to share literature from around the world. Our “Upcoming Opportunities” initiative aims to provide those translators with the opportunity to improve their craft and share the projects they’ve put their hearts into. Have an opportunity that you’d like us to share in this monthly column? Check out our rates here, then drop us a line.

We’re working hard on our upcoming 52nd issue. If you’ve enjoyed the work we do—from our social media channels and blog to our newsletters and, of course, our quarterly issues—please consider supporting us as we continue to celebrate world literature and those that bring it to life. Any and all donations to support us on our mission are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

Spontaneity Through Ambiguity: An Interview with Chia-Lun Chang

March 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Anne Lai

[H]ere is where I can explore my limited English as a vehicle, within this ambiguity.

I met Chia-Lun Chang when we were both enrolled in the Poets House fellowship program in 2016, when I had only been writing for a few years and was hesitant to call myself a poet. We bonded over how new we were to writing poems. In this following conversation, we retraced her unconventional introduction to writing poetry and how English as a second language offered her a newfound identity to be playful and purely honest. Her book Prescribee (Nightboat Books, 2022) wields humor like a dagger, rife with cutting repartee that reveals how cruel, yet liberating life is for her in America. Her poems from the book have appeared in Granta, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB online.

Chia-Lun Chang (CC): In Taiwan, the genres are not as distinct as in America, but I noticed that many high-profile writers in Taiwan primarily write non-fiction prose, expressing their opinions. Readers think of it as culturally significant; it provides a getaway into the lives of another world, a world full of writers or cultured individuals. During our conversation, I’ve also realized that many novelists are telling one story. They have numerous novels, but it’s one same story from a core idea because it originates from their body. 

Anne Lai (AL): Do you feel like you’re also in pursuit of one idea when you’re writing?

CC: Because of my experiences, I tend to question my identity. But, aren’t we all, in some ways, asking ourselves, “Who am I?” In that very question, I’m afraid of finding the unknown. There are moments when I write in English, where I create a new persona that reflects this nation and the body that I inhabit within it. That is the direction I’m heading and it’s tied to my identity, this very new role that I’m cultivating.

AL: This reminds me of your experience in trying to get your green card, and eventually getting it.

CC: Yeah, both of those experiences—applying for a green card and learning the language that I speak most of the time. The green card process was brutal so I was constantly facing a blackhole answer: what’s necessary for me to stay? I’m terrified of my desire. I don’t believe I have the opportunity to create art in Taiwan, I’m not talented enough or I don’t have space to do what I’m doing here, and many may disagree. But I’m grateful that I can be playful and try different things in this new language and space.

AL: I’ve never asked you this, but have you written poetry in Mandarin? How did you start writing? 

CC: Never. Growing up, I was always interested in writing, but I saw myself more as a reader. There were times when I would write essays for school; the requirements of exams in Taiwan were like the SAT tests in the States, but they asked for more melancholic and metaphorical compositions. Those were my experiences in building my first language. I remember the question on my college exam was, “Who is your idol? Who do you look up to?” I actually wrote about the poet Su Shi. In my society, I felt that people had a moral obligation in writing; they had to be heroic—even in love, in pain, or struggling. Deep down, I have a cynical personality and worry about not being accepted by society. READ MORE…