Place: Turkey

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen

November 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

From a Turkish perspective, there is no Kurdistan . . . . Ozmen’s novel meditates on what this effacement does to someone’s subjectivity.

Dizzying, furious, scathing, and absurdist—artist and writer Sener Ozemen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories is a testament to an identity, region, and language under siege. The novel, with its many layered narratives, confronts the Turkish state’s enduring violence against its Kurdish minority, illustrating the psychic and physical fractures of oppression with intellectual complexity and emotional clarity. In attempting to disentangle the knot of selfhood from a merciless assimilating power and a growingly fragmentary everyday existence, Ozmen builds the architecture of fiction to its most veering heights, capturing all the threads of reality’s illusions, and thus resulting in one of contemporary fiction’s most vivid portraits of psychological dissolution—that which still never turns away from the need to express its truths.

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.  

 

The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen, translated from the Kurdish by Nicholas Glastonbury, Sandorf Passage, 2025

In her book Immemorial, Lauren Markham notes that “the feeling of grieving something that isn’t yet gone, and whose disappearance isn’t fully certain . . . is an eerie, off-putting one.” This liminality and its disquieting effect are what animates Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories, deftly translated by Nicholas Glastonbury. This is not only the author’s debut in the Anglosphere, but one of the first works written in Kurdish’s northern Kurmancî dialect to receive an English translation.

Ozmen is a prolific Kurdish writer and multimedia visual artist, the author of numerous books of poetry, novels and short stories, criticism, and artist books. Across his written oeuvre and artistic practice, he has drawn attention to both the urgency and difficulty of speaking from a position of marginalization; The Competition of Unfinished Stories, originally published in Kurmancî as Pêşbaziya Çîrokên Neqediyayî in 2010 and translated into Turkish as Kifayetsiz Hikâyeler Müsabakası in 2015, follows in this spirit. The novel dramatizes—in a challenging and disorienting way—that the stories one tells are always co-authored and situated, demonstrating the interrelatedness and imbrication of the self. As Judith Butler observes in Giving an Account of Oneself, “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.”  READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2025

October 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Sophie Benbelaid, and Xiao Yue Shan

Thoughts and inspirations from our latest issue!

Our latest—and fifty-seventh—issue draws together work from thirty-one countries and twenty-one languages, from antiquity to the boldly contemporary, the comedic to the compassionate, the historic to the experimental. To help you navigate this compendium, our blog editors offer up their favourites.

In one of the many street art pieces embroidering the surfaces of Athens, a black sign reads: ‘A memory of a memory that we are all left with.’ Greece’s capital is bound in all directions: to the bodies that live within its confines, the oblique and omnipresent archive, the dynamism of recollection, the strategies of function, the desperation of loss, the translucency of power, reality’s elasticity and its collapse. To be within it, then, is to acknowledge that no space is neutral—that the collective illusion of fixed borders, fixed pasts, and fixed stratagems of everyday life are gossamer comforts. There is nothing stable in the city. The condition of its existence is nothing less than a mass hypnosis.

‘When my parents told me we lived in Athens, I believed them.’ Amanda Michalopoulou writes in ‘Desert‘, translated with great emotional heft by Joanna Eleftheriou and Natalie Bakopoulos. Through a combination of confession and elucidation, the piece seeks to delineate the living morphology of present-day Athens from its manipulated dreams of cohesion and glory, earmarking the ‘transcendent’ objectives of the ancient city as a catalyst for its current fragility, the very definition of transcendence gesturing at an inoperable unreality, a beyond that persists only in attempts and potentialities. ‘A city that would invent cities and governments, language and liberty,’ so Athens grew with immovable conjectures of goodness and intelligence, until: ‘Step by step, they created a society that matched their insatiable vision of absolute power and control.’ The converge of experience and concept is chaotic, and space does not hesitate to dislocate itself from our comprehension. Thus, as Michalopoulou describes her ‘investigations,’ the city can perhaps be only understood via the fragmented origins of our most ancient texts, in those long-gone years where our present certainties had been amended, invented, reconstituted, and dismembered ceaselessly. The instability of today’s Athens resents the wonders and heights of its own birth, yet this shakiness is also evidence of another strength, for it is as David Graeber said: ‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’  READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur.

At the center of the story is a wealthy notary named Ludovic Possible, who runs a school in Böen—primarily with the motive of getting close to his illegitimate daughter, Aida. When a two-week long rainstorm hits the region, Aida’s mother, Gracilia, dies, and Ludovic reveals himself as Aida’s father, taking over her care. Yet, what truly drives Dahomey’s narrative is the tenets of community and storytelling. Ludovic falls in love with Gracilia because of the way she tells stories, and she passes these tales to Aida; before the child was born, Gracilia “. . . placed a hand on her lower abdomen and told her fertile ovaries the very first story she’d learned from her own mother, who’d learned it from her grandmother, who’d learned it from her great-grandmother. . .”—and so on, all the way back to their first ancestors. Fittingly, the story itself is about a chantrèl who was admired by all: “When she spoke, things would happen. When she made demands, people got to work. With her voice, the rapture caused men to fear for their own sanity.”

Aida internalizes the story and, after her mother’s death, becomes the chantrèl. Armed with the tales passed down from her mother, the young girl builds and fortifies a circle of people who will come to care deeply about her, who will fight on her behalf. Building on the singular capacity of stories to bring people together, Duels captures their particular power within the historical context, demonstrating how the act of telling can frighten those in power and liberate those in captivity.

Whether against an elemental antagonist or a human one, the people in Böen unite to enact change through rebellion. As Duels connects the creation of such solidarities with storytelling, it also works to help the citizens of a tumultuous country imagine a future where violence, injustice, and exploitation no longer govern—necessary work for any nation undergoing immense transformation.

diving board

Diving Board by Tomás Downey, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Invisible Publishing, 2025

Review by Regan Mies READ MORE…

Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

August 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

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Bringing Contemporary Turkish Poetry into English: A Conversation with Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher

August 14, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Even when poetry is read silently, we tend to subvocalize. Rhythm—and even a kind of melody shaped by stress patterns—still resonates.

Curated and translated by Buğra Giritlioğlu, with the collaboration of Daniel Scher, The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish: Poems from the New Millennium (Syracuse University Press, 2025) seeks to dismantle the “Orient of the anthologies,” as Laurent Mignon calls it in his incisive foreword, offering instead a mosaic of voices that refuses reduction to cliché or cultural shorthand. The volume spans 172 poems by 61 poets, weaving canonical figures alongside bold experimenters who push the boundaries of form and language. Familiar names, such as Lâle Müldür and Murathan Mungan, converse with emerging poets whose works might otherwise remain inaccessible to English-language readers. The effect is an anthology that is not merely representative but dialogic.

Turkish, with its null-subject syntax and layered ambiguities, resists a one-to-one mapping into English. Rather than smoothing these difficulties, the translators lean into them. “If any of the translations seem obscure,” Giritlioğlu writes, “the reader can rest assured the originals are equally so.” This refusal to domesticate feels radical in an era of over-sanitized translations. Scher’s role balances this fidelity with readability, bringing a native ear attuned to English idiom

In this interview, I speak with Buğra Giritlioğlu, whose background straddles materials science, ethnomusicology, and literary translation, and Daniel Scher, whose editorial eye and native English fluency helped shape the anthology’s final voice. We discuss the puzzles and pleasures of translating experimental Turkish poetry, the ethics of collaboration, and the aesthetic fault lines that define this vibrant literary moment. From negotiating null-subject ambiguities to preserving sonic textures across languages, their reflections offer a rare glimpse into the labor behind making a national literature audible in another tongue.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): Buğra, given your background in materials science and ethnomusicology, how do these fields inform your work as a translator of poetry?

Buğra Giritlioğlu (BG): Both materials science and ethnomusicology have shaped how I think, in ways that carry over into translation. All three require an inquisitive, analytical mindset. Translation often involves a kind of optimization, much like materials science: you’re constantly weighing trade-offs, making fine-tuned adjustments, and aiming for the best possible version under specific constraints.

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Life Adorned with a Little Death: A Review of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü

June 23, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

This is a novel of simultaneous journeys outward and inward, through space and time, and also through memory and literature. . .

Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Transit Books, 2025

The Turkish writer Tezer Özlü lacks widespread recognition in the Anglosphere, but the tide of her English reception is turning thanks to the efforts of Maureen Freely, the translator of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In her lifetime of 1943-86, Özlü was part of a moment in modern Turkish literary history in which secular women writers proliferated. Though many of them too remain in relative obscurity among English audiences, one can only hope that the publication of Özlü’s novels will set off a domino effect.

In 2022, Deep Vellum released an updated translation (thanks to a joint but asynchronous effort between Nermin Menemencioğlu and Amy Marie Spangler) of Tuhaf Bir Kadın / A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil—the only Turkish women to be nominated for the Nobel as well as Özlü’s friend, source of influence, and dedicated epistolary correspondent. Originally published in 1971, Tuhaf Bir Kadın is a pioneering force in the genre of Turkish women’s writing, but proved to be a controversial text for its frank exploration of a woman’s sexuality, representation of domestic abuse, and explicit engagement with the political left. Still, it set the stage for a new generation of authors, and its legacy extends into the twenty-first century with novelists like Elif Shafak, who is committed to exposing the deep-rooted misogynistic violence of Turkish patriarchal society. For instance, her 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World narrates the story of a murdered prostitute in Istanbul; the dead woman’s brain continues to function for the length of time in the title, a dirge for the disposability and precarity of women’s lives in the Turkish metropolis. 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…

Translation Tuesday: “Fındık” by Sait Faik Abasıyanık

January 7, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Will Washburn

Something else was going on with the dog; deep down, he was catching on to something.

Fındık, the titular character of Sait Faik Abasıyanık‘s short story, is the kind of dog you can find anywhere: one of those common strays who are nonetheless elevated by virtue of their sheer adorableness, endearing themselves to the local residents. He’s also a perfect litmus test for human character, exposing those who would scold a dog for merely approaching them. Despite such treatment, Fındık remains trusting and friendly. That is, until he encounters the Poison Man, a self-important garbage collector who is charged with culling the village’s canine population. Translated from the Turkish by Will Washburn, “Fındık” examines themes of moral responsibility, human-animal bonds, and the rationalizations people use to justify cruelty toward the downtrodden—but also, what spurs them to defy those rationalizations.

Fındık is pals with everyone in our village, young and old, who doesn’t have too high an opinion of themselves. Colored like a tabby cat, Fındık (his name means “hazelnut”) is the bastard offspring of a wolf-dog and a hunting dog. As a love-child, he ought to be beautiful, but in fact he isn’t. If you don’t give him a pat on the head when he approaches you, wagging his big thick tail and blinking his brown eyes, then you’re a strange one indeed. To reject an animal that approaches you with such a need for affection, you’d have to have never been in love in your life, never cared about anything, never known what it means to have a soft heart. You might hold that such people don’t exist. And yet how many times, with my own eyes, have I seen Fındık approach people—not just for a piece of bread, but in need of a simple pat—and be shooed off. So I’m unable to change my opinion of humanity.

It’s a well-known fact that, with the onset of summer, dogs catch a nasty microbial illness from each other. Around that time, the city busies itself with killing off every dog in sight. People hide all the dogs in their area. The municipality pays one-and-a-half lira per dog, and a bunch of dog-killers set off on their rounds.

In our village, we call this person the “Poison Man.” You should see this Poison Man: he’s an odd one. To be sure, not everyone who does that job is abnormal. But becoming a killer, an Angel of Death, inevitably alters a person’s condition, their character, their gaze, their walk. Or maybe it doesn’t alter them; maybe we only think it does. You know that play, So It Is (If You Think So)? Well, if we think the Poison Man is abnormal—then so he is. He might as well be the Düsseldorf Monster. That’s the fellow who used to carry a gleaming metal chain with a knife attached to one end, which he’d use to ensnare little children, take them behind the bushes, and kill them.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Frames of Silent Walls” by Pınar Yıldız

October 29, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Pınar Yıldız

Those voices and looks were as if they had been there forever and would remain there forever.

This week’s story, both written in and translated from the original Zazaki by Pınar Yıldız, is firmly confined within the walls of its narrator’s house. The photographs decorating the interiors offer an occasion for reflection on familial history for the narrator, who is suffocated by the silence that dominates the “soilless cemetery” of their home. These portraits, a collage of family members and Kurdish folk heroes, are portals into memories of a lush childhood, when the images seemed to manifest a corporeal existence, infusing the household with their vigorous commentary. Once, they held the power to influence the animate world; now, they are simply still lifes. The passage of time, resisted by the frozen shots, is instead measured by the tapering volume of their voices. Through reflections on preservation and vitality, Yıldız ponders what keeps a house, and a family, alive.

The walls of our house, like the walls of many other houses, were like a soilless cemetery. The unfortunate lives got stuck to the walls. It was as if the walls wanted to open their mouths and speak, but they were frozen like soulless frames. A silence spread from the walls into the house. Most of the time, like those frames, we would freeze without saying a single word. Like those photographs hanging on the walls, it was as if we were frozen in a different world.

Only three of the photographs hanging on the walls of our house had not been inside that soilless cemetery; they were struggling to live in a corner. One was Ahmet Kaya’s photo. With his saz (baglama) in his hand and his enthusiastic and hopeful smile, it was as if that photo had made him greater than death while he was still alive. The other photo was of my brother Roni, who had just started school. That photo of Roni in his blue apron was also very precious to my mother, just like Roni himself. Roni, born in the millennium century, looked at the camera with a look as if he was lost in worry and thought. The photograph of my father and Sheikh Necmettin taken by the sea in a distant city has been hanging on the wall in a frame for a long time, and liveliness and life radiated from this photograph. In that photo, Sheikh Necmettin did not look like a sheikh, but like a human being, a gentleman. He was not as old as he is now. I do not know why the sheikh, who I thought never left his big house with a courtyard, had been to that distant country. Maybe Sheikh Necmettin brought those pink hard candies from that distant land by the sea. Maybe he would keep those candies in his pocket as a souvenir from those days and distribute those candies not only to children but to everyone.

Apart from the photographs, calendars and timetables from the month of Ramadan were also lined up on the walls. I remembered the blue walls of my grandparents’ house. Calendars and timetables hung on the walls of their house too. An embroidered towel and a mirror always hung on the edge of the stove. The shape and model of the mirror never changed, but sometimes the surroundings of the mirror were blue and sometimes red. I never saw when the mirror was broken or replaced with a new one.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2024

October 14, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Christopher Higgs, Jonathon Atkinson, and Matilda Nevin

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

WaitingfortheFear

Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

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…

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

February 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Kathryn Raver

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

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Translating Ulysses: An Interview with Filmmakers Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel

February 7, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

This is what makes the translation of Ulysses a gift for the Kurdish language and its readers; it allows the archiving of this linguistic heritage.

In the 2023 documentary Translating Ulysses, Turkish filmmakers Aylin Kuyel and Fırat Yücel chronicle the painstaking efforts of poet and translator Kawa Nemir in rendering James Joyce’s “untranslatable” tome into Kurdish. This herculean task, which may seem rooted in the desire of any lover of literature to share a classic text in their native language, is in fact a tremendous act of activism for the Kurdish language, which has long been suppressed by Turkish nationalist policies, as well as a testament to the written text as a living, ever-changing discourse. Through close observation and innovative cinematic technique, Kuryel and Yücel paint a moving, profound portrait composed of the destructive language politics in contemporary Turkey; the tenuous, confounding journey of the translator; and literature as archive. What results is a film that is not only a document of Nemir’s epic journey through the Joycean labyrinth, but a remarkable, intricate tracing of how the vast history and collective memory of language can find a home in a story, or in a mind.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Aylin, the relationships between images and their communication of ideology has been a continuous subject in your work as a filmmaker and thinker. In this film, however, it is not the image which takes centre stage, but a text; how has your conception of visual dialectics transferred into the consideration of language as a social and ideological construct? Has making this film changed the way either of you think about the role language plays, or the way its public usage interacts with discrete individuals?

Aylin Kuryel (AK): One of the central questions that haunted us while making this film was indeed how to ‘translate’ the process of translating a text into images, how to make both Ulysses itself and Kawa’s translation of Ulysses speak in images. This is probably why we ended up structuring the documentary in chapters, like a book, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of the process of translation. We wanted to approach the film as a text itself, making references to Ulysses, and edit it in a way that would allow the images to be ‘read’ in multiple ways.

We had the ‘speaking soap’ of Joyce in our mind while focusing on objects that surround Kawa during his translation process, the colours of Ulysses’s chapters while playing with the colours of the film, and so on. The language of the film needs to reflect—or at least allude to—the subject it follows. Therefore, apart from the references to Ulysses, we also wanted to use found footage (official propaganda material or visuals of Kurdish resistance, taken from Youtube and social media). A documentary that attempts to touch upon a long-lasting collective resistance (in this case, against the oppression of the Kurdish language) can consist of a collective of images too, captured in different periods, by different people and organizations, for different purposes. READ MORE…