Posts filed under 'authoritarianism'

Winter 2026: Highlights from the Team

February 9, 2026  |  in News  |  by Arla Hoxha, Julia Maria, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, Olivia Wohlgemuth, and Sabrina Fountain

Still not sure where to start with the new issue? Let our team members be your guide!

Reading Minna Canth’s Children of Misfortune (translated from the Finnish by Minna Jeffery) felt like a jolt of moral clarity. In a year when I stopped apologizing, the play reminded me why anger, when shared and articulated, can still feel invigorating. Canth refuses the lie that oppression is inevitable, insisting instead that the world we inhabit was made and can be remade. There is something bracing, almost ecstatic, about watching oppressed people unite in fury, turning their rage against the lifeless property their masters prize so dearly.

That same refusal of appeasement runs through Hélène Laurain’s On Fire (tr. Catherine Leung from the French), whose blunt, abrasive narrator feels almost instructive in a moment when calls for meek compromise echo as loudly as calls for violence. Laurain offers no heroes, no romanticism, only a clear-eyed account of what resistance actually costs: police brutality, surveillance, isolation, depression. And yet resistance remains necessary, as does art.

If Canth and Laurain speak to the anger of the present, Zekine Türkeri’s A Jihadist Dried Up a Sea (tr. Keko Menéndez Türkeri from the Turkish) does justice to its grief. Few endings have struck me as forcefully as Türkeri’s explanation of the title. Stripped of sentimentality, the piece insists that meaning is not born from grief but constructed against it, and that only by recognizing our shared pain can we find the strength to go on.

That recognition undergirds Anatoly Loginov’s The Narrow Neck of Being (translated from the Russian by the author himself), a staggering survey of attention in Russian literature. For all its scholarly precision, the essay is bound to the issue’s most politically outspoken works by its insistence that attention and suffering are inseparable. To be aware is to be fragile, mortal, and therefore attuned to the vulnerability of others. Loginov’s call to spend attention lavishly, even on another’s suffering, feels like an ethical compass for an age of ceaseless crises.

I ended my reading in a quieter register with Rokhl Korn’s Four Poems (tr. Pearl Abraham from the Yiddish). Their exactness captures the shared longing of romantic love, but what stayed with me most was Korn’s use of the future tense in “My Wait” and “My Dreams.” Desire, she seems to accept, will never be fulfilled. And still, she grants it beauty.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Reading Zekine Türkeri’s A Jihadist Dried Up a Sea (tr. Keko Menéndez Türkeri from the Turkish) alongside Sidsel Ana Welden Gajardo’s As a Child of a Refugee, I Have Learned That War Lives on Across Generations (translated from the Danish by the author) was devastating. Even knowing, intellectually, that war and displacement scar across generations, both pieces force a confrontation with that truth. Türkeri reminds us that every person in a refugee camp carries a story worthy of more than a report, while Gajardo’s letter to her father wrestles with how trauma persists long after exile, living on in loneliness and the mind. If time heals, these pieces ask, what does healing even look like? Can war ever truly end?

I was struck, too, by A Poetic Psychology of Attention, the interview with Kristin Dykstra, particularly her observation that interruption itself can signify. In a world saturated with stimuli, dissonance becomes not a flaw but a necessity. Estranging ourselves from the familiar may be the only way to recognize what realities truly matter. READ MORE…

The Winter 2026 Issue Has Arrived!

January 29, 2026  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

World literature remains, at heart, a problem of attention: of who is seen, who is heard, and who is permitted to remain invisible.

As authoritarianism continues to take hold across the world, writers and translators are compelled to revisit an age-old question: What might art offer in response? Perhaps not answers, but something quieter and more resilient—a reminder of shared human frailty, and of the possibility that our “flow of being,” as Anatoly Loginov writes, might arrive at a “narrow neck” where attention itself becomes an existential force. Writing in our Winter 2026 Issue, which also marks Asymptote’s fifteenth(!) anniversary, Loginov turns to a literary and philosophical tradition that seeks “not mastery over an object, but communion with it, even if that communion burns.” For this second of our two issues devoted to attention, we bring together his tour de force survey of 200 years of Russian thought with a luminous travelogue by the beloved Taiwanese writer Sanmao, an excerpt from Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon’s prizewinning Tarantula, an exclusive interview with Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov, a quietly devastating story by Italian master Dino Buzzati, and new translations of Milo De Angelis by Lawrence Venuti, alongside never-before-published work from 32 countries. All of it is illustrated by our talented Dublin-based guest artist Yosef Phelan.

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If Loginov argues that attention, when cultivated deeply, can ground compassion toward others, Finnish playwright Minna Canth takes this ethical impulse further into the realm of collective action. In her barnburner drama, railway workers pushed beyond endurance channel their shared anger into defiant sabotage, making exploitation visible at last. Writing from a different frontline, Kurdish journalist Zekine Türkeri bears witness to life in the Mahmur refugee camp in the days preceding an ISIS attack, showing how attention to the living entails the inescapable labor of mourning the dead. Elsewhere, in Egyptian writer Mariam Abd Elaziz’s fiction, characters struggle to care for one another as they swim and sink in the deadly currents of maritime refugee smuggling. The issue’s arc closes with an interview in which China’s Wang Guanglin reflects on the difficulty of imagining a genuinely global literature at a moment marked by isolationism, xenophobia, and resurgent nationalism. World literature, he suggests, remains, at heart, a problem of attention: of who is seen, who is heard, and who is permitted to remain invisible.

For fifteen years, Asymptote has been organized around this problem. Founded on the conviction that literature across languages deserves sustained, serious attention, we have worked to widen the field of vision—introducing readers to voices beyond dominant centers, and treating translation not as a secondary act but as an ethical and imaginative practice in its own right. If this project has mattered to you—if you believe that attention, patiently given, can still resist the forces that would narrow our view—we ask you to help keep it alive by becoming a sustaining or masthead member. Your support ensures that the flow of being we trace here continues to move, freely and exuberantly, into the years ahead.

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #9 When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend by Bassam Yousuf

December 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

This evocative piece blends warm and melancholic notes that linger long after reading.

One day, as I was undergoing yet another round of torture from the secret police in the infamous Palestine Branch, I cried out: “Abdullah al-Daliyah!” Abdullah al-Daliyah is one of our Alawite ancestors, a saint whose name the men from my village invoke to this day when they’re in dire straits. The man torturing me suddenly stopped and yanked off my blindfold. With a wild-eyed stare, he demanded: “Who are you?”

I kept quiet, since in the opposition we were strictly forbidden ever to disclose our names. He shouted in agitation: “Say something! Are you Bassam?”

I nodded. Turning away, he marched around the interrogation room, then closed the door and continued pacing up and down without looking at me. Finally he wheeled around and asked, his eyes full of tears: “Don’t you know me?”

I shook my head. After ten years, he was unrecognizable. With a sigh, he bowed his head. “I’m Abdullah . . . ”

Occasionally, one comes across circumstances so unbelievable they can only be engineered by fate. Coming in at No. 9 in our countdown of the most-read articles of 2025, this poignant piece of nonfiction follows Syrian political activist Bassam Yousuf (tr. Katherine Van de Vate) as he reflects on his relationship with a childhood friend, Abdullah. In this essay featured in our Summer 2025 issue, Yousuf traces their parallel paths as he sides with the political opposition, and Abdullah with the Assad regime—a choice that culminates in their bitter reunion. The title gives it away: “When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #10 Attention as Predation: Fields of Influence and Omnivorous Forces of Alignment by Johanna Drucker

December 22, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Attention consumes its participants—subjects and objects alike—and in its current ravenous high scale dynamic, becomes predatory.

Before we turn the page on the tumultuous year that was 2025, let’s look back on the pieces that readers couldn’t stop reading, sharing, and talking about—i.e., our most popular articles across four massive quarterly issues. From insightful essays to mind-bending fictions, this curated-by-you selection features work from all around the world that not only captured your attention but also seized your imagination. Wonder if your own favorite made the list? Every day from now till Dec 31st, we’ll be counting down to our most-read article of the year, so come back here each day to find out!

First up at #10 is Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation: Fields of Influence and Omnivorous Forces of Alignment”—a fitting grand opening to our Fall 2025 Special Feature themed on attention, as urgent to the moment as it is riveting a read.

Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, Drucker poses a radical re-imagining of the nature of attention itself. Rather than a self-willed, intentional act, Drucker describes the exchange of attention between subject and object as a bottomless energy field where we consume as we are consumed: an ouroboric cycle where we feed off a topic as it feeds off our attention. The result is a serious argument for us all living in dystopia.

Drucker’s theory is an enlightening framework for the digital age, importantly, one that credits attention as the primary instrument of authoritarianism—Exhibit A: Donald Trump’s command of the media landscape.

Here’s a brief explanation in Drucker’s own words:

“Most recently, the Trump phenomenon demonstrates the way the accumulation of attention
becomes a social force, a type of predation on the body politic in which influence devours the
source on which it feeds . . . they become consumed in the process of absorption, returning the investment of attention to the system which, in turn increases in energy and demands more attention to sustain itself. Huge as they are, enormous as transactional beings, focal points in a massive network of attention exchange, the central figures are themselves colonized by the process. In a vulnerable individual, this can be fatal, but in a socio-pathological one the focal object inflates, feeding from an increasingly insatiable need.
. . . 
Authoritarianism works through alignment. Alignment is driven by affect and instrumentalized through attention. Attention consumes its participants—subjects and objects alike—and in its current ravenous high scale dynamic, becomes predatory. The monopoly will only be broken by distributing attention across multiple attractors the terms and values of which remain to be determined but must operate through an appeal to affect.”

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Translation Tuesday: “The Mountain Hut” by Dragana Kršenković Brković

October 28, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Andrew Hodges and Paula Gordon

"Who approached you in Paris?” he asked again, his tone flat, not giving anything away. “You met up with someone. Who?”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a timely tale of intrigue, political paranoia, and mortality from Montenegrin writer Dragana Kršenković Brković, deftly translated by Andrew Hodges and Paula Gordon. In the hills just outside Titograd (now Podgorica), a doctor, Dušan, is held captive by three members of Yugoslavia’s secret police—three men who refuse to believe his relationship with a Czechoslovakian woman, Janika, is merely an innocent love affair. What follows is a story by turns fantastically surreal and punishingly spare; relief may await Dušan in his dreams, but in the real world the mindless, brittle cruelty of the state returns his every truth with a blow. Writes Andrew Hodges, “Brković’s style is literary and fantastical, mixing surreal scenes full of abstract, dreamlike imagery with everyday encounters. This imagery, which here draws on contrasts between peaceful forest scenes and a violent human (political) encounter, is woven in alongside reflections and emotions that point to the futility and alienating power of politics. “The Mountain Hut” blends dreamlike imagery with Slavic mythological themes and enduring cultural motifs, all viewed through the prism of a specific political moment—the fallout from socialist Yugoslavia’s split with the Stalinist block.” Read on!

Forest on a mountain outside of Titograd. October 1948: Three months after the Tito-Stalin Split.

The weak light of the battery lamp moved through the dark, in sync with the short man’s heavy, uneven strides. Occasionally the light reflected off the glassy surface of the October snowdrifts, which had arrived earlier than usual, and sometimes it penetrated the thick needles of pine and fir, their snow-covered crowns drooping. The feeble beam sank into the depths of the wood, creating a trembling play of slender, spindly, dark blue-black shadows.

The frost tightened its grip.

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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…

“I’ve hidden in the details whatever remains”: On Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter

April 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Michael Collins

Throughout this collection. . . one must continually meet Różycki’s challenge to read across the gaps between poems.

To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal, Archipelago Books, 2024

“It’s my word, my letters against your minutes,” writes Tomasz Różycki in To the Letter, the most recent English-language volume from the distinguished Polish poet. The line concludes the poem “Shadow,” in which the speaker—himself already “gone, no longer”—addresses an equally enigmatic audience: “From the shadows / perhaps you’re watching me pass through the gate.” Such confrontations between experiential time and textual consciousness, individual mortality and the ghosts of cultural consciousness, reverberate throughout this collection. The speaking voice of these poems is always aware of itself as text—a part of history inhabiting a living reader.

The book’s macrocosm integrates Jungian insights about how the shadows of history intermingle with the personal and cultural shadows of the living. In literature, these exchanges are facilitated through the act of reading, and To the Letter presents various perspectives on—and within—this process, incorporating allegorical considerations of the reader-writer, as well as direct addresses to the mutable beloved facing the pages. In collaborative, interdependent structures (numerical sequencing, narrative fragments, various configurations of speaker and addressee, and dream-like recurrences of theme, image, and setting), Różycki displays the dynamics between unconscious and conscious, self and other, individual and culture, all captured in a fine translation by Mira Rosenthal. Her English iterations fully relay the poems’ accessibility, music, and humor—as well as the ways they integrate into surprising valences with creativity, love, and interbeing. Within them, one identifies an existentially grounded, metaphysically nimble soul, intrinsically defying the authoritarian project that empowers itself by convincing people that they are drastically oversimplified, reified versions of themselves.

The central character in the collection is Lieutenant Anielewicz, who often appears in cameos. His unexpected arrivals, usually in a capacity of investigation or covert sabotage, befit the historical Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. In using this character to stage ongoing psychological engagement with creativity, trauma, and finality, Różycki finds both literal and metaphorical affinities between the commander’s resistance against the Nazi genocide, and the poet’s evocations of the soul’s potentially destructive aspects. READ MORE…

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

January 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Anna Rumsby, Bridget Peak, Ellen Elias-Bursać, José García Escobar, Julie Shi, Mia Manns, and Michelle Chan Schmidt

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

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Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

August 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by José García Escobar

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 4, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Charlie Ng, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Hong Kong, Central America, and India!

In this week of dispatches from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on literary awards, the establishment of a literature museum, and book fairs! From controversy surrounding the new museum in Hong Kong to the most recent Indian texts in translation, read on to learn more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Public voices demanding for a museum of literature have been around for years in Hong Kong. On July 22, during the Hong Kong Book Fair 2023, Poon Yiu-ming, the Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Writers, announced that the Museum of Hong Kong Literature would be inaugurated in April next year in Wan Chai with support from Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Poon petitioned Lee last year on the establishment of a literary museum. However, the announcement has attracted controversy in the literary arena. 

The concept of a museum for Hong Kong literature was proposed by a group of local writers and scholars, including Dung Kai-cheung, Tang Siu-wa, Yip Fai, Liu Waitong, and Chan Chi-tak, among others, who formed the “Hong Kong Literature Museum Advocacy Group,” in 2009. A signed petition that successfully solicited signatures from hundreds of local and international Chinese writers and scholars was published in Ming Pao, which proposed to establish a literary museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Since the suggestion was not adopted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority then, the Advocacy Group proceeded to establish the House of Hong Kong Literature as a non-governmental organization for promoting and preserving Hong Kong literature.

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A Weird Alchemy of Taste and Determination: Speaking with Taylor Bradley of Honford Star

May 25, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s what is cool about Specters—it tries to explore how government censorship affects the world of art.

South Korean author Hwang Yeo Jung’s scintillating, multi-layered novel, The Specters of Algeria, was our Book Club selection for the month of April; in a narrative that holds fictions inside facts, facts inside fictions, Hwang brilliantly builds and unravels with the double-speak and intimate language of life under authoritarian governance. This invigorating book has come to us by way of the East Asia-centric publisher Honford Star, a small press that has continued to undertake the vital and thrilling work of bringing groundbreaking writers to English-language audiences. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks with the co-founder of Honford Star, Taylor Bradley, about their process from obtaining rights to publication, their mission and goals, and why The Specters of Algeria is such a special title.

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.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): It’s been six years since Honford Star’s founding. What led you and your co-founder Anthony Bird to form this new publishing house?

Taylor Bradley (TB): Anthony and I had known each other since 2008, when we were both English teachers at the same school in Korea. Fast forward to 2015, my wife and I were on our honeymoon in London, where we met up with Anthony and his wife for a pint at this 300-year-old pub called the Chesire Cheese. Charles Dickens was a regular there, and perhaps feeling the inspiration of the Ghost of Literature Past, Anthony and I talked about how nice it would be to have a publishing company. I continued on my honeymoon and didn’t think about the conversation again until a few months later, when Anthony messaged saying he wants to publish the classic Korean author Kim Dong-in and asked me if I want in. I said yes.

Our purpose for starting a new publishing company was to bring a broader range of East Asian stories into English. At the time, we felt the types of books being published were from an extremely narrow band. For example, there hadn’t been much, if any, Korean sci-fi translated into English. We hoped to bring things from areas like classic literature, sci-fi, and queer fiction into English. Fortunately, I think that the translated field has changed a lot in the past eight years, thanks to the efforts of indie and university presses.

LT: You and Anthony were both already working in the publishing sphere prior to Honford Star’s founding, but I’m wondering if there been any unexpected challenges along the way? Unexpected rewards?

TB: We did have experience with printing and publishing, but we had never been in charge of doing an entire book. So finding good translators, editors, artists, printers, distributor, publicists, and sales team has been a journey of trial and error. We’ve been fortunate that our network has really grown into strong group of collaborators, and we have a great printer in Korea that can make the most gorgeous books. Our sales team are a group of wizards, and the distributor is very reliable.   READ MORE…

Turkish Tragedy Writ Small: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn

November 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison

A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality.

Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freeley, Archipelago Books, 2022

Writing in the 1990s, the Turkish literary critic Berna Moran praised Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn for its historical urgency, but noted that it would not be a novel that survived the test of time—that its themes would lose their relevance. Perhaps Moran was optimistic in thinking that women’s struggles and militarism would be issues of a distant past in the years to come, or perhaps he undermined the strength of Soysal’s formal innovations. Whatever his reasons might be for painting the novel as a historical relic, his prediction did not come true; Dawn is now more relevant than ever, with Maureen Freely’s flawless English translation.

Soysal isn’t a stranger to English-speaking audiences. Her novels Tante Rosa and Noontime in Yenişehir have been translated into English, and she is a legendary figure in the history of feminism in Turkey. Along with writers like Leyla Erbil and Adalet Ağaoğlu, she defined the écriture feminine of Turkish literature long before it was coined and theorized by Western feminists. The eccentric, self-reflective, and often ironic tone of their protagonists reflected on what it means to be a woman—not only in a modernizing Turkey, but also in a leftist milieu dominated by men. While women’s struggle and sexual autonomy took the back seat in the leftist quest to liberate “masses,” these authors problematized the very notion of “masses.” Did the dream of a liberated people also include liberated women? The tension between how the outside world views liberated, intellectual women and how they view themselves is often the driving force of such novels, and hence their writing is often turned inwards, with sharp observations of situations and characters.

Dawn is a visceral and cinematic example of this kind of writing: where the embodied social experience of women takes central stage. It is also, as Moran notes, a novel about militarism and incarceration. Written in 1975, after Soysal’s own imprisonment following the 1971 coup, the novel situates the woman’s body in its confrontations with authority. The brilliance of the novel might be traced to the formal structure through which the author reflects on this confrontation; ever the innovator, Soysal sets her novel within the course of a single night, interspersing the narrative with flashbacks of different characters. The stories beget other stories of individuals becoming situated in their own relation to authority, only to return to the “present” moment where they are confined within the four walls of the town jail. A single night becomes the microcosm of the Turkish experience of militarism, gender inequality, and sexuality. READ MORE…

David J. Bailey on Translating Jorge de Sena’s “The Green Parrot”

April 6, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

Discover Portugal’s colonial legacy in de Sena’s humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship

Featured in the current Winter 2022 issue, “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” by Jorge de Sena manages to be both a humorous and heartbreaking account of life under the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal. The story centers around an unlikely friendship between a young boy growing up in a stifling conservative household and the family’s pet parrot, an “impassioned” and “exuberant individual” from Brazil. In his English translation David J. Bailey captures the colorful hues of de Sena’s language and introduces Anglophone speakers to a beautiful piece from one of the greatest Lusophone writers of the twentieth century. I had the opportunity to speak with Bailey over email about his experience translating “A Tribute to the Green Parrot,” and in the following interview we discuss representations of colonialism in language, the power of children in conveying narratives, and the different measures that Lusophone writers have taken to overcome dictatorial censorship in their careers.

Rose Bialer: I wanted to start by asking: How did you first begin translating from Portuguese?

David J. Bailey: I became interested in Portuguese almost by chance, opting to study it at degree level alongside Spanish. I quickly grew fond of the language and culture and eventually took a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian literature to pursue an academic career. I’ve done commercial translation in the past, but this was my first serious attempt at translating a literary piece.

RB: When did you first come to encounter the work of Jorge de Sena? How did your engagement with his writing develop into your translation of “A Tribute to the Green Parrot?”

DB: When I started lecturing at the University of Manchester, I inherited a course on Portuguese colonialism from my predecessor, Prof Hilary Owen. Some of Jorge de Sena’s stories were on the reading list and I was especially moved by this one, which ends the collection Os Grão-Capitães. De Sena was a key figure in the resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, on a par with other writers from his generation such as Miguel Torga and José Régio. “A Tribute to the Green Parrot” was something of an anomaly in not having been translated before. I looked at it with some M.A. students last year and ended up translating the entire story during lockdown. READ MORE…