Asymptote‘s latest issue hit the digital shelves on Friday, and there’s so much to read: in addition to featuring poems by the late Tomaž Šalamun and brand-new verse from Aase Berg’s Hackers, (translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson), you can read interviews with Ferrante/Levi translator Ann Goldstein and literary heavyweight/literary “improbability” Ha Jin. But it doesn’t end there: at long last, this issue features the winners of our Close Approximations contest, but among so many other “regular” journal offerings, it’s hard to know where to start. In true blog tradition, we’ve picked favorites from the latest release. The list, we insist, is by no means exhaustive; you really can’t go wrong at all—dig in! READ MORE…
Posts filed under 'issue'
Weekly News Roundup, 15th January 2015: Hardy-Har, Mordor
This week's happy literary highlights from around the world
Happy Friday, Asymptote! Biggest big deal this week: our new issue, which features so. many. literary standouts and standouts-to-come—an interview with Junot Díaz, an essay by Ingo Schulze, writing from Sibylle Lacan, and on, and on. As per tradition, we’ll be sharing our bloggy favorites here on Monday, but you could click blindfolded and come across a gem. Happy reading!
If you’re a translator in 2016 (!), you’re sure to have a fraught relationship with Google Translate. On one hand, the mystic algorithmic Googlic properties of the service provide for an interesting alternative to the usual bilingual dictionaries we translating folk tend to turn to, but on the other hand, Google’s app supposedly threatens to bully us into irrelevance. And that’s why this glitch—in which Google Translate translated every instance of “Russia” into “Mordor,” as in The Lord of the Rings, is especially hilarious. READ MORE…
Spotlight From the Archives: “Towards the One and Only Metaphor” by Miklós Szentkuthy
"Anyone who has experienced a life of total contemplation and total work knows what a pain mornings are."
The excerpt of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Towards the One and Only Metaphor, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson in our April 2013 issue, is the very first thing I ever read on Asymptote. This was long before I was a blogger (much less blog editor), and perhaps the first time I felt enraptured enough to sustain interest in reading something literary off a screen. It was my induction into the literary Internet. It seems so long ago to me now, and so absurd—online journals portend equity and unlimited access! Poems can be shared, clicked on! Stories bookmarked and hung on (Facebook) walls! And it’s all for free!
But until that moment I was rather unimpressed with the prospect of reading something from a screen that had not been printed, circulated, tattered with time and dead tree. But here is where it changed: where I was so arrested by a piece, I knew immediately how important this kind of Internet literary journalism is—for writers, for translators, and for readers most of all. READ MORE…