Posts filed under 'Prototype'

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse

February 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

One of the pleasures of Mountainish is how its fragments flow together according to an obscure, free-associative logic.

Wandering, dizzying, echoing, gorgeous—spending time with Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is not unlike being four thousand metres above sea level; the book conjures both the vastness and the minute details of the Alps with lyrical intuition, while constantly introducing surprising insights into the peaks’ social presentation. Through both a study of mountains and a poetic testament of the mind inside all that landscape, Gahse takes us across what it means to look, listen, feel, and think—with all the awe, fear, beauty, and inequity that is inseparable from our regard of worldly wonders. We are delighted to introduce Mountainish as our Book Club selection for the month, and to be travelling together along the excursions and perceptions of this singular work’s pursuit.

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.    

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, Prototype, 2025

At some point while reading this strange, moreish book, one is likely to suddenly snap out of the trance it has induced, prompting a question into what this work does, and how it exerts its mesmerising effects.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a series of numbered notes, 515 in total. Certain sections appear to have come from a diary, while other parts resemble the scrambled embryo of a more substantial literary project—a travelogue, perhaps, or a parody of one. But very often, the notes never coalesce into anything; Mountainish might be best understood as the miscellaneous lint of a compulsive writer, a hodge-podge of scenes, sketches, proddings and testings of turns of phrase. This is not to say, however, that the book is lost to chaos. The numbers appended to the notes provide a semblance of order, and oblique patterns slowly emerge and disperse along the reading. Brief, slight, and faintly whimsical, the notes float by like cloud puffs, and if you look at them for long enough, they take on vaguely recognisable shapes. Within its diaphanous structure, the usual anchors to time and place—chronology, for instance—are done away with completely, leaving the book hovering ambiguously over its subject. READ MORE…

Movement and Stagnation: On Virgula by Sasja Janssen

March 28, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The comma is . . . perpetually in motion . . . a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable.

Virgula by Sasja Janssen, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Prototype, 2024

I write to you because you hover in the corner of my eye
I write to you because you never answer
I write to you because, like me, you dislike stagnation

In Wit, Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning one-act play, the main character, English professor Dr Vivian Bearing, re-lives crucial moments of her life while undergoing an experimental chemotherapy treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer. In one instance, she remembers a comment made by her college professor, Dr E M Ashford, reprimanding her for taking language too lightly in an assignment on Donne’s sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud”; Ashford is quick to point out that the edition Vivian consulted contained faulty punctuation, and surmises that the simple message of the poem—“overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life”—gets sacrificed to the ‘hysterical’ punctuation of semicolons and an exclamation point. Vivian’s iteration—“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”—distorts what is conveyed by a single comma: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” One can clearly see the importance of one simple symbol: how it can make or break a poem.

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