Posts featuring Alexander Pushkin

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

May 5, 2025  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Daniel Yadin, Hilary Ilkay, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, Sauvryn Linn, and Sayani Sarkar

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

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The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

October 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Landau

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023 

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 24, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Katarina Gadze, and MARGENTO

Dispatches from the Philippines, Croatia, and the Romanian diaspora!

In this week’s literary roundup from around the world, people in the literary community are both paying tribute to celebrated icons and paving paths for contemporary voices. From the Romanian diaspora, an exciting new publication threads the past and present, adding to an incredible legacy of literary journals. In the Philippines, book fairs are highlighting minority languages and independent publishers. In Croatia, new literary projects orient their local communities around the act of reading and writing, as well as making intellectual space to consider the role of the political novel. 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Romanian diaspora

One of the most significant recent events involving the Romanian diaspora was the debut release of the literary journal Littera Nova in Madrid, Spain, earlier this week. With an impressive range of established and emerging writers contributing literature both in original languages and in translation, alongside essays and criticism, the journal confidently joins a rich market as well as a solid and long-standing tradition. As the founding director Eugen Barz states in his prefatory note,  previous frontrunners in the literary journal landscape include post-WWII Romanian periodicals published in metropoles as diverse as Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu, and edited by legends such as Mircea Eliade, Alexandru Busuioceanu, George Uscatescu, Stefan Baciu, Vintila Horia, and many others.

In the wake of iconic late-Romantic/early-modernist Eminescu’s 173rd birthday, the issue also includes a significant number of remarkable texts referring to the great classic: an erudite and incisive essay from Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau drawing parallels between Eminescu and both Shakespeare and Dimitrie Cantemir; poems translated into English by K.V. Twain; and a selection from the poet’s correspondence by Ovidiu Pecican. The journal deftly balances criticism and creative writing/translation, featuring classic modernists such as Lucian Blaga and Ion Pillat (translated into Italian by Stefan Damian and Bruno Rombi, and into French by Gabrielle Danoux), and Surrealist master—and past Asymptote contributor—Gellu Naum (in English translation from Nicoleta Craete), amongst others.

The Romanian diaspora continues to contribute significant texts and translations in platforms all around the world; for example, Asymptote contributor Diana Manole has recently had one of her plays featured in EastWest Literary Forum, released a collection of new and selected poems by revered Nora Iuga (co-translated with Adam J. Sorkin), and is gearing up for the release of her own forthcoming poetry collection in Canada. Also, major diasporic poet, novelist, and critic O. Nimigean, whose rare social media posts are at times almost as impactful as his best-selling books, reasserted on Facebook the continued relevance of the late paradigmatic fiction writer and anti-Ceaușescu militant Paul Goma (himself an epitome of both domestic and exilic heroic resistance), particularly as reflected by Flori Balanescu’s recent books on the subject. READ MORE…

Hate Makes Us Weak

November 19, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Vladimir Vertlib

We should never forget that this war is about defending freedom, democracy and truth against dictatorship, chauvinism and lies.

As Europeans try to make sense of the war on their doorstep, boycotts targeting Russia have reached past the country’s oil exports to its poets, painters and tennis players. The invasion of Ukraine earlier this year set off the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II; it also, according to past contributor Vladimir Vertlib (tr. Julie Winter), inspired a wave of “outright hostility” against Russian literature. This thoughtful essay by the Vienna-based Jewish Russian writer is an argument about the baby and the bathwater—Pushkin and Putin—and a strident call for nuance in wartime.

When I was a child, other people always knew who I was better than I did. One day my parents told me that I was Jewish. But I wanted to be a Leningradian because I was born in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg. My parents laughed. They said that you could be a Jew and someone from Leningrad, that was no problem, even if you lived in Vienna. I didn’t feel Austrian or Viennese at that time, although I was undoubtedly at home in our neighborhood Brigittenau. To this day, parts of this Viennese district, as well as the adjoining Leopoldstadt, have remained the only place in the world where I feel I belong.

This ambivalent identity confusion was soon as much a part of my being as was my accent-free German and everyone’s mispronunciation of my first name, which I accepted and eventually even adopted myself. For my Austrian classmates and teachers, however, the matter was perfectly clear: I was a typical Russian. Why I was “typical” was a mystery to me because whenever my classmates or teachers described something as “typically Russian,” they immediately said that they “of course” didn’t mean me.

Brigittenau, where I went to elementary school and later to high school, had belonged to the Soviet occupied zone in Vienna after the war; the memory of that time was still fresh almost fifty years ago when I started school. The “Russians” were said to be brutal and uncultured. They drank water from toilet bowls, screwed light bulbs into sockets that were disconnected from any source of power and then wondered why they didn’t light up, raped women en masse, stole, robbed, murdered and destroyed senselessly, simply out of anger and revenge. Russians are emotional, it was said. Sometimes they’re like children—warm, naive and helpful—but they could suddenly become brutal and unpredictable like wild animals. They were, after all, a soulful people, in both negative and positive respects. The latter was attributed to me. If my essays or speeches were emotional, it was said to be due to my “Russian soul,” and people thought they were paying me a compliment. I, on the other hand, was always unpleasantly affected by these attributions, because I knew, even in elementary school, that Jews and Russians were not the same thing. No Russian, my parents explained to me, would ever accept me as his equal. In the former Soviet Union, ethnic groups, which included Jews, were clearly distinct. So my supposed “Russian soul” was not only embarrassing, it was also presumptuous. I was assigned something that I was not at all entitled to, based on my ethnicity. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2020

February 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Barbara Halla, and Daniel Persia

Staffers survey new releases from around the world.

Decisions about the books we read are more important than ever in the outpouring of the Information Age, so for this month, we bring you three texts of learning, authenticity, and artistry. An Argentine novel that rescues silence, a Hungarian volume that engages the incomprehensible, and a collection of Russian poetics from a master of Moscow Conceptualism—these works accentuate the diverse revelations and immense endeavours of world literature. 

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Include Me Out by María Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, Transit Books, 2020

Reviewed by Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large for Brazil 

A mishap at an international conference prompts simultaneous interpreter Mara to change course in Include Me Out, by María Sonia Cristoff, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Mara, tired of the monotony of her everyday interpreting, designs an experiment: she will spend one year in silence, as a guard at a small provincial museum outside of Buenos Aires. It is a job that will allow her to interact with nothing but her chair, she thinks. A job that will allow for stillness, for time to plant in her garden, she hopes. But when an unwanted promotion forces Mara to assist the museum’s gregarious taxidermist as he restores two of Argentina’s heroic horses, Gato and Mancha, an experiment in silence quickly transforms into frustration over static noise. A careful and deliberate portrait, pointedly translated, Include Me Out paints a memorable, authentic cast that stays with us long after we have finished reading. 

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The Anxiety of Translation: A Conversation between Ilan Stavans and Robert Croll

December 12, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ilan Stavans and Robert Croll

From a translator’s viewpoint (at least, from this translator), the best author is a dead author. That absence is a form of freedom.

Translation, by definition, is about dislocation. By traveling from one culture to another, our rootedness is turned on its head. In this dialogue on translation and anxiety, Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of NPR’s podcast “In Contrast,” and Robert Croll, translator of Ricardo Piglia’s three-volume The Diaries of Emilio Renzi (Restless Books, 2017–20), ponder the responsibility the translator has toward the original text, the discoveries of how unstable the target language is, and the realization that translation is an essentially destabilizing experience.

Robert Croll: For me, the act of translation always involves an underlying anxiety: my feeling of responsibility toward the original text, which is bound to the knowledge that my words will be taken to represent the author’s intentions, leads to a constant fear of being discovered as an impostor. But can experience in translation destabilize the way we read texts in their original languages?

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My Onegin

January 7, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Ján Štrasser

The prize-winning Slovak translator on Pushkin

I don’t claim to be an expert on Pushkin’s poetry, in fact I might say there’s only one work of his I’m thoroughly acquainted with, and that’s Eugene Onegin. I‘ve read his lyrical and epic poetry, his fiction, drama and correspondence, of course, and have read up on the poet and his work, yet Eugene Onegin holds quite an exceptional place in my reading and perception of Pushkin.

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