Posts featuring Eugene Ostashevsky

What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2022)

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff have been busy with publications this past quarter!

Philippine Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s lyric collage is included in Our Stories To Tell (Texas: Folkways Press, 2022), an anthology of essays on mental health, out now.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, has recently contributed, jointly with Raluca Tanasescu, a chapter on “Literary Translation in Electronic Literature and Digital Humanities” to the Bloomsbury anthology Translation Beyond Translation Studies and an article on “#GraphPoem: Holisme analytique-créatif, le genre D(H) et la performance informatique subversive” to the special issue on transmediality and convergence in literature of the journal Recherches & Travaux.

An essay, “Humor in the Dark,” by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor, was published in the journal Translation Review. It explored some of the strategies Elias-Bursac used when translating Dubravka Ugresic’s counterpoint of humor and trauma in her book of essays The Age of Skin.

Incoming Visual Editor Heather Green moderated a panel on “Word + Image,” featuring translator Alta L. Price and artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Abdulrahman Naanseh at the Center for the Art of Translation’s Day of Translation conference. She also recently reviewed poetry titles by Iman Mersal (tr. Robyn Cresswell), Shuri Kido (tr. Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander), and frequent contributor Eugene Ostashevsky for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor, took part in a two-way interview with writer Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for Punctured Lines, a blog on Post-Soviet literature. The two writers discussed their respective novels, Two Big Differences and The Orchard.

In September, José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large for the Central American region, published his translation of Solito, a memoir by Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora, with Penguin En Español. READ MORE…

Dubravka Ugrešić on Asymptote: The Visa to Enter is Good Writing

Check out our submission guidelines and send us your best work today!

“As a reader of Asymptote, I am overjoyed to see literary texts by friends I haven’t seen for a long time, to discover new writers and new names from all over the world. Asymptote has become a literary realm in cyber space built by enthusiasts: the visa to enter is good writing.”

Dubravka Ugrešić, winner of the 2016 Neustadt Literature Prize

Did you know that Winter in Sokcho, last year’s US National Book Award winner for Translated Literature, made its English debut in our very pages way back in 2017, and it was on the basis of that publication that translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins was able to find a publisher for her manuscript?

Asymptote is proud to be a leading purveyor of world literature—with a truly global readership that includes luminaries such as Dubravka Ugrešić. In our twelve years, we have built one of the best archives of world literature by casting our nets as far and wide as possible—not only is our team spread out across six continents, we are also open for submissions—in all the usual genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, criticism, and interviews—throughout the year. And we now guarantee a one-month turnaround time for submission outcomes, and offer optional editorial feedback so that you can grow as a translator.

If you’d like to be a part of our next issue, we encourage you to send in your best work today! Worth a special mention is our “Brave New World Literature” category, under the aegis of which we invite critical or even celebratory essays from readers, critics, authors, publishers, and of course translators discussing and problematizing the ways in which non-English texts reach Anglophone readers, perhaps envisioning a “brave new world literature.” Highlights have included Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef’s essay that fleshes out the very real challenges faced by non-white literary translators, as well as Eugene Ostashevsky’s whipsmart poems, from the current issue, that capture the translator’s liminality.

If you would like to publish in the blog instead, we welcome pieces on topics ranging from global cinema to the ethics of review to the literature of revolution. Apart from essays, we run dispatches from international literary events, interviews, weekly new translations, book reviews, and more. Like our journal, we are looking for creative, original, and highly engaging work that considers the role of translation in literature, the arts, and the fabric of everyday life. We welcome pitches for the blog via email.

READ OUR SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Photograph of Dubravka Ugrešić by Shevuan Williams

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2022

This issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured.

The Summer 2022 Issue is our forty-fifth edition, featuring work from thirty-one countries! From newly translated fiction by luminaries such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, to our special feature highlighting Swiss literature, and to probing essays that interrogate the adoption of new languages, these intricately linked writings feature characters who are thrown into abysses both personal and political but discover moments of solace, communion, and revelation. To introduce you to another rich, wide-ranging issue, our blog editors discuss their favorite pieces.

In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s 2021 National Book Award-winning novel, Winter in Sokcho, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins from the French, the unnamed narrator, a young French Korean woman living on the border between North and South Korea, experiences an ongoing crisis of identity due her inability to be seen, displacement, and strained relationships with her domineering mother and absent boyfriend. In the novel, the narrator seeks to recover a self that has been rendered invisible. One of Dusapin’s most fitting metaphors for this reassembling of the self is the narrator’s constant search for her reflection in the mirror of the guesthouse where she works. Similarly, the search for a true reflection emerges as a central theme in the introspective Summer 2022 issue. It is apt in these precarious times when the stability of the self is being shaken by forces of displacement and politics that this issue deeply reckons with fixing selves that have been lost, falsely performed, and fractured. The building of the self is literalized by Lu Liu’s playful yet melancholy cover art, in which two boys nervously construct a sand tower out of words, alluding to the Tower of Babel made personal in Jimin Kang’s moving essay, “My Mother and Me.”

The mirror is the object of Andrea Chapela’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary self-inquiry, “The Visible Unseen,” elegantly rendered by Kelsi Vanada. It adopts the fragmentary form of a series of failed beginnings, in the manner of Janet Malcolm’s famous essay on David Salle, Forty-One False Starts. Chapela’s variation of the form represents the difficulty of locating the self in one’s reflection. By extension, Chapela argues that at a given time, the self can never be completely isolated; rather, it can only ever be seen through a particular type of mirror, at a certain angle, beneath a certain light, yielding a fragment of the whole. Just as Chapela scrutinizes the mirror through a variety of perspectives—scientific, literary, philosophical, memoiristic—so must we be as comprehensive yet fragmentary when we search for ourselves. As Chapela writes, “Little by little, I start to accept that each new beginning of the essay is just one piece of the full picture.”

READ MORE…

Close Approximations: In Conversation with Poetry Winner Daniel Owen

It's like an exorcism and a prayer for long life in one breath.

This year’s winner of the Poetry category in Asymptote’s fourth annual Close Approximations Translation Contest was Daniel Owen. Poetry judge Eugene Ostashevsky called Alfizal Malna’s text “intellectual poetry of the highest caliber,” praising Owen for his “elegant, reserved English,” and for offering readers “a beautiful thing of clear obscurity” in his translations of Malna’s Document Shredding Museum.

We recently caught up with Yogyakarta-based Daniel to learn more about his work with the legendary Afrizal Malna, the process of “unsomeoneification,” and what he has been up to since winning the Close Approximations contest in January.

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): I found your translations of Document Shredding Museum to be incredibly beautiful and inviting; no easy feat given the complexity of Malna’s writing. How did you first come to Afrizal Malna and his work?

Daniel Owen (DO): I met Afrizal at Kampung Buku Jogja, an annual literary event in Yogyakarta with a book fair, readings, and discussions. I had just come to stay awhile in Jogja to intensively study Indonesian language and to read and subsequently translate Indonesian literature. While my Indonesian was okay when we first met, I hadn’t yet read much and was quite ignorant of the literary landscape. We were introduced by my friends, the writers and small press publishers Lelaki Budiman and Tiaswening Maharsi, after Afrizal’s discussion on theater and poetry with Gunawan Maryanto. I bought a copy of his new book of short stories, Pagi Yang Miring Ke Kanan (Nyala, 2017) and we chatted a bit. Following our initial meeting, I started reading Afrizal’s work pretty intensely, the short stories along with poems I found on the internet, and then his book of essays Sesuatu Indonesia. I found myself entranced by the poems; it was like encountering something extremely familiar yet at the same time novel. That kind of tickling of the sensibilities that’s both troubling and pleasurable, takes you, as a reader, outside yourself while making you feel more yourself. I started translating these poems which I’d found online, primarily to see what would happen and to share them with non-Indonesian-speaking friends who asked about what I was reading, thinking about, engaging with. And then I borrowed Museum Penghancur Dokumen from Budiman, read the whole thing and started translating it.

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We’re Giving Away $3,000 to Six Top Emerging Translators!

Submit to our contest for emerging translators today!

With just two months left to the deadline of Close Approximations, our annual international translation contest, there’s still time to polish up your translations (especially of female authors, since we’ve just entered Women in Translation Month) and submit to our contest!

Awarding a total of $3,000 in prizes to six winners this time are Edward Gauvin (Fiction) and Eugene Ostashevsky (Poetry). Entrants have until October 1 to submit their work for a chance of winning up to 1,000USD, in addition to publication in our Winter 2019 issue, joining a roster of translators we have published that includes J.M. Coetzee, Lydia Davis, Michael Hofmann, and Jennifer Croft. We are encouraging early submissions by taking 15% off the entry fee for contest submissions on or before September 1.

To further pique your interest about the contest, here’s more about our wonderful judges and what they think of translation.

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Announcing the Summer 2018 Issue of Asymptote

Introducing our thirtieth issue, which gathers never-before-published work from 31 countries!

We interrupt our regular programming to announce the launch of Asymptote’s Summer 2018 issue!

Step into our bountiful Summer edition to “look for [yourself] in places [you] don’t recognize” (Antonin Artaud). Hailing from thirty-one countries and speaking twenty-nine languages, this season’s rich pickings blend the familiar with the foreign: Sarah Manguso and Jennifer Croft (co-winner, with Olga Tokarczuk, of this year’s Man Booker International Prize) join us for our thirtieth issue alongside Anita Raja, Duo Duo, and Intizar Husain, and our first work from the Igbo in the return of our Multilingual Writing Feature.

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