Posts featuring Mathias Énard

What’s New in Translation: May 2025

New publications from Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, South Korea, Greece, and Poland!

This month, we’re introducing thirteen new publications from eleven different countries. A strange and visceral collection of poems that distort and reimagine the body; a contemporary, perambulating study of the contemporary city; a novel that forsakes linearity for a complex exploration of chance and coincidence; a series that splits the act of storytelling—and the storyteller—into kaleidoscopic puzzle-pieces; an intimate and unflinching look at motherhood and its disappearance of boundaries; and more. . .

Transparencies 2025 PROMO COVER

Transparencies by Maria Borio, translated from the Italian by Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2025

    Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Italian poet Maria Borio’s English debut, Transparencies, transports us to an Italy defined as much by glass, screens, and holograms as it is by history and landscape. Divided into three sections—“Distances,” “Videos, Fables,” and “Transparence”—Borio presents a world where past, present, and future converge toward an audible silence, where the self presents itself as genderless, morphable—the I becomes you becomes we becomes they—and the poet plays not a character nor a confessionalist but an airy, elegant observer, as illustrated in “Letter, 00:00 AM”:

At the end of the video, soundless voices,
hollowed-out faces scroll like the ground stumps
of legend: even people with desires

emptied like furrows in tar can carry
a fable. The screams are timbers, old water
they turn to bark, white knots, even.

Danielle Pieratti’s translations preserve the glassiness inherent in the Italian originals; she has strived for accuracy of voice and image, as evident in “Green and Scarlet” (“Verde e rosa”), an eight-part poem that considers natural, national, and human borders: “Between the trees there’s the border’s furrow / the heavy sign that stopped them / all around shapes spring up like nations.” In an interview at Words Without Borders, Borio recalls how she and Pieratti chose to use “scarlet” instead of “pink” when translating “rosa”: “ . . . in English it’s literally ‘pink,’ but . . . the color referred to the luminous atmosphere of a sunset in the woods, so ‘pink’ would have given too sharp an impression . . . Danielle came up with the word ‘scarlet,’ which . . . feels softer, more delicate, with a gradual outpouring . . . .” Such close attention to diction permeates the collection.

Although the book examines the modern world and its technology—recordings, photos, videos, cellphones—Borio refuses to be glitzy (she’s no Twitter-verse poet). Describing the London Aquatic Centre, she pens lines like, “The transparent organs overhead open / become a soft line chasing itself, / cleansing the breath’s dark colors . . .” and “Life is everywhere, in the curved line / we inhabit as though thinking.” Simultaneously detailed and abstract, her verse brings to mind Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, two influences that Pieratti mentions in her illuminating translator’s note—although there’s some European surrealism rolling through her veins, too: “The cactus spines clench their vertebra of water.” Such accents only add to her poetry’s dreamlike magnetism, its cultured mystique. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

Here to help you diversify your bookshelf, a selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

If, as the adage goes, readers experience a thousand lives before they die, then readers of translated literature experience a thousand cultures without ever leaving their armchair. Set in Canada, India, Finland, Italy, and Jordan, here is a selection of international reads recommended by our staff for the newsletter. Get ready to be transported!

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The year is 1506. The great artist Michelangelo is furious at his stingy patron the Pope, “the bellicose pontiff who had thrown him out like a beggar.” But as one door closes, another opens in the form of an invitation from the Sultan of Constantinople to come to his city and design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. Tell Them of Battles, Kings & Elephants, written by Mathias Énard and translated by Charlotte Mandell, is a feat of richly-imagined historical fiction that tells the tale of this sculptor’s journey. Michelangelo is abstemious and driven, consumed by his art and ego. But he soon succumbs to the charms of cosmopolitan Constantinople, its sounds and smells, its poets and performers. Yet dark forces conspire to thwart the artist from completing his designs. Intrigue. Assassins. Daggers in the night. Will Michelangelo complete his bridge and join cultures and continents? What will be the legacy of his journey? You’ll have to read it to find out.

—Kent Kosack, Director of Educational Arm

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Kjell Westö’s novel The Wednesday Club, translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith, takes us to Helsinki in 1938–ten years after the Finnish Civil War. The Second World War has not yet started, but Hitler and his policies are already a recurring discussion topic far beyond Nazi Germany. Lawyer and recent divorcee Claes Thune wants to keep the gentleman’s club with his three friends amicable but not only the world around them but also the past keeps intruding. As some of the friends start drifting apart, Thune finds a friend in his new secretary Matilda Wiik. But why is she so secretive about her background? Westö is one of the most highly praised Swedish-language writers in Finland. Although he writes poetry and short stories as well, it’s with his novels set in twentieth century Helsinki that he has truly established himself as a writer. Readers of the engaging and intriguing The Wednesday Club understand why.

—Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large for Sweden

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Smita sends her daughter to the village school in Badlapur for the first time, an action that sets a daring journey in motion. Guila works in her family’s wig workshop, the House of Lanfredi in Palermo, but soon receives news that changes the course of their business forever. In Montreal, a successful lawyer, mother of two, and woman who has it all, Sarah’s priorities are about to shift dramatically. Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, published by Picador in 2019, interlaces the stories of Smita, Guila, and Sarah—each on the precipice of change. Cinematic in scope and expertly translated from French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, it is ideal for binge reading. Set in the present day, the alternating perspectives flow seamlessly and are further linked through a poem. Colombani creates a deeply personal tale of women building new paths upon generations of faith, culture, and tradition, while revealing unexpected ways in which our modern lives intersect.

Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant READ MORE…