Posts featuring Valeria Luiselli

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Palestine and Mexico!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on prestigious awards and literary festivals from Palestine and Mexico! From the 2023 winners of the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Creativity to multisensorial poetry from the UANLeer book fair, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

The 2023 edition of the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Creativity has been announced, with three winners selected from different categories. In the Palestinian Creative category, Palestinian poet and academic Dr. Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi won for her significant contributions to contemporary Arabic poetry, including leading a translation project that brought several notable works to English readers.

Lebanese composer, singer, and musician Marcel Khalife won the Arab Creative category for the remarkable additions he has brought to Arab musical heritage. Khalife is known for his devotion to Palestinian poetry, particularly that of Mahmoud Darwish, and has left an indelible mark on the Arab audience’s consciousness.

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Our Spring 2022 Issue Has Landed!

Individuals of the woodland canine persuasion run amok in our Spring 2022 issue, thanks to Theis Ørntoft and Nina Yargekov!

Welcome to our Spring 2022 edition, released just as Russia’s invasion enters a brutal new phase. We’ve been curating a space for writers in support of Ukraine in a new Saturday column. Now, we proudly bring you Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s letters from Kharkiv, Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins, and Ian Ross Singleton’s review of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Complemented by guest artist Shuxian Lee’s poignant cover, these pieces and the new issue remind us that if “humans are destructive”—as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it across so powerfully in his essay “Our Days in Paradise are Over”—“we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos.”

An absolute highlight amid new work from thirty-four countries, Ørntoft’s essay is itself an organizing phenomenon that deserves to be dwelt on. According to him, civilization “began with the delineation of a garden,” but capitalism has taken it to the point where every inch of planet Earth has been altered and nature no longer exists “out there”—no wonder, then, that his expedition to the West of Jutland yields zero sightings of wolves. Heavily mythologized across cultures, wolves most often represent danger, chaos, the unknown—yet, in the author’s telling, they also stand for the primeval and, therefore, a certain elusive real, in stark contrast to the various symbolisms thrust upon them. Ørntoft then inverts the anthropocentric paradigm that humans are used to—with them at the top of the food chain, even though they do not necessarily self-identify as animals—and asks us to consider what message wolves might hold for us instead.

Apart from Nina Yargekov’s uproarious adaptation of “Little Red Riding Wolf” for the age of the #MeToo movement—the obvious story with which Ørntoft’s nonfiction might be paired—“Our Days in Paradise are Over” echoes Nobel laureate Hermann Karl Hesse’s empathetic Weltanschauung in two new translations of his poems by Wally Swist; it also asks us to pay attention to the various animals conjured in this edition: from the suffering, captive bat in Bosnian author Aljoša Ljubojević’s “How We Started the War” to the suffering, liberated “Fish” in Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli’s story about a man who jumps into a lake and renounces his very own humanity along with the social contract it entails. Then there is the elusive boar in Pedro de Jesús’s slippery poem, in which various hunters discuss the “art of the hunt” only to miss the point; the cats with beautiful eyes in Agnieszka Taborska’s fascinating piece on surrealists vis-à-vis their chosen suicides, “yawn[ing] and stretch[ing] in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Mexico and Hong Kong!

January brought a plethora of literary events, from author talks to publishing announcements. In Mexico, the publishing house Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing put out a new bilingual poetry volume. In Hong Kong, the Dante Alighieri Society hosted a discussion on writing in your second language. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

The first month of 2022 has seen many commercial and independent publishers announce new books, both in Spanish and in translation. Though the year, like the two before it, will also be strangled by the global pandemic, the exciting vitality of the publishing scene brings momentary solace and hope.

North American publishing house Deep Vellum published The Love Parade, George Henson’s translation of El desfile del amor, a detective fiction by acclaimed Mexican writer Sergio Pitol originally published by Anagrama in 1985. An expert in contemporary fiction from Latin America, Henson has also contributed to Asymptote in the past, publishing the translated work of other outstanding Spanish-speaking authors such as the Mexican Alberto Chimal and the Peruvian Pedro Novoa. Deep Vellum is not new to Mexican literature either; its catalogue includes the names of contemporary international luminaries from Mexico, among them the poets Carmen Boullosa, Rocío Cerón, and Tedi López Mills.

The renowned Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli co-edited the sixty-fifth edition of independent San Francisco-based literary journal McSweeney’s, assembling a stellar collection of stories, letters, and translations. The compendium is not only dazzling but also urgently political. According to the journal’s website, the issue “delves into extraction, exploitation, and defiance.” The quarterly includes work by several internationally acclaimed writers from the American continent. Many are authors whom Asymptote has featured in the past, such as Gabriela Wiener, Samanta Schweblin, and Claudia Domingo. Their names are listed alongside other famous voices who have rapidly achieved international fame, including Laia Jufresa, Megan McDowell, and Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil.

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A Special Message from Our Editor-in-Chief

If this #GivingTuesday inspires you to donate to a cause, let it be Asymptote, the journal that rolls out the red carpet for world literature.

Dear friends,

This giving season, consider throwing in your support for the journal that none other than Dubravka Ugrešić (pictured above) recently called the global literary miracle.

In 2019, we brought you never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages—more than any other Anglophone magazine has unearthed. Though it may seem a miracle on the outside—a journal that puts so many underrepresented voices in conversation with established names like Dubravka Ugrešić and Viet Thanh Nguyen—it takes hard work behind the scenes to uphold both the diversity and the rigor of our content.

Why do we strive to include outsiders? Because we know what it’s like to be an outsider. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Our wide-ranging literary dispatches this week cover protests, translations, and debuts.

This week’s dispatches report on a four-day literature festival in Italian-speaking Bellinzona in Switzerland, a new podcast dedicated exclusively to Guatemalan and Central American literature, as well as news of the arrest of journalist Hajar Raissouni in Morocco and a theatre group resisting such censorship and freedom of the press violation with a performance of Don Quixote.

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Switzerland

An interest in mapping (often the result of conquests and colonization) and remapping—rethinking what was erased and systematically left out in the mapping process—is at the core of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel. In Lost Children Archive, mapping is related to sound: “Focusing on sound forced me to hear as opposed to seeing, it forced me into a different rhythm. You cannot consume sound immediately,” she explains, “when focusing on sound, you have to sit with it, let it unfold.” It is within this rhythm, she adds, that English emerged as the language that was conducive to the writing of this novel, which she had begun writing in both English and Spanish simultaneously.

Luiselli reflects on this and other aspects of her writing in an intense conversation with Italian writer Claudia Durastanti, in the intimate setting of Bellinzona’s social theater. 

Every year, Bellinzona—the capital of Swiss Italophone Canton Ticino—hosts Babel Festival, a four-day event entirely dedicated to literature and translation. This year’s fourteenth edition, entitled “You will not speak my language,” explored the limits and boundaries of language and literature, as well as languages that are “imagined, invented, despised, censored, regional, silent, visual, and enigmatic.”

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Follow our editors through Italy, the UK, and Shanghai as they bring a selection of literary news of the week.

Prizes, festivals, and book fairs! This week, our editors bring us news about Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega, Mantua’s Festivalletteratura, Edinburgh’s vibrant International Book Festival, and Shanghai’s vast international Book Fair. At the heart of all these dispatches is the wonderful ability of cities to draw huge numbers of people together to celebrate a year in literature. 

Barbara Halla, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Italy

In early June, Antonio Scurati won the 2019 Premio Strega, Italy’s most important literary prize, for his book M. Il figlio del secolo (M. Child of the Century). Scurati’s book is the epitome of ponderous tome: at more than eight hundred pages it is the first of what will be three volumes that novelize the life of Benito Mussolini, with this first title covering Mussolino’s rise to power. The book has been hugely popular with the Italian public, selling some one hundred and twenty thousand copies before it snatched the prize and has even given rise to some interesting debates with some critics calling into question whether Scurati’s book can actually be considered fiction at all, rather than a straightforward biography. What is particularly interesting is the fact that last year’s winner was also a novelized biography set in 1930s Europe: Helena Janeczek’s The Girl with the Leica (translated by Ann Goldstein) traces the final years of Gerda Taro, a German-Jewish war photographer, who bore witness to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism.

Looking forward, if you happen to find yourself in northern Italy between September 4 and 8, it might be worth popping by the small city of Mantua in Lombardy which hosts one of the biggest literary festivals in the country: Festivalletteratura. The line-up of guests could put the Edinburgh literary festival to shame, with a very international cast of writers and themes. Margaret Atwood will be popping by, as will Ali Smith, Valeria Luiselli and Elif Shafak. The festival will explore the contradictions of current American society with the help of Colson Whitehead and Meg Wolitzer among others, and academics like Amin Maalouf and Simon Schama will be hosting talks and debates around the future of the European Union. Other interesting events will be centered around modern Albanian and even Italian literature, science and the environment. You can check a full guide of the guests and events here. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The glorious fragrance of fresh literary works, hot off the presses from around the world.

It seems that national literatures around the world are shaping their next representatives as we receive further updates of new works by authors from around the globe. From publications by a Guatemalan indie press, to a remarkably young award honouree in Brazil, to a historic list of nominations for the most prestigious literary prizes in Japan, our editors are bringing you a glimpse of what is in yourand your bookshelf’sfuture. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at Large, reporting from Central America 

The biggest book fair in Central America, the Feria Internacional del Libro en Guatemala (FILGUA) is only a few weeks away. And like every year, on the days leading to FILGUA, the Guatemalan indie press Catafixia has been announcing its newest drafts. Mid-July, Catafixia will put out books by Manuel Orestes Nieto (Panama), Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador), and Gonçalo M. Tavares (Angola-Portugal). 

Additionally, this year’s FILGUA marks the tenth anniversary of Catafixia, which has helped launch the careers of poets like Vania Vargas and Julio Serrano Echeverría.

Last month, Costa Rican press los tres editores put out Trayéndolo todo de regreso a casa by Argentine author Patricio Pron, who won the Alfaguara Prize in 2019. los tres editores have previously published books by Luis Chavez, Mauro Libertella, and Valeria Luiselli. 

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Meet the Publisher: Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press

It’s a well-known fact that I am often drawn to books that tear your heart out and stomp on it.

Coffee House Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and essays. Since 2014, with the publication of Faces in the Crowd and Sidewalks by Mexican author Valeria Luiselli (translated by Christina MacSweeney), the press has sought out authors from Latin America and farther abroad. Coffee House Press is also a nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists on Books in Action projects that expand the relationship between reader and writer. Over email, Chris Fischbach, CHP’s publisher, and Sarah Moses, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Argentina, discussed the press’s interdisciplinary collaborations, how they discover books by Latin American authors, and some of the titles in translation readers can check out.

Sarah Moses (SM): How did Coffee House Press come to be?

Chris Fischbach (CF): We were founded by Allan Kornblum in the early 1970s in Iowa, and we were purely a letterpress venture back then, publishing poets from both Iowa and from the New York School, where Allan had moved from. In the early 1980s, Allan moved the press to Minneapolis, where it became the first press-in-residence at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. A couple years later, we incorporated as a nonprofit, became Coffee House Press, moved down the street, and started publishing trade editions (fiction and poetry) as well as continuing our letterpress work. I joined the press as a letterpress intern in December of 1994 and was hired as an editorial assistant in August of 1995. I became publisher in 2011.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Your weekly guide to biggest news in world literature.

We’re starting this month with news of literary awards, festivals, and translation parties to distract you from the last few weeks of winter! From the Bergen International Literary Festival and a Mother Tongues translation party to the European Union Prize for Literature and the PEN America Literary Awards, we have you covered with all of this week’s most important literary news.

Jacob Silkstone, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from the Bergen International Literary Festival, Norway

A literary event in Bergen, Norway’s second largest city and Europe’s wettest, doesn’t quite feel complete without a few minutes spent outside the venue—some people smoking, some talking with the writers, some watching the rain drip slowly into their beer. At Bergen’s first International Literary Festival, all participants were presented with free umbrellas, but the weekend (an extended weekend, beginning on Valentine’s Day and ending on February 17th) was miraculously close to remaining rain-free.

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On Translators in Translation: Spanish Novels About Translators Available in English Translation

The increasing need to understand the importance of translation in our globalized world manifests in works of fiction that feature a translator.

In our globalized world, translation seems to be everywhere. In subtitles, instructions, signs, menus, in meetings, and walking down the street. And recently, in fiction too. The representation of the act of translation and the task of the translator has become a recurrent topic in literature. In English, novels such as Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear and Rachel Cantor’s Good on Paper, both from 2016 and with translator protagonists, were very well received by readers as well as critics; and the latest anthology Crossing Borders, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, brings together stories on translation and translators by acclaimed writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Lydia Davis, among others. Translation was even at the center of the Academy Award nominee film Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”) in which Golden Globe nominee Amy Adams plays a translator tasked with communicating with heptapod aliens. The increasing need to understand the importance of translation in our globalized world has manifested in a recurrence with which works of fiction feature a translator or interpreter as the main character. In Spanish, too, there have been dozens of novels with translator protagonists written in the last few decades by both mainstream and cult authors, and by both translators who write and writers who translate. With this newly found interest in translation, more and more of these novels are being translated into English. Here are five novels on translators originally written in Spanish that are available to read in English translation.

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Jill Schoolman Honored at the Glamorous WWB Gala

Young people are being told that America comes first. I think we are here tonight because we believe otherwise and because we read otherwise.

The annual Words Without Borders gala celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature on November 1, named for the first chair of the board, Jim Ottaway. This year, the award honored Jill Schoolman, publisher of Archipelago Books. Archipelago has been a stalwart of the small but dedicated cohort of advocates for international literature in the U.S. since Jill founded the house in 2003—the same year Words Without Borders was created. In her humble, sincere acceptance speech, she told the room full of publishers, writers, translators, educators, and philanthropists, “I’ve felt a special kinship with WWB from the beginning. We created ourselves around the same time for many of the same reasons… Books that Archipelago publishes allow us to lose ourselves in other cultures and explore other worlds. It is our extraordinary translators who guide us through those worlds. We are extremely lucky to be working with such talented translators who are able to make books come alive for us, in both language and spirit. This wonderful award also belongs to them, too.”

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A Moveable Feast: A Year of Reading Women in Translation

In a genre that prides itself on celebrating diversity and shining a light on marginalised voices, women authors have consistently been overlooked.

This August marked the third anniversary of #WomenInTranslation month, a much-needed attempt to redress the balance between male and female authors within translated fiction. In a genre that prides itself on celebrating diversity and shining a light on marginalised voices, women authors have consistently been overlooked by publishers. The numbers paint a rather depressing picture, since according to Three Percent’s database, translated literature makes up approximately 3 percent of the literature published in English-speaking markets, and women make up a fraction of that — a mere 30 percent, or 0.9 percent of the literature that makes it to stores.

In this respect, #WIT Month is a fantastic way of highlighting women’s voices through the power of social media – demonstrating that not only are these books read, but that there is a large audience with a voracious appetite for literature in translation penned (and translated) by women. But I suspect that, like many others, once the dust has settled and we roll into Fall, my reading habits fall back into routine. The culture industry reflects the character of the society that it markets to, and the fact remains that it is considerably harder for women to get their work to appear to English than their male counterparts. If the problem is to achieve any sort of resolution, #WIT Month needs to first inspire a recognition of the gender biases within the industry and reading habits at large, and to introduce readers to women authors that end up being overlooked or that they might not otherwise have heard of — in short, WIT Month should become a moveable feast.

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My 2015

Sometimes there are books that you leave the store reading and can’t put down, and there have been quite a few of those this year.

It’s been a fantastic year for literature and, consequently, not such a stellar year for my bank balance as all these purchases have begun taking over my apartment. I recently discovered that there is a word for this condition in Japanese, “tsundoku”; letting books pile up unread as you buy new ones to add to the literary Tower of Babel rising ever higher in your apartment. But sometimes there are books that you leave the store reading and can’t put down, and there have been quite a few of those this year.

Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life was one such book, a lucid and meticulously researched biography of the late poet, who also acted as a champion of translation and literary internationalism through Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), the magazine he co-founded in 1965 with Daniel Weissbort, through the founding of Poetry International in 1967, and through his own efforts at translation. Most notable of these efforts were his translations of Hungarian poets during the 1960s and 1970s, living in ‘the Other Europe’ of the Cold War era.

In what might well be a q-memory, I recall coming across Ted Hughes’ poem ‘The Thought Fox’ at an early age within an anthology of British poetry owned by my great-granddad. Though I wasn’t to know it at the time, The Hawk in the Rain would later become a touchstone during my teenage years in rural North Yorkshire. Coming from a similarly unremarkable background, Hughes was someone who didn’t forget his countryside roots, but was in fact sustained by them; in short, he was one of us. Though there has been a huge amount of press around the book for its more scurrilous content, an unavoidable consequence of the ever-profitable ‘Plath industry’, Bate successfully puts Hughes over as someone who lived and breathed for his art; contained it within the marrow of his bones, and pursued an unwavering, unforgiving dedication to his art that brought terrible costs to his life off the page.

After featuring in our summer issue, I quickly snatched up a copy of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth when Christine MacSweeney’s wonderful translation hit the shelves of my local bookstore in September. Shortly after beginning the novel, it becomes obvious that Luiselli is sitting comfortably on the edge of greatness; uproariously funny and scathing in its critique of the absurdities and banalities of modern life, the book was just a delight to read from beginning to end. For lovers of the adroit wordplay of Joyce and the ironic farces of Ionesco, this book will make a perfect stocking filler.

Another translated work that has stuck with me throughout the year, particularly in light of the refugee crisis in Syria and the ongoing debates around military action against the self-styled Islamic State, has been Mary McCarthy’s translation of Simone Weil’s seminal essay, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’. A meditation on the nature of war and violence, it shows, on the one hand, why the classics are still relevant to our understanding and navigation of the issues thrown at us in the modern world. On the other, it reaffirms warfare and violence as a dehumanising force that strips both victim and aggressor of all humanity. Written on the eve of war in 1939, it remains one of the most moving literary essays ever written.

David Maclean is a freelance journalist and writer based in Manchester, United Kingdom. He is a Marketing Manager for Asymptote and Editor of Angle Grinder Magazine. Their inaugural issue, “North,” will be released in January 2016.

This is Asymptote: Say Ayotzinapa

A look back at Asymptote, Ayotzinapa, and solidarity through poetry & translation

Asymptote is the only literary magazine I’ve ever worked for (or even heard about) that has the editorial and translatorial brainpower and resources to pull off a 20-language project in 10 days.

Because that is just what we pulled off with Say Ayotztinapa, which—thanks to the intrepid blog, design, and social media teams—surged on the wave of worldwide solidarity with the victims of the Ayotzinapa massacre in September 2014 and with the subsequent protests. And it’s wasn’t only a translatorial feat, the post was shared in the thousands, including retweets by organizations like English PEN, Words Without Borders, and Granta.

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