Elementalia: Chapter IV Air

May 1, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

There was more to the word than Indra thought. There was more in the air.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Inspire, from the Latin inspirare, in- + spirare, to breathe.

 

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Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire

April 30, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

A dark chorus . . . unfurling a portrait of an unraveling community.

In Ecuadoran writer Natalia García Freire’s latest novel, A Carnival of Atrocities, rising from the landscape is a swirling, multivocal, and vivid portrait of a small town torn apart by prejudices and suspicion. There may be something rotten buried deep in the earth—but perhaps it is history itself. With an expert, distinguished lyricism translated melodiously by Victor Meadowcroft, García Freire aims her incisive sights on the violence and hatred that pervade amidst dissenting belief systems, gesturing towards the ways a limited, desperate existence can further inhibit our shortsighted perspectives.

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.   

A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft, World Editions, 2025

There is something about a fictional town that allows their inventors to bend the rules of everyday life—to infuse these imagined destinations with magic, tragedy, and often fear. In novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the respective towns of Macondo and Comala have become canonical spaces to reflect on death, family, faith, tradition, and the world itself. Natalia García Freire’s A Carnival of Atrocities is no exception: in the fictional town of Cocuán, myth, brutality, and poetic cruelty intertwine.

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Translation Tuesday: “An Autumn Evening’s Tale” by Okamoto Kanoko

April 29, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Elena Paulsen

...Their neighbors naturally did not suspect a thing, so they treated Father as a little girl and regarded Mother as a boy.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Okamoto Kanoko, one of several notable feminist writers who flourished in Japan’s prewar period. In “An Autumn Evening’s Tale,” translated from the Japanese by Elena Paulsen (and edited by Ella Campbell), when a family pauses on their journey back to their hometown, the parents take it as an opportunity to reveal a long-held secret. As they recount their pasts with a mixture of nostalgia and resignation, their children begin to question the underpinnings of their seemingly conventional lives. Okamoto’s equally elegant and playful tale unravels notions of gender, identity, and love against a backdrop of familial pressures and societal expectations. In doing so, she presents a vision for living true to a fluid self which is sparklingly radical even today.

A middle-aged father and mother went on a trip with their son and daughter, who were in their early twenties. 

They took lodgings at almost exactly the halfway point of their trip, a quiet hotel in a lakeside town. It was somewhere between the capital city of that country and the countryside village they had come from, a distance of one hundred and fifty leagues. 

I say “of that country”—but is it Japan or a foreign country, in the present or the past? What will the author decide? But really it doesn’t matter whether it happened in Japan or elsewhere, recently or long ago. The fact of this story, the truth of it, rides upon the craft of the author without a care for those details, and the truth is what I would like to convey to the reader. But it’s hard on anyone who might try their hand at illustrating this story, as they haven’t a clue whether to draw black eyes or blue, curly or long, straight hair. Actually it need not even be humans, it could be grass or trees or wildlife or flowers. Anything at all is fine, so long as it corresponds to the feeling that arises when reading this story. With that said, surely the skill and sensitivity of an artist is such that even with no further instructions the illustrator will be able to convey the essence of the story and have it ring true—so, with your permission, I will go ahead and begin. 

The season was autumn. The harsh evening wind had completely died down, leaving the quiet atmosphere from before what little foliage remained was jostled by the wind. The moon, bright but not too bright, came into view on the peak of the night-time mountain. From the hotel window only the edge of the lake was visible. Yet the complete serene clarity of that edge was enough to give an impression of  jade-like translucence to the whole vast surface, soothing the eyes of the four members of the family. Served in the many dinner plates that the waitstaff set upon the table were fresh, fragrant fish only just taken from the waters of the lake. Here and there amongst the plates were figs picked from the surrounding mountains, the ripe flesh of the fruit seeming fit to burst, barely covered by the glossy skin. The fruits were placed in large bowls and carried out together with strong, aromatic tea. 

—— Father. Tonight we should tell the truth about ourselves to the children, don’t you think? 

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To Neither Master Nor Be Mastered By Language: An Interview with Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng

April 28, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Catherine Xinxin Yu

Ghosts cross into my porous peace and poetry all the time, without my control.

“Isn’t language this delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams hovering about our eyes, this mantle, this riddle, of lifelong sleep?” writes Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng in “A Poetics of Sleep #2: the (no) center of writing,” one of two poems by the writer and translator published in Asymptote’s Winter 2025 issue. The poems, which were self-translated by the writer, inhabit shifting, liminal spaces—between sleeping and waking, between one language and another. In her translator’s note, she writes, “Self-translation is a flexible zone where I hope neither language settles into conclusiveness.” That resistance to conclusiveness is one of the joys of her poetry. In this interview, Asymptote’s Assistant Fiction Editor Catherine Xinxin Yu speaks to Nguyễn-Hoàng about the poetics of hauntings, visual symbolism in her poems, and living vigorously in translation.

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): Your poems in our Winter 2025 issue absolutely blew my mind with their oneiric flow and virtuosity. Is A Poetics of Sleep an ongoing series?

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (QNH): “A Poetics of Sleep” is sort of a triptych. The two poems on Asymptote are two out of the three panels of this sleep triptych that I wrote one sleepless night not long ago. The writing felt like one flow of breath. It was winter. I was in bed, under my soft blanket, cradled on the edge of sleep, a kind of open-eyed sleep, a very wakeful kind of sleep. So, in a way, this poetics is ongoing within me whenever I recall this strange consciousness of the body and mind falling into sleep while still writing, rambling, chanting sleep into literature.

CXY: What are the differences between translating yourself and others, and between translating into English and into Vietnamese? On a more personal note, what kind of relationship do you have with the languages you know, and what role do bilingualism and code-switching play in your life?

QNH: When I translate others, I can’t alter their original; it’s not allowed and I also don’t wish to alter the texts I translate. But when I translate myself, I often compulsively, happily, sometimes carefully, sometimes carelessly change my ‘original’ words. So, in my zone, translations and original writings live on rather permeable lands.

I speak Vietnamese and English, both of which seem to stray further and further away from my grasp the longer I live with them. Which is to say, I master neither of them. With a dictionary, I can read a few lines of Chinese and French, two languages that influenced the formation of Vietnamese, two former masters you could say. It’s hard to summarize one’s relationship with language, but since I brought up mastery, I suppose one ongoing question, for me, is how to neither master nor be mastered by language. When I write in a state between sleep and wakefulness, it feels like a way of joining the power, the magic, of language without having to work out the question of mastery, which, for me, often seems to narrow instead of expanding the heart.

CXY: I was intrigued by the recurring allusions to the supernatural and the subconscious in A Poetics of Sleep: hauntings, divination, ghost ships, ceaseless phantoms, poetry-sutras and poet-chanters, angel-ancestors + other electric apparitions, dewdreams and feverdreaminess and sleeptalking. . . Could you talk more about the poetics of hauntings and liminality in your writing?

QNH: A mouth holds many hauntings, a mouth holds many ghosts. Familial ghosts, national ghosts, literary ghosts, art historical ghosts, war ghosts, immigration ghosts. All these ghosts cross into my porous peace and poetry all the time, without my control. Ghosts and I, we learn to live together. Which I guess is what many humans do. We are remembered and joined by ghosts, which flow through us. The pains and joys of the past don’t die; they go on. They eat with us, work with us, mess with us, play with us.

CXY: I love the visual symbolism in your use of the connective/cumulative + sign and the centripetal potentiality of “the O”. How did you come up with them? Also, you marked stanzas in “a river secretes many mouths” with ascending then reversing numbers. What’s your thinking behind this?

QNH: The “O” can be the moon, the seed, the mouth, the bindi, the gourd, the belly, the omelette, the tired curl of the body asleep, all kinds of zero-degree releasements, all manners + mantras of forgetting, all the ways of tracing + saying nothing + everything at the same time. I wonder how readers mouth the “O” in their own different way. When I was a teenager, I used to smoke, and the “O,” back then, was simply the unstable shape and silent sound I made when I exhaled smoke rings into the air on some afternoon of adolescent ennui. A shape of aimless dreams. A circular shape can hold many memories.

The + sign, as a connective and cumulative kind of tissue, came from many memories and influences, one of which is the work of Rose B. Simpson, where the + signs are directional stars, efficacious as amulets. I also think of them as the memory of wounds that unmake us, the sacred scars that grow to protect us.

CXY: Could you share some works that have shaped your translation practice?

QNH: My translation practice is shaped partly by my family of polyglots. I grew up in the nineties listening to my father speaking and bowing in Japanese at work, watching my aunt and uncle reminisce about studying abroad in the Soviet Union, wondering about the life of my grandfather, an occasional translator, who co-translated Sholokhov into Vietnamese from not Russian but French. Meanwhile I myself was learning about conjugation in English from my stay-at-home mom, both of us living vigorously in translation without ever naming it as such.

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer-translator and occasional art curator born in Vietnam. She is the author of Masked Force (Sàn Art, 2020), a lyrical pamphlet interleaved with the war photographs of Võ An Khánh. Her translations include Chronicles of a Village (Yale University Press, 2024) by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện and https://everything.is/ by Samuel Caleb Wee (AJAR Press, 2024). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Jacket2, Poetry, and other venues.

Catherine Xinxin Yu (she/they) is a literary translator working with English, Chinese, and Italian. She is interested in literature from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Italy, especially works that explore ecology, gender, indigeneity, and diaspora. Her translations and writing appear or are forthcoming in Asymptote, The Oxonian Review, This Is Southeast Asia, La Piccioletta Barca, and Full Stop Magazine. More about them @riso.allegro on Instagram and on www.cxxyu.eu.

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 25, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sayani Sarkar, and Wambua Muindi

The latest on book festivals in Nairobi, a spotlight on Indian crime fiction, and changes to publishing norms in Sweden.

In this round-up of literary news, our editors inform on the dialogues and contemporary themes surrounding literary festivals in Kenya; an event celebrating genre fiction in India; and what publishers are doing to switch things up in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

Book festival season is back in Nairobi, and first in line is—as always—Alliance Française’s Nyrobi Book Fest. The fourth edition of this festival, held from April 11 to 13, was a vibrant celebration of Kenyan storytelling, drawing a significant attendance under the theme “A Decade of Kenyan Stories: Past, Present and Beyond.” The festival offered a rich program, including writing masterclasses, storytelling sessions, book launches, and engaging panel discussions, between which attendees had the opportunity to connect with a diverse array of exhibitors such as Writers Space Africa-Kenya, eKitabu, Mvua Press, NAICONN, Mystery Publishers, NuriaBookstore, Writers Guild Kenya, and Jahazi Press, as well as interact with acclaimed authors like Peter Kimani, author of Dance of the Jacaranda; Billy Kahora, editor of Let Us Conspire and Other Short Stories; Iman Verjee, author of Who Will Catch Us if We Fall; Wangari the Storyteller; Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust; and Remy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One. The three-day festival particularly celebrated the creativity of young Kenyan writers, fostering inspiring conversations and discussions that underscored the dynamic landscape of Kenyan literature.

Following the Book Fest, Nairobi’s literary scene will continue to thrive with the fourth Nairobi Litfest, a festival of ideas by Bookbunk and Hay Festival, which is scheduled for June 26 to 29. Curated by Wanjeri Gakuru under the compelling theme of “exploring alternative knowledge systems,” this year’s edition will activate public spaces across the city, taking place at the McMillan Memorial Library, Eastlands Library, and Kaloleni Library. Building on the success of previous NBO Lit Fests, this edition promises a “thrilling experience” that will gather readers, thinkers, and writers for deep reflection, radical imagination, and collective action, addressing the urgent need for fresh perspectives in today’s world. READ MORE…

Baptism of Fire: An Interview with David Limon

April 24, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Michael Tate

We’re not just translating for an English-speaking audience, but potentially influencing how the work is understood worldwide.

In our most recent selection for Book Club, we were delighted to feature Evald Flisar’s winding, intertextual My Kingdom is Dying, which takes the long, venerable, and shifting work of storytelling as both its structure and its occupation. As its protagonist recalls a lifetime spent under the fascinations and complexities of fiction, one is taken through a crowded literary landscape where stories and realities collaborate to create the multiplying halls of memory, and philosophical preoccupations of the writer’s craft are constantly interrogating the capacities and functions of invention. In this interview, Michael Tate speaks to David Limon, the translator of this fascinating text, touching on the realities of Slovene-English translation, the particularities of Filsar, and his own illustrious literary journey.

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.   

Michael Tate (MT): I thought we’d start off today by asking for an overview of your life as a translator, starting from the beginning.

David Limon (DL): Well, at school, I did French, like almost every person in the (English) school system. Then at university, I studied English literature and philosophy, but then later, I did a master’s in linguistics, and got into teaching for a while. The first job I had was in Nigeria, which obviously has nothing to do with Slovene, but the second job I had was in Yugoslavia—which still existed—and obviously, Slovenia was one of the Yugoslav republics.

One of the main languages in Yugoslavia was then known as Serbo-Croatian, but there were also other languages, such as Macedonian and Slovene and Albanian. I ended up in the Republic of Slovenia, I met a young lady, and I loved and married her; this is really why I learned Slovene, because of my wife, and partly because her parents didn’t speak English. Her father did speak German, and he used to speak to me in German, thinking: well, English and German are fairly close, he’ll understand. I didn’t, so I thought that I’ll have to learn Slovene. READ MORE…

Memory Personified: A Review of Ballerina by Patrick Modiano

April 23, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sophie Benbelaid

Modiano’s work engages with literary traditions and themes innate to autofiction: identity, the passage of time, fragmented recollections.

Ballerina by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, Yale University Press, 2025

Patrick Modiano’s latest work, Ballerina, takes its readers to a Paris that feels uncertain, still marked by the shadow of the Second World War. Like most of the author’s other publications, so too is this novella written as autofiction, with the main perspective being that of the same young man who normally figures in his writing. Over the course of his story, we float from recollection to recollection, following the narrator’s attempts to capture the memories of his youth in 1960s Paris—during which he finds himself admitted into a ballerina’s circle.

Despite the title, the eponymous dancer herself feels less like a central figure than what we might be led to expect. She is, of course, present and recurring in the narrator’s focus, acting as the glue between him and the other characters, threading connections that are introduced over the course of the novella—but as we read through the story, we feel as though we are trying to catch hold of an ever-elusive spirit, rather than an actual person.

It is at this point that one comes to consider the metaphor of dancing and ballet, and how it further feeds into the ballerina’s enigmatic character. While the novella’s title bears her epithet (which is also her nickname), this is as much as we receive in terms of her identification. In contrast, every other figure, barring the narrator, is named: the ballerina’s son, Pierre; Hovine, whom the ballerina had known ‘since childhood’; Verzini, the narrator’s landlord and the ballerina’s friend; and Kniaseff, the ballet master, to name but a few. In this way, nearly all the characters are rendered concrete and tangible, not only through their names, but also the short physical descriptions which accompany them. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Buckle by Nirha Efendić

April 22, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

I don’t think that having to prove oneself is right; you break yourself but the people around you see only what they care to see.

Too often, stories about war sensationalize the trauma it inflicts—the dead reduced to numbers, the survivors to lists of symptoms. Not so the work of Bosnian writer Nirha Efendić, whose autobiographical novel Buckle, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, offers a compelling vision of what such narratives often omit: the shunning of refugees, the punishments of a post-war economy, the daily psychic grind of living as an undesired and unforeseen survivor. The nature of the narrative is best described by Bosnian author Faruk Šehić, as “. . . a documentary-like, autobiographical work of prose with elements of fiction”—the early chapters narrated by various members of the protagonist Nirha’s family, the later narrated by Nirha alone, following the death of her father and brother in the Srebrenica genocide. The excerpts below are taken from the middle of the novel, following Nirha’s attempts to find her footing after she is finally separated from her father and brother. Of these passages, Elias-Bursać writes: “The challenge in working on this translation was to convey the nuanced sense of the narrator’s grace, strength and gentility as she speaks of such wrenching, tragic subjects.” Read on—

All morning long, Mama and I worked on stitching sturdy yellow cloth for rucksacks. Mama had a Singer sewing machine that my grandfather bought her while she was still in elementary school so she could learn the trade over summer vacation.

Now she was determined to teach me how to sew.

She thought it might come in handy at some point. We knew we had to stuff our whole past into the backpacks, at least the most important parts of it, and set off into the unknown.

This wasn’t easy. There were shells raining down all around us.

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Blog Editor Highlights: Spring 2025

April 21, 2025  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper dive into Rosario Castellanos, Liu Ligan, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in our latest issue.

There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.

A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”

As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 18, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Kathryn Raver, and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest literary news from Palestine, France, and the United States!

This week, our editors take us behind-the-scenes at book festivals, from a festival spotlighting Latin American literature in Los Angeles to Paris’s Festival du Livre. From workshops on reimagining fairytales to a look at the only Palestinian-owned publishing house in America, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

Beneath the glittering glass ceiling of the Grand Palais, Paris welcomed over 114,000 attendees for its fourth annual Festival du Livre last weekend. The festival is a hub for publishing professionals and book lovers alike, promoting both Francophone and international literature to French-speaking readers and offering insights into the literary and cultural landscape of today.

Among an extraordinarily diverse selection of programming, a few of my personal favorites included a workshop on reimagining classic fairytales and a seminar on resisting the language of fascism—an examination of far-right language and how it is actively influencing popular discourses “blurring traditional political markers and weakening collective memory.”

Thousands of authors and publishers took part in the festival, as they do every year. Among them was Moroccan-French author Leila Slimani, whose previous works have been highly praised and have even been awarded prestigious prizes like the Prix Goncourt (Chanson douce, 2016). Slimani’s newest novel, J’emporterai le feu, was released in January of this year and concludes her Le Pays des autres trilogy.

In fact, Moroccan literature was the festival’s special cultural focus this year. Thirty-two publishers of Moroccan voices were present at the festival, most of them taking part in one of the many events offered at the Moroccan Pavilion—a dedicated space designed to highlight the country’s multilingual literary tradition and its “image as a cultural crossroads between tradition and modernity.” The events included a number of creative writing workshops, author talks, and even a seminar on translation and cultural reception of the Moroccan novel.

The Festival du Livre wasn’t the only event on which French readers could slake their thirst this month. Hors Limites, a festival hosted by the Association Bibliothèques en Seine Saint-Denis, seeks to highlight contemporary literature and address reading as a dialogue between creators and consumers. This festival, though smaller, still featured dozens of workshops and author meetings in Ile-de-France.

Among the authors present was Palestinian author Karim Kattan (whose 2021 interview with Asymptote can be found here). Kattan’s most recent novel, Eden à l’aube, was recently awarded the 2024 Prix de la Cagnotte. An English translation of his first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, was recently released by Foundry Editions. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

April 17, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What’s the antidote to a world of trade wars and closed borders? Quite possibly our Spring issue, celebrating the free circulation of ideas!

What do we need from each other? What do we gain if we give? At the dawn of a new age of tariffs, the dominant mode of exchange has become a kind of brute transactionalism—before one hands over anything, one must demand something of equal value in return. But what if simply giving is the better way to flourish—the way to a richer commons? It is in this spirit that we proudly unveil “The Gift.” Gathering new work from as far afield as Paraguay, Lesotho, Senegal, and Guyana, our Spring 2025 edition centers the generosity of translation—an act that Youn Kyung Hee, invoking Paul Celan, rightly compares to a gift: “For Celan, the event of poesis goes beyond receiving a gift from some unnamed sender; it also comprises the work of sending it out once more, a transmission bottled in glass.” How fitting, then, that our interview section, which usually features major authors in the world literature canon (such as the recently deceased Mario Vargas Llosa, in our Spring 2018 issue), cedes the floor to two of the most prominent practitioners of the art working today: Robin Moger, acclaimed translator of contemporary and classical Arabic literature, and Anton Hur, who went from debuting as a translator in these pages nine years ago to becoming the Booker International Prize-nominated voice in English of Korean authors like Sang Young Park. Hur’s interview pairs perfectly with our Korean Literature Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, whose many highlights include Jeong Ho-seung’s bittersweet “sorrow by special delivery” and talented director-writer Lee Chang-dong’s absurd comedy in which a scrounging couple on vacation return to find their house burgled.

blog_Spring_2025_issue-announcement

Elsewhere in this edition beautifully illustrated by South Korean guest artist GLOO / Yejin Lee, the theme of gifts—often passed down from the generation prior—persists. The opening trio of pieces (Men and Bread, Long Shadows, and Taxidermy) each consider the tendrils of paternal legacy, but the title of most dad-haunted narrator might be a contest between Pierric Bailly tracing the real-life events leading up to his father’s death in the woods and Song Seung Eon’s imaginary fisherman addressing his macabre haul (“Skull, are you my father? Are you something that was my father?”). In Christopher Carter Sanderson’s sparkling update of Anton Chekhov’s drama The Gull, by contrast, Treplev wrestles with having a celebrity for a mother. (“On her own, she’s a sexy young actress. When I’m near, she looks like a soccer mom.”) Monica Ong—whose visual poems drawing on astronomy have been featured in  Scientific American, among other places—likens her parents to intrepid “cosmonauts” for migrating from their native Philippines to a new home in the US. Finally, against the backdrop of brutal deportations from the US, poet Judith Santopietro calls attention to the gifts inherent even in the most dangerous of international journeys, juxtaposing a glimpse of black orchids from atop a freight train with the eventual hardship of “distributing food and christmas gifts” in a foreign land. Too often portrayed as mere victims, Santopietro’s poem reminds us of the agency of immigrants, inviting us to recognize their journeys as choices they have made, and to consider that these, too, may be gifts, if we allow that possibility.

If Asymptote has been a gift to you, consider helping us stick around so that it may be a gift to others down the road. Remember: the best way to support us is to join us as a sustaining or masthead member (and signing up only takes three minutes, but the good it does reverberates through time).

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Every Tender Thing Breaks: A Review of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part

April 16, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

It is not possible to move beyond atrocities when its perpetrators are unyielding, and when justice eludes us.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, Hogarth, 2025

Han Kang’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, opens with a dream: Kyungha, a writer, sees thousands of black tree trunks of various heights protruding from the earth along a hill in front of her. As she walks closer, she wonders if they are gravestones. She thinks they look like thousands of men, women, and children huddling in the sparse snow coming down. Suddenly, she is wading through a body of water that gets deeper before she realizes she is at the shore and the sea is crashing in. 

“When had everything begun to fall apart?” Kyungha asks herself. She thinks back to the two years before her book on the massacre in “G—” was published, when the nightmares began. Trying to shield her family–her daughter especially—from the worst of what had overwhelmed her inner world, she began to work on the book in an office 15 minutes away from her home. She tried to draw hard lines, to compartmentalize, to keep work and home as separate as possible. But sleep became impossible—days bled into nights, and nights bled into horrifying and disorienting nightmares. She hoped they might cease when the book was published, but we know now, in retrospect, that that did not happen. She is baffled by her early naivete: “having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively–brazenly–hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?” 

Those violent traces have haunted her since, the dream recurring on and off in the four years since she began researching for the book.  We learn that she and her friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker and amateur woodworker, have agreed to work on a film recreating the dream. For a few years, they call each other to discuss the project, but never actually begin. Kyungha eventually tells Inseon she wants to abandon the project. They contact each other less and less frequently as time passes, and Inseon gets more and more preoccupied with the failing health and eventual death of her mother, a survivor of the midcentury massacre in Jeju. Kyungha is likewise miserable and alone. For years now, she has been dealing with episodes of debilitating migraines and abdominal pains, and has lost her job, her family, and almost all of her friends. She starts drafting her will but can’t think of one person to whom she can send it. She is barely nursing the will to live when she is roused—by a feeling of responsibility towards the person who will inevitably take up the work of executing her will after she dies—to resume living, at least long enough to get her affairs in order. “That is how death avoided me,” she tells the reader.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Boat” by Rabindranath Tagore

April 15, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Anushka Sen

Who is that approaching, singing, rowing to the shore? / When I set my eyes on her, I think we’ve met before.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a lyrical meditation on longing, loss, and ephemeral encounters by India’s eternal poet laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. Set against a monsoon-drenched landscape, “The Boat” captures a moment of solitude as the narrator, tired after a long day of harvesting, watches a mysterious boatwoman pass by. There is a haunting nostalgia in the stranger’s presence, yet she vanishes as quickly as she arrives, leaving behind empty hands and unanswered questions. Tagore infuses his songlike verses with his signature blend of natural symbolism and emotional subtlety. Translated gracefully from the Bengali by Anushka Sen, the poem illuminates a world where human connection is as fleeting as the rains.

The Boat

Through thickets of thunder runs the rapid rain.
I sit alone and helpless by the shore.
The harvest heaped in heavy rows,
draws my labour to a close.
The brimming river grows
to a sickled roar.
The rains arrived as I was threshing grain.

I sit alone in a little field of rice
with little rivers rippling all around.
Smudged against the distant stroke
of watersky, a village glows
through forest fog and cloudy smoke—
So it was I found
myself alone in a little field of rice.

Who is that approaching, singing, rowing to the shore?
When I set my eyes on her, I think we’ve met before.
She hurtles past with streaming sail,
never glancing either way
as desperate waves assail
her boat and turn to spray.
I see her, and feel as though we may have met before.

READ MORE…

What’s New In Translation: April 2025

April 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Dan Shurley, Eric Bies, Liliana Torpey, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from Brazil, Portugal, Switzerland, Colombia, Norway, Italy, Palestine, Cuba, Peru, Japan, Afghanistan, and Germany!

The brevity of a transcendent ecopoetics, a fierce diagnosis of the contemporary art world, the psychological torture of a toxic relationship, a gathering of formidable Afro-Brazilian voices. . . This month, we are delighted to introduce fifteen new works from around the world, from the intimate to the twisted, the reverent to the radical, of healing and breaking, of what goes on within us and between us.

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 Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández, translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia, World Poetry Books, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Rhythm in poetry, Yeats told us, serves to “prolong the moment of contemplation—the moment when we are both asleep and awake” by balancing a monotonous formula of language with the surprise of new images, ideas. In his metered perfection, he reminded us that we are innately rhythmic creatures, alive by the steady pace of breath and heartbeat, habit-forming and fond of repetition, and every interruption to this enduring pattern is a miniature shock, a fracture, a revival.

The hundred poems in Gastón Fernández’s Apparent Breviary are full of interruptions: huge, gasping chasms of silence throwing poetic rhythm into some archaic past. A few pages in, I understood why their translator, KM Cascia, had admitted that the poems made them “squirm.” They unsettled me too. With no guiding cadence to the words, no comfort of the steady pulse, with language disorientating in its skeleton arrangement, there is a sense of learning how to read again, examining each word set firmly on its own—rare stars in the page’s matte sky. Max Picard had once brought up the idea that language is too self-conscious: “each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front than to the silence.” In Fernández, this isn’t so; here, language is conscious of its origin and reverent of its silent surroundings, and as soon as one acknowledges this fact, the vacancy of the negative spaces on the page begin to seem inviting. Instead of being read as simply text, there is something of Apparent Breviary that demands to be interpreted as score, in which the nothingness is full of measures, divisions, momentum. The poet demands we notice that the emptiness is alive: it breathes. READ MORE…