Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, Brazil

Memoir takes on a new form in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019), a devastatingly brilliant account of a relationship gone bad. With each chapter built from an archetype or narrative trope (consider “Lost in Translation,” “Murder Mystery,” or “Choose Your Own Adventure”), Machado constructs a story that is at once fragmented and whole—her story, which at times feels like a ghost story, at times like a sitcom, at times like a rope that’s knotted and twisted and confusing and elegant, pulls you every step of the way. By overlapping personal experiences with extensive research on lesbian and queer culture, Machado shows us that domestic abuse can and does exist in same-sex relationships. From the National Book Award finalist (Her Body and Other Parties, 2017) comes another daring page-turner, an imaginative reformulation of the memoir genre and a must-read for writers and translators alike.

Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor

At the centre of Manjoranjan Byapari’s novel, There’s Gunpowder in the Air, recently translated from the original Bengali by Arunava Sinha, five inmates meticulously plan a jailbreak. Set in Kolkata in the seventies, when the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal was gaining strength while many dissenting rebels were being jailed, Gunpowder presents a chilling account of state repression and class politics, where a prison represents much more than a prison. For the Naxal rebels whose stories Byapari narrates, the jail cell both confines and defines their revolt—“It seems they are in jail with the sole intention of defying and demolishing its solid walls as well as its rules and regulations”, he writes. By interspersing the perspective of these inmates with that of a head jailor, staff members, and even a ghost, the book’s portrayal of prison life articulates the mechanisms of state-sanctioned oppression as a combination of individual human choices, collisions, prejudices, and ideologies. The events detailed in Gunpowder closely resemble Byapari’s own time in jail during the Naxalite movement. It was, in fact, within these confines where he taught himself to read and write and developed the politics that inform his fiction and non-fiction. Published half a century after the uprising, the novel is a work of fierce honesty and speaks directly to India in the twenty-first century, insisting, crucially, that the fist of authoritarianism, as faceless as it may seem, is human-made. 

Alyea Canada, Assistant Editor

Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart (2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), translated from the French by Sam Taylor, is both devastatingly matter of fact and subtly lyrical in its description of the events surrounding a heart transplant. I was a little worried that this book was going to involve a lot of waxing poetic about the fragility of life, but de Kerangal avoids that. There is definitely rumination on the many ways a life can be marked or ended by tragedy, but this sentiment comes from the deep respect each character has for his or her role in the transplant process. From the moment the patient is declared braindead, we are introduced to the numerous doctors, nurses, and family members involved in the organ donation process. There is a time limit: twenty-four hours. This is a tension that hovers in your mind as de Kerangal shifts from the hospital to the characters’ lives outside of the moment. Sam Taylor’s translation does an excellent job of balancing the novel’s philosophical diversions with descriptions of medial processes in this weighty story about life’s delicate moments.

“Sunrise” was originally part of a short story collection that accompanied an installation by the multimedia and manga artists on the theme of light. Revised for publication as a stand-alone piece, “Sunrise” is constructed  through numbers—measuring distances, time, and ages. Combining news-like facts with life events, Erika Kobayashi asks the reader to consider how the human existence—in its entire cycle—is counted. This skillful translation by Brian Bergstrom affords the reader a glimpse into Japan’s relationship with nuclear power, a theme that comes up again and again in Kobayashi’s work. 

                                          —Rachael Pennington, Assistant Managing Editor

She slowly opens her eyes. She looks into the light of the sun. The sun is 1,400,000 kilometers in diameter. The energy from the nuclear fusion at its center takes over a million years to reach the surface. The surface heat is over 6000°C. The heat is accompanied by light, light that takes eight minutes and nineteen seconds to reach Earth.

She was born in Tokyo on August 10, two years and a day after Nagasaki was blasted, three days after Hiroshima, by the flash of a nuclear bomb.

She emerged from her mother’s womb after ten months and ten days.

She was named Yōko, the yō from Taiheiyō, Japanese for Pacific Ocean.

After reading the rest of the story here, take a deep dive through our archive, organized by issue and geographic region.

What an eventful two weeks it has been in world literature. Around the World with Asymptote featured dispatches from China and the United States, as well as Brazil, Central America and Sweden, including reports on the Nobel Prize ceremony and the ongoing controversy surrounding 2019 laureate Peter Handke. Translation Tuesday surfaced a flowing, rhythmic poem from Italy via Maria Borio, claiming “Fragile beings have eyes that touch.” We reviewed a new anthology edited by Chris McCabe, Poems from the Edge of Extinction, an ambitious collection of poetry written originally in endangered languages, as well as Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life, a Tolstoyesque epic revolving around family secrets. Sarah Moore chatted to Ümit Hussein about the challenges and pleasures of translating Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez, author of Labyrinths, our Book Club selection for November, while former editor-at-large Lara Norgaard spoke with Indonesian journalist Ayu Utami, whose hugely controversial first novel Saman broke taboos around sex, gender and politics under Suharto’s military dictatoraship. And today’s What's New in Translation just published staff reviews of the latest offerings from world literature: a discursive and genre-bending Korean work, a powerful Uzbek novel that traverses existential questions of migration and hybridity, and the intimately potent lines of a young Argentine poetess. For illuminating interviews as well as coverage of the best writing from around the globe, make the Asymptote blog your daily window on world literature.

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See you on the other side of the New Year,

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