Editor's Note
Ready to dive into our
Summer 2016 edition? We have many rich
pickings from the underwater world of translation (video trailer
here),
including: memoirs of childhood submerged in ghosts and television;
in-depth interviews with Paul Celan translator Pierre Joris and Sawako
Nakayasu, winner of the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; our
colorful coral-reef Multilingual Writing Feature, this time
incorporating ten different languages from as far afield as Puerto Rico,
South Africa, and India; as well as
fifteen fresh-from-the-sea translations of Pedro Novoa's devastating
cuento breve, which, at 997 words, took first place in Peru's "Story of 1,000 Words" contest.
It's
not hard to see why. At once a nautical thriller and drama-filled
family saga, Pedro Novoa's masterful story delivers a powerful allegory
about the blood ties that bind even when they're broken—the
concatenation of islands we will nevertheless always be. The subsequent
intergenerational stories by Philippe Sollers, Alessandro Cinquegrani,
and Edi Matić also feature the same beating (if shrieking, squalling)
heart; and we round off the Fiction section with Mahsa Mohebali's
delightful take on interconnectedness via a love-story-in-footnotes.
Elsewhere,
we are thrilled to give you Patrick Chamoiseau's also-very-hyphenated
introduction to Martiniquais writers, both an important theoretical work
and a masterpiece of creative writing. Along with David Shook's essay
on translating multilingual writer Jorge Canese, it provides the perfect
bungee-jumping off point to the adventurous experimentations in our
Multilingual Writing Feature. Borne from a certain "multiplicity of
being," these projects blur the lines between translation and original;
monolingual and multilingual. Audio recordings in this section, editor
Ellen Jones notes, uniquely reveal actual sounds of different languages
riffing off one another.
A new sound (Xitsonga, a South African
language) and some very existential investigations can be found in the
Poetry section: Czech Surrealist Vítězslav Nezval, for example, presents
a man composing a self-portrait out of objects, while Mikhail Eremin,
of the Russian "philological school," interrogates nature, time, and
myth in dense free verse octaves; and Nurduran Duman responds to Rumi's
"Song of the Reed" in her urgent, questioning poems about the self's
place in the world. In the aftermath of May 1968, Italian poet Elsa
Morante asserts, "Fare ye well measures, directions, five senses. Fare
ye well slavish duties & slavish rights & slavish judgments."
As you plumb the rest of the issue, illustrated gloriously by
Andrea Popyordanova,
don't miss Brian Vinero's new drama translation of Euripides (in
rhymed-verse!); Trisha Gupta's review of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's
delightfully counter-current novel,
Panty; as well as a
spotlight on artist Jakub Woynarowski, who repurposes images from Polish
history to create spatial experiences ranging from the subtle to the
sublime.
In other magazine-related news, we are adapting Daniel Hahn's popular 'Ask a Translator'
column to a live event on July 20 at Waterstones Piccadilly (RSVP to the event
here), and
also live-streaming it on
Facebook (in a first for
Asymptote!)
so catch us there at 1930hrs (GMT) and ask your questions from all over
the world. For our Special Feature in January 2017, our sixth
anniversary issue, we are looking for contemporary work from Indian
languages. Find the details
here, along with our call for Canadian Poetry (deadline: 1 Aug 2016).
As
Asymptote
prepares to turn six (without financial support from any government
body or educational institution all these years), we are now urgently
looking to secure our future so that we can continue operating beyond
January 2017.
That's why we are rolling out a new sustaining
membership program. Subscription takes just a few moments (and $10 a
month), but allows us to continue bringing the freshest world literature
to an audience that grows exponentially with each passing year. In
return for pledging a year’s support, you will receive an
Asymptote Moleskine notebook, perfect for you and your loved ones. If you value our work and our mission,
become a sustaining member today
. Thank you so much for your support!
Posts
