ASYMPTOTE Indiegogo Fundraiser

After being nominated for Magazine of the Year by 3:am, alongside The Times Literary Supplement, and pulling off a global launch--8 events in 7 countries--to celebrate our 2nd anniversary, just this January,

and more recently, after having added 10 new editors-at-large from Argentina to Kenya to Central Asia to extend its network even more, and so that it can bring even more diverse work to English readers,

and--case in point: we’ll be publishing our first work from Hong Kong, Indonesia, Latvia, Cyprus apart from an Africa Feature in our upcoming issue (slated for release in just one more week!)

ASYMPTOTE is launching a Indiegogo Fundraising campaign fro supporting its wonderful projects.

Here is a note on the e-zine and the campaign from 

• 
  Yew Leong Lee

  Editor-in-Chief

 What We Do
Asymptote is a free online journal dedicated to bringing together the best in contemporary literature. Our mission is simple: to unlock the literary treasures of the world. To date, we‘ve published authors working in 54 languages. Coming from 75 different countries, many of these writers are already familiar to (and well loved by) English readers: Haruki Murakami, Ruth Padel, Lydia Davis and 3 Nobel Prize winners (Imre Kertész, Czeslaw Milosz and José Saramago).

But many names may not be so familiar: Abdellah Taïa (although he won the 2010 Prix de Flore), Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Obie Award, 2011), or Toh EnJoe (Akutagawa Prize, 2012), whose award-winning novel is excerpted for the first time in English in our January 2013 issue.

We take our mission of introducing these amazing writers to readers so seriously that, apart from hosting work in all the usual genres (including visual art and drama), we even have a special section for essays in which overlooked non-English writers are concisely... MORE HERE!!!!!!

MARJORIE WELISH Symposium at Université Paris Est

 

On Thursday 11 April and Friday 12 April, we will be hosting a 2 day symposium on Marjorie Welish’s work at Université Paris Est Marne-La-Vallée, bâtiment Copernic, 3rd floor, room 15 (April 11) and room 6/8 (April 12). How to get there? See here.

We will be meeting in the morning of April 11th at 10 am to prepare our sessions with Marjorie Welish. Marjorie Welish will be joining us at 2 pm on the 11th. She will also be with us all day on the 12th.

On Thursday 11 April at 7:30 pm, Marjorie Welish and Jacques Roubaud will give a poetry reading at galerie éof, 15 rue Saint Fiacre, Paris.

So far, we’ve tried to focus on the writer’s own (creative and critical) work on... MORE HERE

SALON DU LIVRE PARIS--ROMANIAN LETTERS SPECIAL FEATURE

Romania is the guest of honor at the 2013 Paris Book Fair

Pour sa 33ème édition, le Salon du livre met à l’honneur les lettres roumaines. En 2013, les visiteurs du Salon viendront à la rencontre d’une belle sélection de 27 auteurs roumains dont une dizaine de romanciers découverts en 2012 par...
Read more at http://www.salondulivreparis.com/A-la-une/Les-lettres-Roumaines.htm#q7D65OHTaECsbK6z.99

MARGENTO listed on the EMERGENCY INDEX

MARGENTO "Nomadosofia / Nomadosophy" world-tour performances to be presented in the Emergency Index 2012 by US publisher Ugly Duckling Presse;

The line-up includes Jerome Rothenberg (for the performances in the US and S-E Asia), Costin Dumitrache, Valentin Baicu, and Grigore Negrescu (for the performances in Bucharest, Paris and London), Felix Nicolau, Claudiu Komartin, Iulia Militaru, Anca Bucur, Raluca Tanasescu, Cristina Budar, Sergiu Nisioi, Marina Gingirof of ABiS (for the performances in Bucharest), Alec Schachner and Nguyen Tien Van (for the performance in Saigon), and Chris Tanasescu for all of the above. 

CALYPSO EDITIONS @ AWP 2013

CALYPSO EDITIONS exhibits at the AWP Conference in Boston on the same table with Poetry International and Marick Press

ANNE CARSON - RED DOC

ROSENCRANS BALDWIN reviews the amazing book for NPR:

You don't read poetry. That's fine. Nobody does anymore. I'm not going to make you feel bad about that. But if there is one book I've pressed on more people in the past decade, it is Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. And I'm here to tell you its sequel has just been published, and that it's pretty much the biggest event of the year.

Autobiography of Red was a novel written in verse, a crossbreed of... MORE HERE !!!!!!

CAVAFY SESQUICENTENNIUM: "WHAT SURVIVES TRANSLATION"

                                                                                                                                C.P. Cavafy (Cavafy archive)

Randall Couch interviews Murat Nemet-Nejat and George Economou on Cavafy's poetry and poetics for JACKET2. Economou has completed a Cavafy Collected Plus due out from Shearsman this spring.

Teaser:
Couch: Cavafy spent seven years, from age nine to sixteen, in England, wrote his first verses in English and reportedly spoke Greek with an English accent until he died. He had a substantial familiarity with the English poetic tradition. He was employed most of his adult life in the Anglo-Egyptian bureaucracy of the Ministry of Public Works. Apart from (or including, if you like) the thematics of imperialism, colonialism, and exile in many of the poems, do you have any thoughts on the effect of linguistic and cultural “double vision” on his poetry? Might it have an effect on the translatability of the poems into English?

Nemet-Nejat: In relation to this issue I think the most revealing writer to compare Cavafy to is Jabès. Jabès, who is also basically a Levantine writer/poet, chose to identify himself with the centrality of the French culture, leaving behind, essentially erasing, the Arabic culture in which he lived for forty years. Cavafy identified himself with his Levantine world (writing in Greek) and, what is crucial, took a confrontational stance (that of a “minor poet”) in relation to the cultural center. My essay "Questions of Accent," first published in The Exquisite Corpse in 1993, starts with a critique of Jabès as a Jewish Levantine writer. When first published, it caused a great deal of controversy.

The center of Cavafy's poetry, at least to me, is an erotically infused psychic isolation, the almost ecstatic melancholy of itinerant aloneness. Modern Turkish poetry also registers the victim’s, the outsider’s point of view though, because of its more directly Sufi connections, the ecstatic side of this melancholy—an ecstasy achieved through tears and suffering—has a more prominent place. (Gayness also, its gradual coming to the surface—is key to the reading of modern Turkish poetry.) MORE HERE!!!!!!