MCLC: Asymptote, Jan. 2014

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Asymptote Journal <editors at asymptotejournal.com>
Subject: Asymptote, Jan. 2014
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Asymptote's Winter issue is Here

Chinese highlights:

- A selection of poems by Hai Zi, from "Wheat has Ripened," tr. Ye Chun
- A excerpt of a memoir by Fu-chen Lo and Jou-Chin Chen's "From Taiwan to
the World and Back," tr. Lee Yew Leong
- A play by Singaporean writer Yeng Pway Ngon, "Man and Bronze Statue,"
tr. Jeremy Tiang
- Dylan Suher on Tao Lin and Murong Xuecun
- The winners of our first-ever $1,000 translation contest, Close
Approximations, judged by Eliot Weinberger and Howard Goldblatt

Other highlights include new translations by J.M. Coetzee and Rosmarie
Waldrop, interviews with Yoshitomo Nara and Adam Thirlwell, an essay by
Michael Hofmann, dispatches from Darfur and Syria, poems by Emilio Villa
and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, as well as Korean Hangul Text Art. All this,
plus our first work from the Lithuanian and Finnish and the winners of our
first translation contest!

Find our new issue here: http://asymptotejournal.com

Watch our issue trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUt0QRfwGHY

Now with updates about world literature at our blog here:
http://asymptotejournal.com/blog

The official mailer for the Apr 2013 issue is here:

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/view_edm.php?id=21

Text of Mailer:

Asymptote turns three this issue, and instead of temper tantrums, we
decided to throw a series of events around the world. Look out London, New
York, Zagreb, Boston, Philadelphia, Shanghai, Berlin, Sydney, and Buenos
Aires! We also held our first translation competition, and you'll find the
winners in our gigantic January issue alongside a letter from Darfur, an
essay by Michael Hofmann, translations by J.M. Coetzee and Rosmarie
Waldrop, interviews with Adam Thirlwell and Japanese artist Yoshitomo
Nara, plays from Singapore and Israel, and much more, all of it
illustrated by the frightfully young and talented Swedish artist Leif
Engström.

 
Almost three years ago, Japan was hit by the 3.11 earthquake, and both
Hideo Furukawa's story and his conversation with Yoshitomo Nara address
the ways artists deal in devastation's wake. Much as the athletes in
Phillipp Schöntaler's story use talismans to ward off defeat, or the
protagonist of Elina Horvonen's story seeks solace in an in-flight
magazine, so do some authors keep writing to dispel doubt, or even death.
With two essays about Giacomo Leopardi's 19th century Zibaldone (one from
one of his translators), we examine the treasures and challenges to be
found in an essayistic diary that's 4,526 pages long. Our Dylan Suher,
meanwhile, compares the very contemporary work of Tao Lin and his Chinese
peer Murong Xuecun. Like Leopardi and the marvelously raging Iranian
poetArash Allahverdi, these writers are trying to create some order out of
chaos. But what happens when the paper stays blank? Michael Hofmann
presents the cautionary tale of Wolfgang Koeppen, a German writer who, at
the apex of his career, stopped writing novels entirely.

The protagonists in fiction from Colombia and South Africa are trapped in
such terrible situations that they see storms as salvation and death as a
kind of release. Survival is at stake in a riveting prison memoir from
Syria (translated additionally into the Chinese) and also in Jérôme
Tubiana's photos and letters fromSudan. In the radical poetry of Víctor
Rodríguez Núñez, we find landscape and language to be so intimate as to
suggest they engender each other while we attempt to apprehend their
horizons, whereasEmilio Villa's experimentations produce a gorged and
macaronic language headed toward "the new era, / the bicipital era, of
phonetic devilries."  Equally radical is the risqué poetry of Nansŏrhŏn Hŏ
("White Orchid"), a 16th-century noblewoman from Korea who wrote inhansi,
a Korean adaptation of Chinese characters. Although Korea's current
"hangul" alphabet was first invented in the 1440s, it wasn't until after
1945 that it came in widespread use. The Korean artists presented in our
visual section use that unique alphabet as a way to harness the vibrancy
of speech. One of them,Jewyo Rhii, builds typewriters that have to be
operated with your whole body, or inside a closed box; each speech its own
machine.

The idea behind our first competition was to reward translators who are
early in their career and who work on writers under-represented in
English. Just how close their work approximated the originals' spirit was
up to the judges Eliot Weinberger and Howard Goldblatt. (Read their
citations here.) Though the former lamented the lack of strong work from
the less familiar corners of the literary world, something we at Asymptote
are passionate to counteract, both were so pleased with the level of
submissions that they decided to award not only one winner, but two
runners-up as well. Goldblatt lauded Cory Tamler and Željko Maksimović's
work in conveying a "somewhat erotic and generally foreboding" story by
Serbian author Tanja Šljivar, and Weinberger praisedOwen Good's
translations of the Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth for their lively zip. At
their best, these translators have done what the late Hai Zi's poem,
"Wheat Field of May," so beautifully describes "Sometimes I sit in the
wheat field reciting Chinese poetry / My eyes disappear, my lips
disappear." And that's what the best writing does, doesn't it? Takes your
very you away.

 
While you explore the many marvels mentioned above (and those we left for
you to discover yourselves), do check back for daily updates and offerings
at our 3-month-old blog. Don't forget to play around with our addictive
map feature, which offers yet more ways to explore our rich back catalog
of global literature and has just been updated with a new legend that
tells you more about where you can find Asymptote around the world. If you
like what you see, please consider joining our team or donating to our
cause (we've crossed the 25% mark of our goal as of 14 Jan 2014!).
Spreading the word far and wide is also mightily appreciated, especially
as we're scouting out great talent for April's English-language feature
(under the banner theme Diaspora) and our upcoming Latin American fiction
feature. ¡Ándale!