This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: Asymptote Journal
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreWriting in the Margins
Our literature movement was born from a need. People here wanted something to free themselves, they wanted to go to university, to treat their children better, but they didn’t know where to look for it. For Asymptote, Kathleen McCaul Moura examines Brazil’s literatura marginal movement in an interview with its leader, Ferrez. Through popular readings on the outskirts of […]
...moreHigh Fidelity: Anita Raja on Translation
The editors at Asymptote Journal certainly couldn’t have expected Elena Ferrante to be outed when they planned their October 2016 issue, which includes Rebecca Falkoff and Stiliana Milkova’s translation of a 2015 speech given by Anita Raja. In “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance,” Raja argues that “to confront translational difficulty with inventiveness does not […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
The summer issue of Asymptote was published this week with a gorgeous spread of short fiction in translation from Spanish, Croatian, Persian, and more. If you’re not already familiar the journal, it publishes English translations of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and more from across the globe (the website cites 105 countries and 84 languages so far) […]
...moreOn Being Jacques Lacan’s Daughter
A writer and translator in her own right, Sybille Lacan writes a series of reflections on what it was like to have the famous psychoanalyst/literary theorist Jacques Lacan as her father. Asymptote Journal has the story.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Revise your summer reading lists, ladies and gentlemen, because this week brought us new issues of Guernica and Asymptote to bump to the top of the pile. Asymptote delivers more of its consistently stunning literature in translation, including a haunting story from the late Uruguayan author Mario Levrero about a very, very strange house. At Guernica, […]
...morePolitics, Lost in Translation
Asymptote Journal takes a look at some of the concerns translators have when confronting a politically problematic text. The choice of text is of course the first decision a translator faces—but the challenges translators confront aren’t necessarily limited to pushing a political agenda or avoiding it, but also with the nuances of language itself: For […]
...moreJay Gatsby Invades Poland
Polish language speakers are getting a new translation of The Great Gatsby, but a modern translation raises all sorts of linguistic issues. The primary difference, of course, is that the original translator wrote under the iron curtain and without the aid of Google: It was, therefore, more difficult for her to track down various details, such […]
...moreTranslators Lost in Translation
Once upon a time, folktales contained sex and violence. But as the stories were collected by cultural anthropologists, they were gradually stripped of this adult content in order to make them suitable for children. Moreover, these neutered children’s stories often make no mention of their translator, or even that they’ve been translated, writes M. Lynx Qualey: […]
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