Asymptote Journal – Jan 2017

So we made it after all to our sixth anniversary issue (commemorate with us by watching this mind-blowing video trailer), the galloping horse on the cover impossibly apt. If the translator is a “supertourist” (according to contributor Amanda DeMarco in her tour de force essay consisting only of quotes), then what to call a translation journal that has arguably published more translators than any other in the last six years (including the sixty showcased at The Guardian since October 2015)? Perhaps, to use another appropriated phrase: a horse that has “(galloped) off the flat earth.”

[hide for=”!logged”]In our debut issue from January 2011, I opened the editor’s note by thanking my five part-time team members. Six years on, unveiling the sublimation of a much bigger team’s efforts, I’ve remained the only full-time staffer. In our quest to charge into “that pure far world,” we’ve been asymptotic in our expansion strategy, but the attrition has also been staggering. The two others still with us from the original six are Aditi Machado and Sayuri Okamoto. Last May, we bade goodbye to Florian Duijsens and Diana George, both key members no longer able to abide by the whole “unpaid gig” thing—our emphasis on diversity and rigor has meant that we have only received one grant of $8,400 USD in all of six years.

Just as there is “an enormous difference between being a German or Norwegian writer and a Croatian or Slovak one,” as David Williams points out in a highly revealing essay explaining why he gave up being a literary translator, there is also a big difference between a Singaporean journal and, say, an American one. If, as Williams argues, literature in translation is like the Olympics: “pay-for-play,” “a state-sponsored art”; then everything changes for a journal that has the support of institutions. For example, the US National Endowment for the Arts awarded the single largest quantum to any group ($60,000 USD) to the London Book Fair Award winner in the same category the year prior to our own win; Asymptote is ipso facto excluded from applying. And just as Dubravka Ugrešić might be deemed “stateless,” so too can Asymptote be said to be nationless, to the extent that literary editing is not considered a supportable activity by Singapore’s National Arts Council.

Not all have been able to fully appreciate the challenges we face. One prominent member of the American translation community openly foreswore any association with Asymptotesimply because we do not pay translators, even though we, who cannot even afford to pay ourselves, will have given away more than $10,000 USD to eighteen emerging translators through three translation contests after this April (two more weeks left to submit to the upcoming one, judged by David Bellos and Sawako Nakayasu!)—and we in fact encourage literary translators in many other ways. When I reached out to thank Danish reader Lin Falk van Rooyen for signing up as a sustaining member, she wrote back unexpectedly, “As a translator I have personally benefitted greatly from Asymptote’s in-depth, inspiring, informative (esp. ‘Ask a Translator’ by the ever sincere, ever astute Daniel Hahn), essential and yes—ambitious!—endeavor to promote and disseminate world literature.”

There is also a fresh perspective that an ‘outsider’ magazine like Asymptote can offer to English language publishing—I stand strongly by this. Yes, running new work by J. M. Coetzee and Lydia Davis will always be a career highlight, but I am most proud of the projects we pursued not because we were led there by money but because of their potential for literary discovery (such as 2012’s painstaking Sinophone ‘20 under 40’ Feature’, and our massive translation projects that reached far beyond the English language community). I’m also thrilled that the hard work of the past six years has yielded highly prestigious, highly visible platforms through which we are able to advocate for a more inclusive world literature—a vision reflected not only in the names we feature on our covers, but also on our masthead. This applies to our Translation Tuesday showcase at The Guardian too—hegemons within the English world literature canon, European and South American writing combined accounted for less than half of all translations I chose to present to The Guardian’s international readership in 2016. A big pity then if we were to fold—if our former Senior Editor and Copy Editor found it hard to juggle a part-time, unpaid gig with myriad other paid pursuits, I assure you it’s harder to keep down a full-time, unsalaried one.

In 2017, we will give it our heroic best and then decide what is to be done. Our approach to sustainability will be three-pronged. Having spent most of last year rebuilding and strengthening the team, I will now concentrate my energies on putting together grant applications and developing sustainability initiatives (so, for the first time since 2013, we will not be holding events to commemorate our anniversary, alas). As we experiment with money-making, there will be more and more changes to the site: ads, Amazon Affiliate links—as tastefully implemented as we can manage it. In addition to continuing the publicity packages (especially tailored to publishing houses looking to promote their forthcoming releases) we started offering at reasonable rates last year, I will be looking to unroll consultancy services and mentorship programs related to literary translation publishing and editing. Charging for access will be a last resort, and insofar as it runs counter to our mission, I’m not very interested in it at all: as contributing editor Adrian West expressed so well, the preponderance of free content on the Internet makes a subscription model harmful to the already beleaguered authors we are trying to make better known.

The third prong is where we hope you’ll come in, dear reader. If you deem Asymptote worth keeping around, sign up to be a sustaining member today from as little as $5 a month—in exchange for great perks, such as a newly designed AsympTOTE, a Moleskine notebook imprinted with an Asymptote logo, and regular exclusive updates sent out only to sustaining members. (Alternatively, consider becoming an honorary member to help us go even further. US readers—I should add—can also make a completely tax deductible donation at our Fractured Atlas Page here.) We hope to hit 100 sustaining members by the end of February, and 600 by the end of the year. So that everyone is looped in on our progress, we’ll maintain a weekly counter on the blog’s right-hand column. Any good news we get on the grant application front will be announced in future editor’s notes. Rally along with us.

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Guest illustrated by the amazingly talented Dianna Xu, our milestone issue is themed ‘Intimate Strangers,’ taken from the title of Evelyn Dueck’s new monograph on Paul Celan, reviewed by Ottilie Mulzet especially for Asymptote. Connecting the many pieces in this new edition are seaward-facing figures too, from Colm Tóibín (and his muse Vija Celmins) to Mexican “water poet” Xánath Caraza and Iraqi Kurdistan-born Bachtyar Ali, whose “Friendly Harbor, Hostile Ship” represents our first work from the Kurdish-Sorani. Also implicating a dock and a ship is Lika Tcheishvili’s “Daland,” which can be paired powerfully with Nona Fernández’s Mapocho: both are fictions by women describing love-hate homoerotic relations between men (i.e., intimate enemies!). In the same section, listen in on a pensive dream-dialogue by Strega Prize winner Cesare Pavese, and then feed your soul elsewhere with Amanda DeMarco’s shape-shifting essay on arriving at the “bigness of the world” through translation. Lose yourself in our special feature on Indian Languages, edited by Poorna Swami and Janani Ganesan, and more than half a year in its making. Celebrating diversity and dissent, its thrilling lineup includes fresh work by Vidrohi, Kanji Patel, and 2016’s Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Prize winner Shubham Shree.

“Dare we walk further?” asks Zhu Zhu—an active critic and art curator, and one of contemporary China’s most prolific poets. Along with Rodrigo Lira, described by Bolaño as “one of the last poets of Latin America,” you’ll also find, in this edition, a haunting scene by the groundbreaking Indonesian playwright Putu Wijaya, a gut-wrenching dispatch from Kigali by the genre-crossing Abdourahman A. Waberi, and Nico Vassilakis’s sublime visual poems—described by our own Eva Heisler as “jazzy anatomies of the alphabet.” Hop into the saddle; get ready for the best ride you’ll have. Next stop: the pure far world.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief[/hide]