Interviews

Fear and Loathing in Athens: An Interview with Makis Malafekas

September 21, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

The crisis is a strangely democratic thing that practically everyone experiences, like an earthquake.

Deepfake, the English-language debut of Greek author Makis Malafekas, is an electric, scintillating noir that courses through the illusions and pretensions of our histrionic present. As the narrator, a writer, is implicated in a plot to infiltrate a rising alt-right party, the novel swirls through the glistening streets of Athens and the surreal topographies of contradictory social realities, attempting to decipher some coherent narrative from the deceptions that surround us. He may not succeed, but his author certainly does; what arises from the tumult is a sharp, funny portrait of end times. It’s the latest end in a history of many, and surely not the last to come—but this is a novel of the present jolt, when one finds oneself walking away from the gravesite of a previous world, and thus into a new one in the process of being pieced together, woven, as always, by truths and lies alike.

I interviewed Makis from our respective islands, in a conversation ranging from the alt-right with Greek characteristics (the ‘cool fascists’), to the noir as a post-crisis genre, to the fact that invention can only occur within limitations, and onwards. A buoyant and vivid conversationalist, he spoke always with a pen in hand. 

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Deepfake is part of a trilogy, but this is the first book to appear in English. Just for the sake of contextualising it for Anglophone readers, would you be able to tell us about the series?

Makis Malafekas (MM): Yes, it’s the third in the trilogy, and I suppose it was translated because it gained a certain amount of attention, having been shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature, and the subject itself being a bit larger, more international. There isn’t one single subject, of course, but the dominant one is the rise of a specific faction of the far right, the alt-right. It’s a global phenomenon, but these trends tend to reach the periphery as well—and Greece is a periphery. So in Deepfake, I describe the rise of the alt-right and the mechanisms through which it operates, with very Greek, very local characteristics.

As for the trilogy, there is a recurrent hero: Michalis Krokos. The form of this one is in the vein of hardboiled fiction, or pulp—but a parody of that style, because the hero actually isn’t a cop nor a private detective; he’s a writer, he’s my alter ego.

XYS: When you talk about the alt right, minds in the Anglosphere immediately go to the US or the UK. I wonder if you could explain what the alt-right means in the Greek contemporary.

MM: Well, as with many things, it’s an imitation of what the Western centre of politics and culture produce—that which the others then tend to imitate. I won’t get into what the alt-right in general is—I mean, we’re all subjected to its tropes. But as for the Greek. . .

Political history in Greece, seen from this contemporary moment, is a very traumatic one. We had dictatorships, military governments, civil war—all relatively recently. Those things have left a clear division in Greek society. The Greek Civil War ended in the late forties—but in reality, it never really ended because the political and social order that followed kept those divisions alive. In that sense, the Greek alt-right is a very painful, itchy revival of the post-Civil War trauma.

But the neo-fascists in Greece—they’re ‘nice guys’. I’m not talking about the neo-nazi, appalling type of fascists, but about these nice people in nice shirts, sometimes being very eloquent. Not always. Let’s not get carried away. And they’re using technology, as well as a very effective propaganda model that manipulates Greek contemporary history in a very tactical way. Of course, there’s still the classic obsession with ‘liberal tyranny’, the anti-woke fixation—but the fact that such things come from the West helps them. They’re not domestic trends, so it’s easy to reject them by claiming a bizarre theory that equal rights and inclusivity come from decadent Hollywood, or foreign far-left campuses.

XYS: Not to buy into the infiltration from the West, but I couldn’t read Deepfake without thinking of Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: the world being a representation of a representation, our ideals the facsimile of ideals, our politics a symbol of politics. . . Were such theories influential in the writing of Deepfake? READ MORE…

Fearlessness in Various Combinations: An Interview with Mariètou Mbaye and Julie Huntington

September 17, 2026  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

I like thinking about the city as a character and as a silent witness.

Felix Faure Street, by Ken Bugul—the penname of Senegalese novelist Mariètou Mbaye—takes the reader straight into the tumult and dazzling music of Dakar, positioning its various hierarchies, architectures, accents, and socialities together on the page. A vivid portrait of urban existence that lyrically depicts how such densities conceal points of intensive conflict, Bugul’s novel exacts the body as an intersection of influences. To walk in a city, she posits, is to be vulnerable and fearless at once. In this interview, Mbaye and translator Julie Huntington talk to us about the work of genre, subjectivities of geography, and more. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Junyi Zhou (JZ): Felix Faure Street is simultaneously a crime novel, a screenplay, and a prose poem. In your preface, Mariètou, you mentioned struggling to evoke the “I” in this particular project, even though it draws on personal experience. What did each genre give you access to narratively? Could you tell us more about your decision to work with multiple genres?

Mariètou Mbaye (MM):  There are so many things one can expresses with the body, but for me, writing was easier.

I traveled to Cameroon once, and a friend of mine—a very smart and well-educated lady—used to work there. She came to see me at the hotel. I did not recognize her. Turns out, she was being manipulated by a religious guru to the point of risking her family life. I had similar experiences when living in Benin—somebody wanting to exploit me through religion. And that got me thinking about how women were manipulated and exploited through religion.

But when I write something, I have to think about how to write it. I cannot start the story with, “I have a friend in Cameroon.” With each book, I need to invent a new way of writing. I need to create an atmosphere, to organize everything—the colors, the weather—and that took commitment. I need the atmosphere to talk about whatever I want to talk about.

JZ: It makes me think genre isn’t just a container here, but part of the argument the book is making. Julie, in your translator’s introduction to the novel, you mentioned that you specifically picked Felix Faure Street to translate out of the five titles that Mariètou selected for you. How did you come to that decision? What was the translation process like? 

Julie Huntington (JH): This is a project that I’ve been wanting to do for a really long time. I think Felix Faure Street is such a unique book; it’s one that blends so many different genres and styles, and it’s actually part of what Mariètou herself has called a feminist trilogy.  There’s one before—which hopefully we will be able to translate soon—called La folie et la mort, and then there’s Aller et retour. All three of them are terrific for thinking about the process of publishing. READ MORE…

The Tension that Keeps the Bridge Aloft: An Interview with Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Anam Zafar on Children’s Literature in Translation

September 10, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation teaches you that you never finish learning any language. There are always more words, perspectives, and ideas to encounter.

For nearly a decade, World Kid Lit has acted as a corrective to the Anglocentric biases of global publishing as it continues to champion children’s and young adult literature from more than 170 countries. So far, it has featured books originally written in languages from Arabic to Polish and Swedish to Korean, alongside interviews with publishers from the US and UK, translators from Brazil and Ukraine, illustrators from China and Portugal, and authors from South Africa and Cameroon.

Translators Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Anam Zafar are among the dozen volunteers leading this big-tent project alongside their independent translation practices, which encompass Arabic picture books, French graphic novels, Russian nonfiction, Egyptian food memoirs, and more. Both see translation as a linguistic exchange and regard it as a decolonial project and an act of empowering young readers. Zafar draws on the idea that culture is the battleground of politics and argues that translated children’s literature is an essential tool for social justice and nourishes the youngest minds with ‘cultural material that truly and faithfully represents everyone, everywhere.’

In this conversation, I spoke with Ahmedzai Kemp and Zafar about World Kid Lit’s growth into a borderless community, the pedagogical value of bibliodiversity, the work of dismantling xenophobic reading habits, and how to navigate what Ahmedzai Kemp calls the tension that keeps the bridge aloft between one world and another.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): World Kid Lit is so widely inclusive. Was that always the dream, to champion this global view of the field?

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (RAK): I’d say it’s emerged gradually. In the first year or two, our focus was more narrowly on translation, but the more research we did, the more the evidence showed entrenched biases in the routes that books follow, and the major barriers excluding vast swathes of the planet from literary translation and publishing rights deals. Reading children’s literature in translation ends up meaning reading translation from a very small number of countries (mostly Western Europe, Latin America, and three or four Asian countries) and excluding most of the world.

We therefore shifted very explicitly to exploring and celebrating global literature for young people written in English as well as in translation into English. Our aim is to feature authors, illustrators and translators from every continent. We still have gaps, but we’re proud that in our first 10 years we’ve featured books and book creators from 178 countries. We also spotlight works in other languages that we would love to see translated: see the ‘Not Yet in English’ part of our website, which we hope to expand in the coming years.

Anam Zafar (AZ): My underlying mission as a translator is utilizing literature as a tool for social justice. We need the soft power of books and stories to drive people away from viewing the world through an Anglocentric or xenophobic lens—especially for younger readers, since they are much more open to influence.
READ MORE…

Betraying Ourselves through Language: An Interview with Ramesh Karthik Nayak

September 7, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre

“Language does not merely translate our thoughts; it transforms them.”

Ramesh Karthik Nayak (born 1997) broke new ground in Indian English literature when he became arguably the first indigenous poet to publish an English poetry collection with Chakmak in 2023. Before him, indigenous poetry in India was scattered in regional languages and very little of it became available to national audiences through translation. Unsurprisingly, the young poet went on to clinch the prestigious Muse India Young Writer Award for Poetry in 2025. However, he is no stranger to charting unexplored territories and winning national awards, having already won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in Telugu in 2024 for his short-story collection Dhaavlo. This made him the youngest Telugu writer and also the first indigenous writer from Telangana State to win this coveted award.

Born in the Nizamabad District of Telangana State, Ramesh belongs to the nomadic Banjara community, which was callously branded as a “criminal tribe” by the British Raj in 1871 and suffered innumerable hardships at the hands of the colonial monsters and their desi enforcers. After being denotified and decriminalized in 1952 by the Parliament of independent India, the community with its origins in Rajasthan settled in parts of Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Telangana, but still finds itself on the margins of the caste-ridden society—struggling to make ends meet while fighting a hopeless war to protect its jal-jangal-jameen (water, forest, land). It is this much-abused indigenous community to which Ramesh gives voice in his poems and short stories. After writing a critical essay that explores—through his poems—the possibilities of a tribal aesthetic that goes above and beyond prevailing urbane ecocriticality, I began translating his English poems into Marathi, and that’s how we got into long, winding conversations, an excerpt from which follows.

Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre (CKM): You write in Telugu and Gor Boli as well as English. How significant is this multilingualism to what you express and to how you express it?

Ramesh Karthik Nayak (RKN): I am fortunate to be able to speak four languages—Telugu, Hindi, English, and Gor Boli which is the language of my own tribe—and I can read and write three scripts. Yet, there is a certain sadness in this multilingual journey: I am unable to write with the same ease in my own mother tongue, Gor Boli, also known as Lambadi or Banjara language, because our language does not yet have a universally accepted script.

There are efforts to change this situation. Leaders and intellectuals such as Dr. Dhananjay Naik, Former State Minister Amar Singh Tilawath, Prof. Surya Dhananjay, and Dr. Ramesh Arya have been consistently making efforts and submitting representations to the Central Government seeking the inclusion of Gor Boli in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India in order to make Gor Boli an officially recognized language of India. Though this aspiration has not yet been fulfilled, the efforts continue with hope and determination.

My own relationship with language has a personal history. When I was four or five years old, I was sent to a private school. I was an introvert as a child, and speaking was never something that came naturally to me. It was only when I was around sixteen or seventeen that I learned to speak our Gor Boli language fluently, without stammering.

For me, multilingualism is both a great boon and, in some ways, a curse. It gives me the ability to see the world through different linguistic and cultural windows, but it also changes the way I express myself. I write the same poem differently depending on the language I choose.

Language does not merely translate our thoughts; it transforms them. We reveal ourselves differently in different languages. In a sense, we betray ourselves through language—because every language carries its own memories, rhythms, cultural associations, emotions, and ways of thinking. We also deface, reshape, and rephrase our original thought through the layers of everything we have learned in that particular language. Perhaps that is the paradox of being multilingual: we gain many voices, but each voice changes the person who is speaking. READ MORE…

Just Listen: An Interview with George Szirtes

August 26, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Mohammad Farhan

If you become a translator, you’ll be aware that you have chosen to become a servant of the master.

Among the many literary prizes around the world, the announcements of the Nobel and the Booker might be the biggest events of the global scene. In this, 2025 was a significant year for Hungarian literature; the Nobel Prize was awarded to László Krasznahorkai, and Booker Prize went to David Szalay. However, the former’s introduction to his global readership could only be made possible through the diligence of English-language translators—one of which is George Szirtes, poet and one of Krasznahorkai’s important translators. Here, he speaks to us on the craft of translation, divulging the work’s precarious reality and his long journey of translating from Hungarian.

Mohammad Farhan (MF): How would you define yourself—as a poet or a translator first?

George Szirtes (GS): A poet first—chronologically first. And to me, that’s what I’ve given my life to. Translation came along much later, in 1984, while I started writing in 1967 and publishing books in 1979.

I came to translation after having been invited on an arts council grant to Budapest, where I was born. I went as a poet, but once there, I was invited to translate some poems. And that’s how it all began.

MF: Do you remember the poems that you really enjoyed translating?

GS: Quite well. A little bit of background: my family and I were refugees to England, arriving in 1956. When we got here, my parents decided that the family should speak English immediately, and we didn’t speak Hungarian at all. So, for many years, I wrote in English, I thought in English.

And then, in about 1980–83, after having published, I think, three books, I began to be curious about my own background, which is why I went back to Hungary, and have been returning almost every year since. READ MORE…

Exactly as It Was: An Interview with Takami Nieda on Translating Yusuke Norishiro

August 20, 2026  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Very often when a person chooses not to say something, that act is just as meaningful as what's spoken.

In Traveling Practice, the lauded Japanese writer Yusuke Norishiro takes readers on an immersive, quietly profound trip along the banks of the Tone River, telling the story of an author and his young, athletic niece as they work to develop their respective crafts. The result is a gentle, but surprising novel that emphasises the necessity of careful attention—on the intricacies of our surroundings, the joy of being accompanied by a loved one, and the grounding of oneself in gradual, focused practice. In this interview, translator Takami Nieda tells us about working with the subtle language of this text, its psychogeographies, and what it means to memorialise—moments, people.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Traveling Practice is such a meditative book, and one that’s dominated by its two paces: the pace of writing, because the narrator is an author as well, and also the pace of walking, because it takes place across a six-day trip. How did you balance the two rhythms of this novel?

Takami Nieda (TN): It’s interesting that you talked about rhythm, because rhythm wasn’t something that was in the forefront of my mind as I was translating this at all, so when I read your review, I was like—yes, that is completely a way of reading this story, so I appreciated that very much.

I think in terms of rhythm, I feel like the pace of the prose is something I definitely paid attention to, making certain that the leisurely and unhurried pace of the novel was there. But that was also conveyed really well in the source text, so I just needed to translate the words that were on the page.

I was aware that the author himself occasionally goes on these walks and these trips as a writing practice. And in fact, the trip of this book closely mirrors one he actually took along the Tone River himself, for over six days with a Moleskine and a soccer ball, during the early days of the pandemic. So a lot of the actual landscape descriptions he wrote then are ones that appear in the novel. But the way he goes about his work, looking for things in the natural world in that leisurely way, and the way he wants to capture that in writing, it reminded me of something that the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki did in his life. He would walk for miles and miles to go into nature, wanting to capture a scene exactly as he sees it. For him, that was what haiku was: to actually suspend time and capture a thing, a scene, a place, a flower, a bird, to capture it through words so that the person reading the poem would also be able to understand the essence of the thing, exactly as the artist or the author saw it. He was kind of drawing on this aesthetic of shasei, which is translated as ‘sketching from life’, and I found myself thinking about that tradition as I was trying to capture what Norishiro was doing with the narrative. READ MORE…

Translating Syaman Rapongan: An Interview with Kyle Shernuk and Darryl Sterk

August 12, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

I think every translator comes to a self-developed set of principles and stylistic choices through their sustained encounters with an author. . .

Syaman Rapongan is an acclaimed Tao writer who lives on Pongso no Tao, also known as Orchid Island. He is the author of many books, including Eyes of the Ocean and Eyes of the Sky, now published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Within these works and in his life, Syaman Rapongan is a tireless advocate for Tao culture, balancing his literary life with diving and canoe carving.

I spoke with Syaman Rapongan’s translators, Darryl Sterk (Eyes of the Ocean) and Kyle Shernuk (Eyes of the Sky) about retaining the cultural specificity in translation—including the neologisms coined by the author; serendipity and community in translating literature from Taiwan; and the universality and anti-colonial messaging across Syaman Rapongan’s work.

Tiffany Troy (TT): Kyle and Darryl, as the translators of Eyes of the Sky and Eyes of the Ocean, respectively, what is literary translation to you?

Kyle Shernuk (KS): For me, I think about literary translation as making a text linguistically and culturally legible to a new audience. This doesn’t mean a word-for-word translation of a text into a new language, but rendering the essence of that text in a way that communicates the same message as the original, under different linguistic and cultural conditions.

This also doesn’t mean erasing all markers of difference or making a text feel entirely familiar for readers; for me, linguistic idiosyncrasies and cultural specificities are important to maintain wherever possible. It is more that difference needs to be rendered to produce the same effect in the target language and culture. The Tao expression “eyes of the sky” is a good example. If I had translated the phrase solely for its meaning as “stars,” then the cultural specificity of the translation would be diminished, despite being technically correct. Rather than having English translations look like English originals, I think of translation as a platform for showcasing the various versions of human experience and offering readers a point of entry for learning about them.

Darryl Cameron Sterk (DS): Literary translation is just what people call the translation I’ve been doing since 2007. Before then, I’d been a technical translator who’d projected the axis of equivalence onto the axis of combination—which is Roman Jakobson’s fancy way of describing the poetic methodology of creating musical beauty through rhythm and rhyme.

Since I began translating “literary” work, I’ve continued in trying to get the technicalities right while playing verbal music. And I describe what I’m working on not as patent or press release but as, in the case of Eyes of the Ocean, a bildungsroman—even if the roman happens to contain an excerpt of a press release. Like Kyle, I love the expression “eyes of the sky,” which Syaman Rapongan uses in Eyes of the Ocean as well. In this autobiographical book, Cigewat (the author’s name before fatherhood)’s mother points out his eye of the sky, his lucky star, which has protected him during his odysseys around Formosa, the main island of Taiwan.

TT: What were your respective journeys as translators of Taiwanese literature, leading up to your encounter with Syaman Rapongan’s work? READ MORE…

Reworking and Eventual Surrender: An Interview with Prawin Adhikari

August 10, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alfa M. Shakya

If the intention is to make the work available for the reader, there’s plenty that can be done to translate words or phrases between languages.

Prawin Adhikari is always at work, often on a translation—which he calls his dal bhat, the staple food in Nepal. He began translating as a way to better understand Nepali history and society during the turbulent decade of Nepal’s civil war which began in 1996 and lasted until 2006, culminating in the end of the Shah monarchy and the establishment of a federal republic. Now, he regularly translates between Nepali and English and does so with intricate beauty.

 I spoke with Adhikari about his translation journey, what his process entails, and his experience of being a translator in Nepal, as well as the relationship between his fiction writing and his translation practice.

Alfa M. Shakya (AMS): How did you start translating? How and when did it strike you that a particular text needed to be translated?

Prawin Adhikari (PA): I began translating for pocket money while still in high school. My father worked as an editor at a daily newspaper. In the late ‘90s, wire news and articles needed to be translated into Nepali quickly, and there weren’t always enough people to do it. I think I made 25 paisa per word for the work, when a roadside plate of momo was 10 rupees.

I was at Whitman College in the US during the bloodiest period of Nepal’s armed conflict of 1996–2006. (It feels dissonant to call it the People’s War or the Conflict anymore. The Maoists absolutely squandered the political capital they had earned through that painful decade.) News of battles and massacres, protests and crackdowns created guilt and anxiety. I spent a lot of time reading news from Nepal. An op-ed written by Khagendra Sangroula, about the arrest of Gagan Thapa by royalist forces, titled ‘Hajaraun Gagan’—A Thousand Gagans—transported me to a place where I could imagine participating in the transformation taking place in Nepal. He had imbued the essay with rage and with hope; it was polemical and poetic, obtuse and forcefully direct all at once. I tried my hand at translating it, attempting to closely sculpt the English to match the Nepali in weight, style, and sonic quality. It was a difficult but inspiring task. Sarahana Shrestha, who ran the website samudaya.org, mailed me copies of Junkiri ko Sangeet, Palpasa Cafe, and Dibyopadesh. I chose Dipyopadesh to translate because I wanted people to see that it is a narrow-minded, xenophobic, contradictory document ill-suited to a people fighting for a new, liberated day. A lot of people like to base their Nepali nationalism on Dibyopadesh. But if you see it as a document instructing a small number of families to do all they can to keep the rest of the country oppressed in order to reap wealth, its significance shifts. It did so for me.

And so began my journey as a translator.

AMS: In all your years of translation, what has changed? What did you think of translation earlier and what do you think of it now? READ MORE…

The Feeble Animal, the Delicate Tongue: An Interview with Birhan Keskin and Öykü Tekten on Turkish Poetry in Translation

August 5, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The inner journeys that have emerged from the lands stretching from Rumelia to Anatolia feel like my kin.

In a 2013 interview for the Turkish literary magazine Notos, when asked by Dilek Emir about the soundscape of her poetry, Birhan Keskin responded that it is every poet’s job to look at the earth, a practise she said began while writing her 2002 collection Yeryüzü Halleri (Earthly Conditions): ‘Yeryüzüne ve onda barınan bütün varlıklara yeterince göz alıcı bir şekilde bakarsanız, ki zaten göz alıcıdır yeryüzü, o sesleri duyarsınız.’ (If you look at the earth and all the beings it harbours with sufficient attentiveness, and the earth is captivating enough as it is, you hear those sounds.)

A selected volume of her poetry, which draws from five collections published between 1999 and 2010, including the titular Earthly Conditions, has been translated into English by poet, editor, and archivist Öykü Tekten for World Poetry Books. In her translator’s note, Tekten writes of Keskin: ‘In a world where it is not obvious that one can listen to oneself through the medium of silence, she writes her poetry with/in and through silence.’

Can Keskin’s poetry, however, be confined to the country of sound alone? As the scholar Meliz Ergin contends in Ecocriticism and Turkey (2024): ‘[Keskin] does not explain what it is that could be or was not done. Rather, she foregrounds the urgent need to take flight … [to seek] a revised understanding of the self through an embodiment of other beings. She uses the states of the earth to understand the many states of the self.’ As Keskin declares in the Notos interview: ‘İçi çok geniş bir varlıktır insan.’ (The human is a being with a vast interior.) 

In this interview, I spoke with Keskin (in Istanbul) and Tekten (in Granada) about Earthly Conditions, the role of translation as a return to language, and the abrogation of boundaries between the human and non-human.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Bravo to both of you on the publication of Earthly Conditions! The book gathers selected poems from Birhan’s five poetry collections spanning more than a decade: from 1999’s Yirmi Lak Tablet (Twenty Coated Pills) to 2010’s Soğuk Kazı (Cold Excavation), and it’s titled after the 2002 collection Yeryüzü Halleri (Earthly Conditions). Could you both talk us through how this selected edition came together? What was the journey like, distilling a decade’s work into a single volume?

Birhan Keskin (BK): Earthly Conditions—the life forms that exist beyond the human—is a thread that has run through almost my entire poetic journey. Looking back, I can say that these poems have always been shaped by a sense of wonder, sometimes more subtly, sometimes more intensely, across nearly all of my books.

This selected volume brings together those different earthly conditions from across my various collections. In that sense, these poems have always been familiar to me. But seeing poems that were originally scattered across different books gathered together in English was a beautiful idea, and I owe that to Öykü Tekten.

Before we begin our conversation, I would first like to thank Öykü.

Öykü Tekten (ÖT):  When I first began translating Birhan, I wasn’t thinking about a selected volume. I had just arrived in a new country, trying to begin a life without a language. It was a time marked by uncertainty and endless waiting. To keep from feeling entirely lost, I turned to language. Being on the shores of the Mediterranean also became a way of finding my way back to Turkish. READ MORE…

To reach a place higher and farther: An Interview with Chen Du and Xisheng Chen on Translating Rock Arrangement by Yan An

July 29, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

We believe that faithfulness not only refers to the faithfulness to the original, but also the faithfulness to English writing. . .

When Yan An’s Rock Arrangement was originally published in 2014, his fellow northern poet Zhang Tong Wu described the collection with the grandiosity of the geological: “. . . as deeply layered as the Qingling Mountain regions, as dense and immense as the Wei River’s valleys, like stones—red, black, iron-grey, steel-blue stones that protrude with such unyielding solidity, containing within them history and culture, humanism and mysticism, bones and blood, knowledge and the unknown, reflections both ephemeral and eternal . . .” Now, with Chen Du and Xisheng Chen’s translation of this formidable collection forthcoming in October, English language readers will soon be able to share in Yan’s visions, which merge the grandly historical with everyday lucidities.

In this interview, I speak with the translators about their process of collaborating with Yan An to illuminate the poems rooted in place (most specifically Shaanxi province and Xi’an, its capital); thinking of translation as transcreation; and things they uncovered along the way in “gathering stones” with the poet.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of translation to you?

Chen Du (CD): To us, translation, especially Chinese poetry translation, means the incorporation of many perspectives—thoroughly understanding the original; faithfully conveying its senses and meanings; demonstrating accuracy, complexity, and creativity in the translation; and displaying excellent English poetry writing skills.

We think understanding the original is the first barrier a translator needs to overcome to achieve a brilliant translation. Only when the translator fully understands the original—when they have a whole picture of its images and meanings—can they know what to include and exclude in the target text, how to arrange the word order and lines, if the original is perfect, and how to improve it if it’s not flawless. READ MORE…

On the Extraordinary Everyday: An Interview with Nguyễn Bình Phương

July 16, 2026  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Huey-En Ooi and Kim Tran

. . . moving from one realm to another is simply like taking a quiet, untroubled step; there is nothing solemn or extraordinary about it.

In The Young Die Old, Nguyễn Bình Phương brings a chimeric, elusive, and interwoven experience of Vietnamese reality to the page, with his customary spellbinding lyricism and deep reverence for his nation’s complexity. Blending folklore, surrealism, and the struggles of everyday life, the novel refuses to bind time in compartments of past, future, or present, operating instead in a mode of simultaneity and haunting to evoke the continual unfurling of history. As the novel’s translator, Khải Q. Nguyễn, describes: ”Nguyễn’s non-linear showcase of magical realism . . . is indeed a stroke that helps to lay bare the inner workings of time and memory. In a way, many scenes and musings in The Young Die Old read like Dalí’s paintings.’ In this interview, the author speaks on the role of mysticism in his work and life, the history of Vietnamese literature, and how the fantastic serves as a methodology for survival. His responses has been translated from the Vietnamese by Kim Tran.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Ooi Huey-En (OHE): In your 2017 interview with Khải Q. Nguyễn for the Mekong Review, you said you felt lucky to have Thái Nguyên, the recurring setting of your fiction, as the haunting country that you love. What does haunting mean to you, and how does that shape the world we are introduced to in The Young Die Old? 

Nguyễn Bình Phương (NBP): First, I do have to clarify that I was actually born in the city, but lived there for only about six months; because of the war, we had to relocate to take refuge, ending up in Thái Nguyên, a semi-mountainous region where people lived both as farmers, cultivating their fields, and gatherers, harvesting what the forest provided. Their way of life was therefore a complex mixture of both worlds. The place was also permeated by the spirit of the mountains and forests, which, to me, was at once desperately impoverished and deeply haunted. The eerie, fantastical tales people told there were like a remedy that helped alleviate the hunger of human existence.

I lived in an atmosphere shaped by everyday life and by a cultural milieu saturated with uncanny tales—of ghosts, myths, and supernatural occurrences that people told one another. All of this took place beneath the veil of mist covering the mountain forests, and, combined with the hallucinations brought on by hunger, it created an atmosphere that felt deeply magical to me. And I have never felt that this kind of magic was any less profound than the magical realism people so often speak to me about.

The people I encountered and came into contact with there have never left me, haunting me from that time right up to the present. That place became both an obsession and a promised land for me. Later, after I left, I collected materials from the outside world and built them into that place. It eventually became the haunted land of The Young Die Old.

And I thank that obsession, I thank that haunted place because it provided an anchor to every single work that I went on to write—afterwards, in the then future. READ MORE…

The Depth of the Surface: An Interview with Hanna Johansson

July 9, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

I’m interested, in general, in the relationship between fiction and reality, how it shows up in ordinary people’s lives. . .

Cinematic, mysterious, and playful, Hanna Johansson’s second novel, Body Double, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, takes the reader to the heart of obsession. Weaving together the storylines of two perfect strangers who trade identities and a transcriber haunted by an enigmatic voice recording—“I have seen you. Have you seen me?”—Body Double mobilizes thriller cliches to probe the link between seeing and violence, desire and destruction. In this interview, I spoke with the author about some of the things that inspired the novel.

Sofija Popovska (SP): The first thing that stood out to me in Body Double is its specific atmosphere—which made me wonder about what movies and texts inspired it. Can you tell me a bit about that, and how the final version of the plot came to be?

Hanna Johansson (HJ): I originally set out to write something that would leave the reader with a certain aftertaste, like a memory of having watched, for instance, Caché by Michael Haneke or the adaptation of Malina from 1991. It wasn’t necessarily about writing something that was similar to those movies in terms of plot and structure—although I realize I’ve probably stolen quite a bit from Caché, with the mysterious recordings—but rather something with a similar atmosphere, something that would leave the reader with the same type of images in their head. Something that also happened repeatedly while I was writing Body Double was that guys at parties would tell me, when I told them what I was working on, that it made them think of Lost Highway, so I watched that.

I really knew very little about where the novel was going to end up when I began writing, and for a long time, I was just sort of walking around in the city, viewing it through the gaze of the anonymous narrator. I decided to add the story of Laura and Naomi quite late, as a sort of stylized mirror image of the story about the lonely ghost writer’s assistant. READ MORE…

A Labor of the In-Between: Olivia Baes on Translating Marguerite Duras

July 8, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Violet Cooper

“I always feel that Duras’s texts are already ripe for another medium, and their rhythm is the vehicle.”

Whether it is a film, a play, a novella, or a prose poem, there is something utterly recognizable in Marguerite Duras’ work. A disembodied voice at the other end of a telephone, a man’s wide-brimmed hat on a young girl’s head, a shuttered hotel room. Duras had a penchant for collecting and collating these searching, restless images; perhaps she was haunted and charmed by them in equal measure. Her writing bears their singular watermark—an elliptical, phantom trace.

Duras’ impossible images find perhaps their most apt expression in Six Films, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan and published by Inpatient Press in October 2025. Six Films is Duras’ experiment from the late 1970s, in which she reimagined six of her films as extended prose poems and monologues, splicing and stitching together original narration, voiceovers, and dialogue. The result is six interlocking, cyclical pieces—Duras’ attempt to collapse the distinction between text and film and create a truly hybrid project.

I spoke with Olivia Baes, a fellow admirer of Duras and co-translator of Six Films. We discuss Duras’ attempt to transpose image and text, the iterative nature of her oeuvre, and Baes’ own multidisciplinary background.

Violet Cooper (VC): How did you discover Marguerite Duras’ work?

Olivia Baes (OB): When I was in my early twenties, I was studying Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. My objective, really, was to write a first novel. I took a class one summer with Darcey Steinke, in which I started what would become my thesis, A Home. The story followed a young woman who lived deep in the Floridian mangrove forest with her brother. Their mother had died. My protagonist had gone mute after a lover of hers had disappeared. Through an internal dialogue, she spoke with the walls of her house as if they were him, all the while evading her brother, who was a drunk. When you followed her into her dreams, you realized her mother had been a drunk too, and completely abusive.

I remember turning in the draft to Darcey, and when she handed it back, she had scribbled at the top: DURAS?! I had no clue who Marguerite Duras was at that time. Though French is my mother tongue, I had left the French school system for the American school system at thirteen, so I had not had the privilege of reading her in high school. “Read her,” Darcey ordered. It was summer and I fell in love; I forgot all about Darcey’s orders. But then, the next semester, my Post-War European Literature professor, Dan Gunn, assigned us Lol V. Stein. I read it in French and I finished it in one sitting. Here was a woman saying things I felt so deep in my bones. Things I had been trying to put into words since I was the smallest of girls. I was completely transfixed. Something of Lol’s voyeuristic desires, her imagined triangles, her floating quality, spoke to me in ways I had not yet experienced in literature. The language resonated with an experience I had told no one. READ MORE…

Gathering Our Remains: An Interview with Samer Abu Hawwash and Huda J. Fakhreddine on Palestinian Poetry at a Time of Genocide

July 1, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Liberation, or the path to liberation, begins with finding a new language and a new direction.

Born in Beirut to a Palestinian refugee family, Samer Abu Hawwash has produced a body of work comprising eleven volumes of poetry, five novels, and notable Arabic translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Bob Dylan, Mark Strand, Louise Glück, and Florence Ai Ogawa, alongside The Book of Tea and Native American folktales. A selection of his recent original poetry can now be found in Ruins and Other Poems (World Poetry Books, 2025), translated by Dr. Huda J. Fakhreddine, which unfolds with these elegiac lines: ‘There, on a land, we were told was not our land, / under a sky, we were told, was not our sky, / my people live their death.’

In her translator’s note, Dr. Fakhreddine positions Abu Hawwash in a timeless tradition. Like the quintessential poet of the aftermath, he ‘journeys, turns away from the site of ruin, and sets off into the desert, the inventory of meanings and images, searching for a language to break the silence, a language to reconstruct a world in place of the lost one’. 

In this conversation, I spoke with Abu Hawwash and Dr. Fakhreddine about the contours of Palestinian poetry at a time of genocide, and how there can remain ‘but the poem, the witness, the triumph against time, the signpost in the wasteland of history’.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Ruins and Other Poems brings together the book-length poem أطلال (Atlal / Ruins) with selections from من النهر إلى البحر (Min al-nahr ila al-bahr / From the River to the Sea). How did Ruins (both the original and this new bilingual edition) come about? In light of the ongoing genocide, what makes this book feel particularly urgent and relevant seventy-eight years after the Nakba?

Samer Abu Hawwash (SAH): Atlal was written in 2020, during the COVID-19 outbreak. Living in Abu Dhabi at that time, it was devastating to see how a modern and dynamic city had turned—or rather went back—to its former entity as a desert: abandoned streets, total silence, and that inevitable sense of an end.

This sense of an ending has accompanied me since my adolescence years. The first scenery of emptiness and hollowed-out cities, I experienced when I was ten during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I remember running with members of my family, searching for safe refuge, in the streets of Saidon. Two images have stuck in my mind from that period: stores gutted out, with candy and chocolate wraps thrown into the street, and the dead bodies we were forced to pass on our way to a shelter. Palestine was not in my mind while writing Atlal; rather it was that impulsive feeling of an ending, which was and still is a driving force behind most of my writings. But this maybe half of the story, the other half being the question: What remains after the ending?

 Saying this, it must be added that being born and raised without a homeland—without a real place I can call home—was and still one of the main preoccupations of my poetry.

Huda J. Fakhreddine (HJF): My return to Samer’s Atlal (which I had read when it first came out in 2020) was in the moment of the Gaza genocide. Since the fall of 2023, I have found a refuge and a solace in the poetry from and of Gaza. It is perhaps a testament to our helplessness—we the witnesses from afar. The first of Samer’s poems that I translated in that period was “It No Longer Matters if Anyone Loves Us.” Translating the poems he was writing in that moment of unspeakable horror was my way of reading them and claiming them on some level. It was also my way of sustaining a conversation with Samer. In genocide, we find new ways of living as we witness the unfathomable scenes of annihilation live-streamed into our souls.   READ MORE…