Reclaiming North Korean Literature

Engaging with ancient literature has its difficulties. Even if we put aside the unfamiliar details of cultural context, there remain factors such as genre, function, and form that can be daunting for the modern reader. The didactic genre is currently out of fashion (Vergil's bee-keeping manual…...read more »

The Week in Translation

GO Lorca in New York: A Celebration: the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. With more than two dozen events throughout Manhattan, it focuses on the brief but prolific period (1929-1930), during which Lorca…...read more »

Where Are the Women in Translation?

I’ve never been good at math, or maybe I should say, I never liked math enough to be good at it, even if I did get the odd A in the subject in high school. So I don’t have a clue how to divide 3% by 26%, for example. I searched on the Internet, and found calculators that were very handy for…...read more »

The Week in Translation

Lorca in New York: A Celebration: the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. With more than two dozen events throughout Manhattan, it focuses on the brief but prolific period (1929-1930), during which Lorca came…...read more »

From the Archives: Exiles

This month’s North Korean defectors join the numerous WWB contributors writing in exile. Most of April's Iraqi writers, many of November's banned Chinese writers, virtually all of our July and August 2011 Arab Spring authors, and many others write from countries not their own. Some are…...read more »

PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: Palestinian Writers in Conversation

The decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict has yielded many harrowing developments, but none, arguably, more absurd than the un-improvable bit of legal coinage that deemed a portion of Israel’s Palestinian residents as present absentees. The term applies to tens of thousands of…...read more »

PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: “Bones will Crow”

To celebrate the publication of Bones Will Crow, an anthology of Burmese poetry, poets Zeyar Lynn, Khin Aung Aye and James Byrne joined Philip Howze for a conversation and reading at The Public Theater on May 5. Mr. Lynn and Mr. Aung Aye began by reading from their work in Burmese and English (Mr. Byrne…...read more »

The Week in Translation

Lorca in New York: A Celebration: the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. With more than two dozen events throughout Manhattan, it focuses on the brief but prolific period (1929-1930), during which Lorca came…...read more »

PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: The Translation Slam

The Translation Slam has become a popular tradition in the PEN World Voices Festival, and this year’s event saw a full house at The Public Theater on Friday evening. For years it was held at the Bowery Poetry Club, which lamentably closed this past week. Host Michael F. Moore was clearly dismayed…...read more »

PEN World Voices Festival Dispatch: South Africa in Two Acts

Siphiwo Mahala set the stage for this engaging discussion of South African literature and media at the Cooper Union on Saturday with an opening brief on the political state of the country, focusing on freedom of speech rights.  The looming issue is a bill, already passed by both chambers of Congress,…...read more »

Most Recent Entry

Submit to Asymptote’s “Close Approximations: A Translation Contest”

what: Asymptote Journal's Inaugural "Close Approximations: A Translation Contest"
contest judges: Eliot Weinberger (Poetry) and Howard Goldblatt (Fiction)
prize: $1,000 for 5-10 pages of poetry translated into English, or up to 25 pages of fiction translated into English
submission deadline: September 1, 2013
more info: http://ow.ly/ll3Ut


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