In an animated introductory video to its work, web-based literary translation journal Asymptote begins with a quote by George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
Works of art often exist in silos, separated from one another by geographical distance and language barriers. It was to “unlock the literary treasures of the world” that Lee Yew Leong, a freelance editor and translator of contemporary Taiwanese literature based in Taipei, founded Asymptote five years ago. Since then, the journal has grown widely, featuring never-before-published poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and interviews from 105 countries and 84 languages. While it has featured many celebrated names like J.M. Coetzee, Patrick Modiano, Ismail Kadare, David Mitchell, Ann Goldstein and Deborah Smith, Asymptote ’s success has been in publishing writers who otherwise get lost in the slush pile, or writers whose fame is trapped within their own regions, such as Josef Winkler, Marianne Fritz, Jean Amery, and Pere Gimferrer.
Yew Leong founded Asymptote as a quarterly publication. “At the time, I noticed that a lot of ‘world literature’ journals out there were not really living up to their name, being heavily skewed towards European or South American content — often featuring the same circle of well-regarded translators or authors,” he says. “The journal that I wanted to read — a go-to portal where one discovers exciting and important literature from around the world, curated with a high bar, and a decidedly adventurous slant — was not yet in existence, so I thought I would give it a go.”
Lee Yew Leong, editor of Asymptote, a quarterly journal dedicated to translated literature.
Yew Leong initially invested $50,000 of his own funds in the journal. He then invited a small group of writers he knew, to participate as editors. They in turn recommended contributing editors, one of whom is Howard Goldblatt, translator for Chinese novelist Mo Yan. Slowly, the journal snowballed from the original six members to 12 times its size. It won the London Book Fair’s International Literary Translation Initiative Award of 2015. It has a partnership with The Guardian: every week, on ‘Translation Tuesdays’, the newspaper reproduces a short translated piece from the journal. Asymptote is now busy bringing out its first India feature, all in verse, in January 2017.
Neat and wonderfully rich in content, the website is also free, which means that it does not generate enough to provide a full-time salary for even one person. Team members are based in five continents. None of them work full-time except Yew Leong, who moonlights as a translator as he does not take home a salary. “We’re now asking readers to voluntarily sign on as sustaining members (at $5 a month),” he says. Only 10 have registered so far, but the magazine's reach continues to expand.
“We all do it for the love of literature,” says Poorna Swami, editor-at-large, India, who has curated the India feature along with Janani Ganesan. So, how is Asymptote different from what others are doing, I ask her. What are they publishing in the India feature? “We are trying to encapsulate a variety of marginalised voices. There are so many writers who don’t get featured because of geography, caste, gender; some pockets in the country get published more than others… mainland politics. So we were looking for voices English language readers hadn’t heard.” She hastens to clarify that Asymptote is not the first to be doing this. “Many others are and they’re all being very helpful. But we do this across the world.” And that, says Yew Leong, has become the journal’s strength.
The April 2016 cover of Asymptote.
For the India feature, Asymptote has accepted works only by living writers. “Works need to stand on their feet even before translation,” Poorna says. The challenge for the team wasn’t so much soliciting submissions, or choosing from a wide range of submissions; it was giving a pan-India glimpse to the reader. And politics, Poorna sighs. “What happens when people from one part of the country don’t identify as Indian,” she asks. “These are the kinds of issues we were trying to negotiate, maybe carry the piece with a translator’s note.” With the team getting an influx of poetry submissions, the India feature will be a poetry feature, she says.
In a post in the journal, contributing editor Adrian Nathan West writes about why Asymptote matters: “Krasznahorkai has been writing since the 80s, Elena Ferrante since the 90s, but only now are they getting their due in English. When recognition comes, it is usually the result of long, thankless, unpaid promotion on the part of writers, translators, editors, and other advocates. Journals like Asymptote are essential to this process: spaces where established voices don’t crowd out newcomers, but where rigorous criteria ensure that the goods on offer are more than mere fluff.”
And for those of you who are wondering where the journal gets its curious name from, asymptote means “a dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend toward, but never reach”. Much like original works and their translations: you might have ordered a martini, but sometimes what you end up with is just cold, salty lime juice. Is the translated text as effective and as glorious as the original? Does the magic linger even if the syntax is correct and the essence mostly captured? These are perennially debated issues in translation. Yew Leong says he holds a controversial view. “Sometimes, the translation can be more effective than the original, if we set aside the question of primacy,” he says. “Isn’t any original work a translation of sorts — of experience, of emotion, of a world view — anyway?”
radhika.s@thehindu.co.in
