Asymptote Podcast

In this week’s all new Asymptote podcast we’re getting crafty! We’ll be hearing from translator Roland Glasser about how he uses technology in his work, as well as getting sage advice from Susanna Basso who is featured in our new Spring Issue. We’ve also got a special dispatch from poet Suzannah V. Evans from the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, where she sat down with writers and artists Aurélia Lassaque and Tessa Berring to get the scoop on their translation workshop. Get ready to untangle a lot of French feelings: fear, dread, horror, terror, and finding out how marigolds inspire very different moods in standard French versus Occitan—and what exactly all this has to do with a giant fish.

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

Audio Editor: Mirza Puric

The Swiss are known for their rules and order. Language is not exempt from this trend, except when it comes to Swiss-German in which case there are no rules and there is no order, because there is no Swiss-German. Instead, the German-speaking part of Switzerland is home to many different dialects, often referred to as distinct languages: Baseldytsch, Bärndütsch, Züritüütsch. Despite the lack of a standardized writing system, authors in Switzerland are writing the stories of modern Switzerland the way they hear them and in the language in which they live. This literature, referred to as Mundartliteratur, is a unique form of translation from the spoken to the written, as each author must create their own method for transcribing the unique sound of their “Swiss-German”. In the first of two episodes exploring Mundartliteratur, Asymptote Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle speaks with Professor of literature at the University of Fribourg, Ralph Müller, to provide some valuable historical context, and Swiss writer and poet Beat Sterchi who explains just why it is so important for the Swiss to write in their own language. Sterchi, a member of the collective Bern ist überall, also shares a reading, giving us a true sense of his work and the sound of his Bernese Swiss-German.

Podcast Editor and Host: Dominick Boyle

All sound recorded and produced by Dominick Boyle.

It's early March and here in the northern hemisphere, we're all ready for spring. Take a walk in the park with the new Asymptote podcast as Layla Benitez-James discusses all manner of transplants. Crossing borders and taking root in a new creative (eco)system, artist Lauren Moya Ford shares new writing in her native English and non-native Portuguese—a language she is still learning, but already exploring in her composition. In a kind of mixture of translation and botanical study, these writings blend bright description with flora inspired research calling back to the likes of Andrea Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners and W. G. Sebald’s own hybrid text Austerlitz. Imagine flowers “the size of loose fists or dinner plates”, or hothouses that defy natural habitats and artificial borders. Our latest episode will be a breath of fresh air and more.

 

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

Music provided by TinyTiny Trio, free for non-commercial and artistic use.

Starting off the new year fresh, we’re taking a look at opera, an art form that purports to have it all: poetry, music, costumes, and lots of drama. Opera in translation is ubiquitous, and what originally started as a private performance for Florentine nobles quickly spread beyond the palace walls and around the world with the aid of translation. With so much going on, translating opera is a multimodal undertaking. Our new podcast editor Dominick Boyle talks with Lucile Desblache, a professor at the University of Roehampton in London who led the project Translating Music. She guides us through the history of opera, explaining that translation has been there all along—just in different costumes. We also talk to Amanda Holden, a practicing opera translator who specializes in creating sung translations. She talks about how our image of opera as a boring and staid art form is a problem of translation, and how its true power can be revealed. With enough twists and turns to fill an opera, this is the Asymptote podcast.

Podcast Editor and Host: Dominick Boyle

Music provided under a Creative Commons license from freemusicarchive.com and copyright free from museopen.org and europarchive.org.

Our last Asymptote Podcast for 2016 takes a turn for the mystical as we explore the Tarot and its influence on different corners of fiction and poetry from around the world. In recent times, there have been many new "translations" of the Tarot in updated editions of the mysterious 78-card deck: see, for example, the ingenius "Black Power Tarot" deck by the Canadian Musician King Khan, who found his inspiration after attending readings by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky! We’ll also delve into Spanish artist Andres Marquinez Casas’s "Macondo Tarot," a deck crafted with characters from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and hear from the creator of the most recent Tarot reimagining, American artist Courtney Alexander who has updated the ancient deck with characters like Grace Jones and Duke Ellington. Stay tuned: you might just have your future unveiled! This is the Asymptote Podcast.

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

In this episode, we're unveiling wild new poetry in translation from Asymptote's Fall Issue, by taking a close listen to poems by Iran's Rasool Yoonan (read in Persian by Amir Maleki and in English by Siavash Saadlou), Singapore's Tan Chee Lay (read by the poet himself) and Iraq's Jan Dammu (read by translator Suneela Mubayi).  Metaphors unfurl from these lines and stretch into works of art. Finally, we'll consider the written component of the multimedia poem, "First Person," by Taiwan's Hsia Yü. To help us unpack how a translator navigates the original writer's web, our podcast editor Layla Benitez-James turns to Anita Raja’s essay, "Translation as a Practice of Acceptance", which we also featured in the Fall 2016 issue. Exploring lies, little and big histories, and figuring out what Proust is doing in an action movie, this is the Asymptote podcast.

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

Audio Editor: Mirza Puric

In this episode, we crack a window into the creative impulses behind the multilingual writing in our Summer issue. There, Spanish and German, French and Arabic, Romanian, Sanskrit and Afrikaans all find their way woven in with English in poems and a story you don't want to miss. Here, in this latest installment of the podcast, Omar Berrada and Klara du Plessis allow us a deeper understanding of how their linguistic backgrounds and travels shaped their current writing; while Greg Nissan uncovers other origins for his multilingual creations. So how does a translator go about translating a text already leaping across languages? And what does it take to write in the multilingual mode; does it create its own form, its own genre? What makes a writer feel driven and compelled to step outside the bounds of one language without leaving it entirely? To help us continue down this rabbit hole, Asymptote editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova, MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu), uncovers more about his process of translating Șerban Foarță's poem "Buttérflyçion" for the Summer issue. We'll explore radical nomadism, emotional chunks of language and more. This is the Asymptote podcast.

Podcast Editor and Host: Layla Benitez-James

Audio Editor: Mirza Puric

In this month's episode we look at science fiction from all over the world. We'll start with the Hugo awards, the Oscars of science fiction, where a group calling themselves the Rabid Puppies is trying to take over the ceremony to protest diversity in science fiction which they see as destroying the genre. To prove them wrong, we'll look at fantastic works from America, Russia, Cuba, and Nigeria that tell stories about dreaming robots, alien plagues, time travel, monstrous sea creatures, and the perils of extra terrestrial communication. This is the Asymptote podcast.

Editor: Mirza Puric

Voice Actors: Piyali Syam, Alessio Frank, and Rron Karahoda.

Music: Spare by Ono, Gotta Run by Wahyas, Let it Me by Drag Sounds, I Was Born on the Wrong Day by Cate Le Bon, Mary Bumble Bee by Purling Hiss Here, Masked Laughter by Dalek, Devil Do by Holly Go Lightly.

All music provided under a Creative Commons license from freemusicarchive.com

Works read: Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle, Robot Dreams by Issac Asimov, Moom by Nnedi Okparanta, Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Khrizhanovsky, The Cosmonaut by Angel Arango.

What ever happened to savoring the moment, or better yet, the moment in between two others? Why don't stories ever focus on the euphoria of transition? There's a lot to be learned in between point A and point B that we might not recognize. Today on the Asymptote Podcast, Blog Editor, Allegra Rosenbaum brings us literature in transit; literature from the places in between places, where the rules and regulations that govern our lives disappear behind us, as new ones loom up ahead. Allegra has spent most of her life traveling and with the help of Ezra Pound, Blaise Cendrars, Agustín Fernández Mallo, and Teju Cole, she tries to figure out what is going on in those moments of transition. This is the Asymptote Podcast.

Asymptote's fifth anniversary celebration in New York brought together top literary translators Ann Goldstein (translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy) and Natasha Wimmer (translator of seven Roberto Bolaño novels including The Savage Detectives and 2666) for an evening of conversation moderated by acclaimed fiction writer Frederic Tuten. Whether you couldn't join us in NYC or just want to revisit this fun and informative discussion, this month's Asymptote Podcast gives you a front-row seat! Podcast Editor Daniel Goulden brings you the highlights from the New School panel, which includes introductions by Poorna Swami, our own Editor-at-Large for India, and several terrific questions brought forward by audience members during the Q&A. Download your copy now. It's almost as good as being there in person!

This event was co-sponsored by the Liberal Studies Department, New School for Social Research.