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| Cover art by Kazunari Negishi |
George Bernard Shaw famously said, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange 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 those ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” Similarly, incorporeal works of art (poems, short stories etc.) have the potential to affect millions since unlike apples, they are unencumbered by the problem of scarcity (Lewis Hyde). The value of translation is that it unleashes from latency ideas and emotions to a vast sea of others who do not have access to the language in which these ideas and emotions reside.In an email, Yew Leong told me:
What differentiates Asymptote from other magazines is that we not only intend to display the original text after the translation, but we also encourage translators (especially of poems) to provide MP3 recordings of a reading of the original text so as to offer the reader a feel of what the original material sounds like. We even have a visual poetry section where we showcase the intrinsic visual characteristics of the non-English language under scrutiny.
Cha contributors Reid Mitchell, Philip Holden and Yew Leong Lee have new creative works published in the latest issue (January 2010) of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. Read Reid's poem "Never Give a Clock to a Dead Person", Philip Holden's story "Host" and Yew Leong Lee's "Faith".
Cha contributors Lee Yew Leong and Shirley Geok-lin Lim have works published in the October 2009 issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. Read Yew Leong's story "Gross Domestic Happiness" and article "The Mise En Abyme in Byatt’s The Matisse Stories" and Shirley's review article "Singapore Between Past and Future". Also included in the issue is a review of Gilbert Koh's poetry collection Two Baby Hands. 
Yew Leong Lee's new poem "A bureaucrat's song" is now published in the November 2009 issue of Nth Position.
Yew Leong Lee's short story "The Disappearance" was published in the February 2009 issue (issue#6) of Cha.
Cha contributors Lee Yew Leong, Eddie Tay, O Thiam Chin and Toh Hsien Min have creative works published in the July 2009 issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. Read Lee Yew Leong's poem "On a Scale of 1: ∞", Eddie Tay's poem "for arthur yap", O Thiam Chin's short story "Garoupa" and view Toh Hsien Min's photographs of Seoul at night, "Film Noir Korea" in the new issue of QLRS.
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