Friday is once again upon us, dear Asymptoters! This time, our report brings you the latest literature in translation news from Europe. Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has been at the Central European Forum conference and Blog Editor Hanna Heiskanen attended the Helsinki Book Fair, while Zsofia Paulikovics has an update from Hungary. Enjoy the ride!
Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood has these stories from Slovakia:
On 20 October, the emerging writer Dominika Madro’s story Svätyňa [Sanctuary] won the annual short story contest Poviedka 2016. Now in its twentieth year, the competition is run by the publisher Koloman Kertész Bagala and all submissions are anonymous. This year’s runner-up was the story Šváby [Cockroaches] by novelist and Elena Ferrante’s Slovak translator and Asymptote contributor Ivana Dobrakovová.
A survey of reading habits, commissioned by the Slovak Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association, has recently published very depressing findings: 72 percent of the public don’t buy a single book in any year; 40 percent read books only once a month and 28 percent don’t read at all. Nevertheless, judging by the crowds attending a huge variety of literary events taking place across the capital, Bratislava, over the past month, the picture isn’t perhaps quite as bleak as these figures suggest.
Slovak-Swiss writer and journalist Irena Brežná, Polish novelist Grażyna Plebanek, and recent Neustadt Prize winner Dubravka Ugrešić sought antidotes for despair as part of Bratislava’s annual Central European Forum conference from 11 to 13 November (video recordings here); Dubravka Ugrešić also read from her book of essays, Europe in Sepia, which will be published soon in a Slovak translation by Tomáš Čelovský. Parallel with the conference, some 200 publishers displayed their recent publications at the Bibliotéka Book Fair, held in the somewhat drab Incheba exhibition halls and vying for space with a “World of Minerals” exhibition. At the Centre for the Information of Literature stand two young authors, Peter Balko and Peter Prokopec, along with graphic designer David Koronczi, introduced their new “anti-logy” of Slovak writing. Aimed at schools but very far from being a stuffy textbook, Literatúra bodka sk (Literature.dot.sk) aims to show that contemporary authors inhabit the same world and share the same sensibilities as young readers, and includes samples of fiction and non-fiction as well as a graphic novel, Rudo, by Daniel Majling. Rudo started life as a Facebook cartoon strip and has now been issued in book form by Czech publisher Labyrint (in a Czech translation!).
On the other side of the Danube, housed inside the Slovak National Gallery and overlooking the river, Café Berlinka is fast establishing itself as a vibrant literary venue, in association with the adjoining Ex Libris bookshop. Since September 2016, the café has been hosting Literárny kvocient [Literature quotient], a series of debates featuring leading literature scholars and critics. Of the many book launches that took place over the past few weeks, the liveliest must have been the feminist press Aspekt’s presentation of a selection of poems by Hungarian activist poet Virág Erdős, Moja vina [My Fault]. The book was translated into Slovak by Eva Andrejčáková (a past Asymptote blog contributor) in cooperation with poet Vlado Janček, who read some of the hilariously outrageous poems to his own guitar accompaniment (you can watch Virág Erdős perform “Van egy ország”/ “There is a Country” in Hungarian with the band Rájátszás here).
Blog Editor Hanna Heiskanen reports from the Nordic countries:
This year’s Helsinki Book Fair, the most important literary gathering in the country, took on the themes of Nordic literature and translation, bringing together tens of thousands of book fans and dozens of authors from Finland and abroad. Among this year’s speakers were the acclaimed English and Swedish into Finnish translator Juhani Lindholm, who talked about how to identify a poor translation; Iraqi Muhaned Durubi, Peruvian Roxana Crisólogo, and Burmese Ye Yint Thet Zwe, who read their own poems; and Mona Henning, a Sweden-based publisher of Arabic literature in translation, who presented her approach to bringing Nordic stories to Middle Eastern readers, and vice versa.
The Elina Ahlback Literary Agency has sold the film rights for Finnish author Maria Turtschaninoff’s feministic YA fantasy novel Maresi (The Red Abbey Chronicles) to Film4, the production company behind Slumdog Millionaire and 12 Years a Slave. More details will follow in early 2017. Maresi, which received the Finlandia Junior Literary Prize in 2014 and which Turtschaninoff wrote in her mother tongue Swedish, has so far been sold to seventeen language areas, and is published in English by Pushkin Press in the UK and by Abrams Books in the US. This is the second major film deal this year for the Elina Ahlback Literary Agency, who sold the rights for Salla Simukka’s Snow White Trilogy to Zero Gravity this spring.
Across the Baltic Sea, Sweden is to gain a new publishing house, Polaris. Founded by the Danish publisher Politiken, the endeavour will be helmed by the ex-Albert Bonniers Förlag Publisher Jonas Axelsson, and the first releases are to be expected in autumn 2017. The new company aims to be a “highly commercially successful publisher with a list that covers quality fiction and nonfiction.”
The twentieth Stockholm International Poetry Festival was celebrated 20–22 November. One of this year’s themes was poetry and the nature, with talks featuring Julia Fiedorczuk from Poland and Norwegian Øyvind Rimbereid.
The Nordic Council Literature Prize has been awarded to the Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson. Frostenson is one of the country’s foremost poets and has held a chair in the Swedish Academy since 1992. She has also been made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her services to literature. Surprisingly, despite these achievements and the fact that she has been publishing actively since 1978, her work hasn’t as of yet been translated into English. Previous Nordic Council Literature Prize winners include Sara Stridsberg and Sofi Oksanen.
The Publishers’ Fellowship, a part of the Reykjavík International Literary Festival, celebrates its seventeenth anniversary next year and is accepting applications until 31 January. Head up north on 6-9 September 2017 for a healthy dose of Icelandic literature.
Zsofia Paulikovics covers Hungary:
17 November marked the nine-year-anniversary of the death of Magda Szabó, novelist, poet, essayist and literary translator. Though she started her career as a teacher, she became one of the most prominent Hungarian writers of the twentieth century both at home and abroad. Her work was often either implicitly or explicitly political, and it’s a shame she is no longer with us to comment on Hungary’s political evolution. Now is as good a time as ever to pick up or re-read her classics, An Old Fashioned Story or The Door.
Hungarian Literature Online published a new translation of the late Györgyi Petri’s poem “That I might reach the strip of sunshine beaming” by Owen Good, alongside a look back at the life of the poet and editor.
On 2 December, a panel of writers, critics and translators will hold a discussion honoring the life and work of Péter Esterházy, who passed away in July, at the Párbeszéd Háza [House of Conversation] in Budapest. His writing has been translated into more than twenty languages, and he was the recipient of several Hungarian and international literary awards. His distinctive, vivid prose was unparalleled, and his shoes will be difficult to fill for some time.
On 8 October, Hungary’s largest left-wing broadsheet newspaper Népszabadság was abruptly shut down and its employees—among them some of the most distinguished Hungarian journalists—made redundant. This was a new step in a series of recent shifts on the Hungarian media landscape, which have allowed for the seizure of most mainstream media channels by government-aligned investors. The closure was met with a community-organised street protest on 16 October, attended by thousands—members of the public and journalists alike. Népszabadság journalists have since begun publishing articles in Fedél Nélkül [Without a Roof], a newspaper sold on the streets of Hungary by homeless people. Twelve pages were added to its Thursday issue, resulting in unprecedented sales with all proceeds going to the homeless.
Zsofia Paulikovics is a Hungarian student of Comparative Literature (among other things) at University College London.
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