As James Baldwin said; “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” This week, our editors are reaffirming the ability of literature to overcome discrimination and unite people with a shared passion through words. In Madrid, the Woolf Pack open mic night has been celebrating womxn and LGBTQI+ writers, whilst in the Czech Republic, a workshop sparked lively discussion on modern Tibetan literature. Read on to find out more!
Paloma Reaño Hurtado, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Madrid
The Woolf Pack is an open mic night celebrated since September 2018 at Desperate Literature, a trilingual bookstore in the centre of Madrid. Everyone is invited to attend, but the mic is exclusively open to womxn (cis and trans) and LGBTQI+ identifying folk. The event echoes a similar initiative called Self-Ish, launched in Paris for the first time in May 2016.
Aiming to be a tribute to the womxn and queer writers who have overcome all kinds of obstacles to make their literature, The Woolf Pack is a homage to womxn and LGBT idols from different times and latitudes—hence the name of the event. It is, in sum, a sort of anti-macho literature night; each participant can share their own or any other author’s text, as long as it is another female/trans/nonbinary author.
More than eighty writers have shared their works in the last year, including the poets Connor Byrne, Salena Godden, Joan Fleming, Violeta Serrano, Elizabeth Duval and Itisha Giri. On November 16, the ninth edition of The Woolf pack took place, and numerous writers, editors, performers, translators, and readers got together again, eager to listen and contribute their stories.
Throughout these meetings, a community of mutual support and reliable listening begins to develop, a safe space where discrimination of any kind is prohibited. The feeling that reigns at the end of each encounter is one of inspiration and empowerment; of not being alone; of the joy and the certainty that we share many more interests than we suspected at the beginning of the evening.
There is something both striking and memorable about this multicultural evening: despite the variety of styles and contexts, the voices gathered here share a common resistance—the fight against the white-western-hetero canon, and the awareness that participation is part of a change for the good, in which womxn and LGBTQI+ authors are better represented.
We want to claim peripheral voices, new voices, literary experiments, and life experiences that allow us to recognize each other. At the end of the evening, if you are attentive, your list of pending readings will have few of the usual-commercial-canonical authors.
Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Czech Republic
In my July dispatch, I had cited Kamila Hladikova’s experience of witnessing little participation of modern Tibetan literature in the IATS’s conference. Four months later, on November 23, we were at least nine scholars on a full-day workshop on modern Tibetan literature, organized by Kamila and Franz Xaver Erhard, as part of Sinophone Borderlands Project at Palacky University, Olomouc in Czech Republic.
While I was the only scholar on Tibetan-English Literature in attendance, all other participants in “Gulfs and Bridges: Inter-cultural Influences and Emergence of Modern Literature in Tibet” are also prolific translators of Tibetophone and Sinophone Tibetan literature. Christopher Peacock recently spoke to Asymptote about his approach as a translator to Tsering Döndrup’s linguistic confrontations between the Tibetan and Chinese languages in the latter’s stories. A related issue on the complexities of the translator’s own influences on a source text was probed by Michael Monhart vis-à-vis his translation of Pema Tseden’s stories. Michael took recourse to the idea of “linguistic hospitality” (cf Paul Ricoeur)—for example, inviting authors into translators’ linguistic worlds without imposing on them the translators’ own values.
Lama Jabb made it a point to read a poem by Kyachen Dedrol in the Tibetan language before repeating it in his English translation, for he deems it fit (and rightly so) to include the sound of Tibetan alphabets in a workshop on Tibetan Literature. He and Tibetan scholar Lobsang Yongdan slightly disagreed on the Tibetan/Chinese education and resources of Dhondup Gyal’s works. However, Riika Virtanen’s translation of excerpts from Dhondup Gyal’s Notes for Teaching Literature showed the author’s confluence of influences.
It was a workshop so intense that it wouldn’t end even after the formal closing remarks. We continued discussing the topics and our respective initiations in Tibetan literature while strolling through medieval-era roads until midnight, when over rounds of beer Francoise Robin commented that Tibetans have been the best translators since the 7th century, when they began translating Sanskrit texts into Tibetan. Tibetan literature and its translations have come a long way since then. It’s time we raise a toast to it!
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