Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” As countries around the world enter lockdown in response to the COVID-19 situation, readers, writers, and translators find other ways to thrive, to share their stories, and to respond to the crisis. In Argentina, female writers engaged with International Women’s Day; in Sweden, organizers found novel ways to interview authors after the cancellation of its Littfest festival; and in the UK and Belgium, publications and exhibitions look to live-streaming and online platforms to overcome cancellations.
Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina
Around the world, women and men recognized International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8. In Argentina, women protested pervasive violence against women and abstained from going to work or school on “Un día sin nosotras,” or “A Day Without Us,” the following Monday. But the day also marked an opportunity to celebrate the gains women have made in math, science, and literature, among other fields, and 2019 marked an unprecedented year for global recognition of Argentine women authors. One of the many authors recognized was María Moreno, a leading voice in the #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneLess) women’s movement in Argentina. Chile’s Ministry of Culture awarded her the Premio Iberoamericano de Narrativa Manual Rojas, and she recently read from her work Mujeres de la bolsa at the Mariano Moreno National Library in Buenos Aires.
This year, Argentina inaugurates a national literary prize, modeled on the Booker and Pulitzer prizes. The Premio Fundación Medifé Filba de Novela will honor a novel published in 2019 and award its author, who must be Argentine or a naturalized citizen, a cash prize. Authors and publishers are able to submit works for consideration until April 15. Organizers hope the prize will be a welcome source of conversation about Argentina’s literature for years to come.
On March 17, Moreno returned to the Mariano Moreno library to present on Florencia Abbate’s book Biblioteca femenista (Feminist Library, 2020), an ambitious history of women’s movements around the world since 1789. Abbate is herself a founding member of the #NiUnaMenos collective. The presentation complements the library’s ongoing exhibition in the Plaza del Lector Rayuela, Vidas que cambian vidas: mujeres notables en Iberoamerica (Lives That Change Lives: Notable Women in Iberoamerica). The exhibit, hosted in partnership with the Evita Museum and Organization of Iberoamerican States for Education Science in Culture (OEI), commemorates the 100th anniversary of Eva Perón’s birth and the 70th anniversary of the founding of the OEI. The displays highlight women’s fight for human rights and women in various fields, including the arts. Fittingly, the exhibit is outside, in public—where many women found themselves on March 8, demanding that the progress continue.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Sweden, like most other countries, is adjusting to the COVID-19 situation, and so is its literary scene. Book sales are expected to drop as a result of the virus and a government ban on large gatherings prevented Sweden’s biggest literary festival taking place last week.
Littfest has run annually since 2007 in the northern town of Umeå and was planned for March 12 to 14 with 150 guests and approximately 20,000 seminar visits. This year, some of the writers on the program were Icelandic Sjón (CoDex 1962: A Trilogy, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was), Norwegian Vigdis Hjorth (Will and Testament, A House in Norway), exiled Russian Mikhail Shishkin (The Light and the Dark, Maidenhair) and Mauritian Ananda Devi (The Living Days, Eve Out of Her Ruins). As the Littfest drew nearer, withdrawals continued to be announced, but the organization behind the festival was still planning to go through with the event up until the Swedish government’s decision to no longer allow gatherings of 500 people or more. Littfest, a nonprofit organization, is currently looking into the financial complications of the cancellation.
While in-person events are cancelled, two of the most popular, weekly literary information hubs in Sweden are the radio show Lundströms bokradio and the literary talk show Babel. In the past week, both had planned to broadcast from Littfest. While virus-risky trips and assemblies were avoided, quick alternatives were created for both shows. Marie Lundström, the host of Lundströms bokradio, stayed in Stockholm and conducted a remote interview with musician Annika Norlin who published her first collection of short stories last year. The radio show was also visited by Finnish-Swede Philip Teir (The Summer House, The Winter War). Babel’s host Jessika Gedin reached out to the TV show’s online book club on Facebook and asked for suggestions of previous interviews that people wanted to watch again, to make up for reports from the cancelled festival. Sunday’s show presented Danish writer Hanne Vibeke Holst, American Joyce Carol Oates and Swedish poet Bodil Malmsten (The Price of Water in Finistère).
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the UK and Belgium
As European nations enter lockdown and one after another borders get shut down overnight, literature and the arts seem to take routes of their own, bypassing such physical roadblocks and turning confinement into other-dimension topologies and connections. Ominously ironic events seemed, for instance, to surround past Asymptote contributor’s Matei Visniec’s latest book, whose launch cancellation at the London Book Fair (inevitable as the fair itself was canceled altogether) was already the second one in a row. While the book made it across the Atlantic to be prestigiously distributed by University of Chicago Press, it is still ironic—and particularly uncanny in business-as-usual freshly-Brexited London, stated translator Jozefina Komporaly—that a Kafkaesque title like Mr K Released still waits to be physically released. Crossing the English Channel in the opposite direction for a residence at Passa Porta in Brussels, place poet Iain Sinclair saw his event (scheduled on the same day as Visniec’s) not taking place either. Still, another significant Brussels event announced for the same ominous date, March 12, did take place at ERG, or rather went half way through. The opening of the In/Between Places exhibition featured a remarkable international line-up, with Kenneth Goldsmith chiming in from across the Atlantic for a live streamed talk, and spectacular digital/minimalist art/literature installations, cross-artform digital videos/extravaganzas, politically testifying/transgressive digital photography, and ‘expanded animation’ ambushing the unsuspecting audience from a confined backdoor theatre. (Law-enforced) Confinement was still what cancelled the promising events and performance scheduled for the ‘fateful’ Friday the 13, still allowing the public to catch a fleeting glimpse of the exhibits and grab a flyer with the online gallery and publication coordinates. As curators Alexander Schellow and Alexander Streitberger put it (‘prophetically’ before the second day cancellation), the event was meant to create spaces between the real and the virtual rather than being confined to either. Powering the exhibition was the online (symbolically named) Place, the electronic publication chief-edited by none other than Jan Baetens, who contributed himself a dislocating work, the novelization in verse of a Godard movie . . .
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