This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Central America, and China. In China, the Shanghai Book Fair explodes with glitz and glamour in suspicious contrast with a supposed dedication to books and reading. In the United Kingdom, important translation mentorship and courses are adapting to online programmes to continue to discover and help emerging translators. And in Central America, Centroamérica Cuenta festival has created an exciting programme for its online events, whilst Guatemala’s Catafixia Editorial has announced new publications by three famed Guatemalan and Chilean poets. Read on to find out more!
Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China
On August 12, the 2020 Shanghai Book Fair began its week-long occupation of the grandiose Shanghai Exhibition Center, bringing with it the usual munificence of new publications, symposiums, readings, and exhibitions. While large-scale, highly attended events may seem unwise at the moment, organizers ensured the public that plenty of precautions were being taken, with the keywords of “safety” and “brilliance” operating in tandem to cohere the theme of this year’s fair. Brilliant safety—or, alternatively, safe brilliance.
True to China’s dedication to establishing itself as a technological trailblazer and the foremost nation in holding dominion over the future—accentuated by the threat of COVID-19 against physical bookstores (and brick-and-mortar spaces in general)—this year’s fair adopted the modus operandi of utilizing the new to reform the old, as opposed to incorporating novel contents and technologies into the existing framework. What this means for the ancient medium of reading and writing soon became clear as the fair revealed a buffet of stratagems to morph the existing methods into multi-faceted, multi-sensory activities. Featuring isolated reading “pods,” cloud-based tours and libraries, virtual reality reading “experiences,” augmented reality reading “supplements,” “sound castles” which seemingly exist solely to provide to children books void of their need to be actually read, interactive reading featuring audio-visual installations, and robot “writing.” The embarrassment of instruments and innovations—which have become increasingly familiar to the arguably more tech-savvy Chinese population—appears to be entirely genuine in its motivation to increase readerships and engagement with literature, but also has the slightly queasy effect of concealing the book, and the function of reading itself, underneath a nebulous aggregate of superficial entertainments and twinkly charms. This is exemplified perhaps most sardonically by the AI library in the aforementioned sound castle, in which one may pick up a paper book and immediately be transported into an immersive, intuitive reading platform—what, one is likely to wonder, is the point of this book, when it performs a function identical to that of a switch or a button?
This obligation of technology to expedite and accentuate our experiences strikes me as one of its most suspect ends, in compliance with its subduing and totalizing tendencies; those among us who love reading acknowledge it as an active, pursuant undertaking, and engorging the transference of language with manufactured visions and kinetics undermines its innate and sublime power to invoke those senses and impressions by the individuating motor of human imagination. As enthusiasm for, and adoption of such technologies rise, a decline in creatively productive, sensually complex language will surely follow. Safe brilliance, indeed.
Daljinder Johal, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from the UK
How do we nurture future generations of literary translators? Like all industries, the world of literary translation has to always keep one eye on the future by nurturing budding talents and increase transparency for those on the outside, looking in.
It has now been ten years since British translator Daniel Hahn founded the Emerging Translator Mentorship with the National Centre for Writing with partners. The mentorship programme is for literary translators into English, particularly for languages whose literature is currently under-represented in English translation, for a six-month period. The scheme provides crucial professional development for mentees (including, importantly, one mentorship for a UK-based BAME literary translator), with publishers seeing the mentoring cohort as a reliable source of high quality emerging translators. The programme is currently accepting applications, but are mentoring programmes like this enough?
For all backgrounds and levels of experience, the British Centre for Literary Translation’s BCLT Summer School 2020 took place online from July 20-24, 2020. Writers and translators came together to make connections alongside an intensive, one-week programme of hands-on translation and creative writing practice. But for the first time in its twenty-one-year history, the event took place online, with organisers being “excited about what this new type of event has to offer.”
Similarly, the Edinburgh International Book Festival kicked off over one hundred online events for the first time from Saturday, August 15 to the end of the month. While allowing access to some of the bigger names in literature, such as Elif Shafak and Maryse Condé, the time and cost of travelling to the festival is now a non-issue; instead, there’s more room to be adventurous with the entirely free, online programme. One moment you can hear from Adania Shibli on her memoir, Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, before joining author and translator, Fernanda Melchor and Sophie Hughes on the English translation of the Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season.
There is joy in exchanging ideas during an in-person meeting or the fresh mark of an author’s signature (despite the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s best efforts to recreate this with online signings). But, in terms of helping future new voices in literary translation access the best minds across the globe, rigorous training for a skill refined over decades of practice and tailored individual guidance, it’s promising to see the industry’s willingness to adapt and, hopefully, become more inclusive.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
Centroamérica Cuenta, the region’s most prestigious and famed literary festival, continues its online series, Autores en cuarentena. Following the social distancing recommendations, Centroamérica Cuenta has put together a programme of writers, poets, and journalists. Recent conversations include Karina Sainz Borgo (Venezuela) speaking with Francisco Javier Sancho (Chile) and a conversation between Mariano Quirós (Argentina), Daniel Quirós (Costa Rica), and Verónica Ríos Quesada (Bolivia).
There has also been news of exciting new releases to look forward to. In early August, Guatemala’s indie-press giant, Catafixia Editorial, announced they will reissue Cariátides by famed Guatemalan poet Isabel de los Ángeles Ruano, Altazor by the Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro, and Maelstrom by the legendary Guatemalan writer and poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón.
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