This week our editors bring you the latest literary news from Poland, Hong Kong, and Serbia. In Poland, high-profile authors including Olga Tokarczuk have been vocally supporting women’s rights and an exciting, newly discovered Bruno Schulz story has been published; in Hong Kong, authors have spoken out against claims of a dearth of writing in Hong Kong to attest to its thriving literary scene, just as the Hong Kong International Literary Festival kicks off; and in Serbia, a new biography of Ivo Andrić, the only Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner for literature, has sparked debate. Read on to find out more!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland
As if having to cope with two waves of the coronavirus pandemic was not enough, Poland has been swept by two major waves of social unrest. The summer months were dominated by protests against the rising tide of homophobia, which prompted an open letter from the world’s leading writers, directors, and actors, including Margaret Atwood, Pedro Almodóvar, and Olga Tokarczuk. And since October 22 people have been out on the streets in their thousands protesting against the decision to further tighten the country’s abortion law, already one of the most restrictive in the world. Members of the LGBT+ community and people from all walks of life, including miners and farmers on tractors, joined women in marches up and down the country. Olga Tokarczuk summed up the sentiment in a tweet:
“Let us not deceive ourselves—this system will cynically exploit every moment of crisis, war, and epidemic, to return women to the kitchen, the church, and the cradle. Women’s rights are not given once and for all. We have to safeguard them, like every other achievement broadening the range of civil rights and human dignity. As of today, all of us are women warriors.”
Many other renowned writers—women including Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Agnieszka Taborska, and Anna Janko, as well as men, such as Zygmunt Miłoszewski, Mariusz Szczygieł, Jacek Dehnel, Szczepan Twardoch, Ziemowit Szczerek, and Aleksander Kaczorowski, have expressed their support for the women’s strike and their right to voice their anger in very strong language. Marta Frej, whose in-your-face feminist posters and memes have been empowering women and LGBT+ people for years now (here is her cover for a recent issue of the weekly Polityka) was joined by a number of renowned illustrators (see a selection featured in Calvert Journal).
Moving on to more strictly literary news, the online journal Notes from Poland has come up with a minor sensation: a translation of “Undula,” a newly discovered story, almost certainly written by Bruno Schulz, more than a decade before the writer’s first known works appeared. The story “follows the masochistic sexual imaginings of a sick man confined to his bed in a room inhabited by whispering shadows and cockroaches” and was published in an obscure Polish oil industry newspaper in 1922 under the name Marceli Weron. The Ukrainian researcher Lesya Khomych, who found it in an archive in Lviv, immediately suspected that this was a pseudonym and that the story could only have been written by Bruno Schulz. The story has now been translated and is introduced by Stanley Bill of the University of Cambridge and editor-at-large at Notes from Poland.
For fans of Polish literary reportage there are two new treats in store: All Lara’s Wars, a heartrending account by war correspondent Wojciech Jagielski (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) of one mother’s struggle to save her sons from Islamic radicalization, will be released by Seven Stories Press in November, while Ellis Island: A People’s History, Malgorzata Szejnert’s “lyrical and deeply human portrait of the island and the people who made it” (excerpt) was published by Scribe in August. This is the first book by Szejnert, a giant of Polish literary journalism, and the book’s English translator, Asymptote’s Close Approximations translation contest winner Sean Gasper Bye, talked to the author on LitHub. More recently, Bye has asked some fellow Polish translators for their tips and tricks. In concluding his lively and informative piece, which should prove useful for budding translators from any language, he spotlights a crucial feature, namely due diligence: “I check and double-check and triple-check. I revise, revise, and revise again. This is really time-consuming, but it’s all an essential part of the job.”
Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
A recent essay published by Electric Literature kicked up quite a storm on Twitter among Hong Kong’s small but active English literary circle. Claiming there is a dearth of writing in and about Hong Kong, presumably in the English language, the article was met with opposition in various forms as people listed literary figures—Dorothy Tse, Hon Lai-chu, Tammy Lai-ming Ho, Chris Song, Mary Jean Chan, Nicholas Wong, Xu Xi, to name just a few—whose works are available to an Anglophone audience. The entire exercise serves to emphasize once more the importance of exposure and distribution for world literature in translation, much of which still occupies a liminal space from a commercial and marketing standpoint.
The controversy is a good prelude to November, one of Hong Kong’s most literary months with the annual Hong Kong International Literary Festival (HKILF) as well as events from Hong Kong Literature Season, which spans the whole of fall. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of HKILF, and while the pandemic has halted festivals elsewhere, HKILF has decided to push ahead with a hybrid model of online and physical events from November 5 to 15. Featuring renowned international writers as well as prominent writers and translators at home and from the region, the program includes sessions with translators Jeremy Tiang and Natascha Bruce alongside writers Yan Ge and Dorothy Tse; Intan Paramaditha on her latest novel The Wandering, translated from the Indonesian (which I reviewed for the Asian Review of Books); and Bae Suah in conversation with Frances Cha, hosted with the Korean Cultural Centre in Hong Kong.
Organized around ideas of travel and mobility, this year’s Hong Kong Literature Season has held writing workshops, screenings, and conversations. On October 30, they presented On the Brink of Borrowed Time: To Stay / Flee, an exhibition pairing texts by twelve Hong Kong writers—Xi Xi, Ye Si, and Yau Ching, among others—with twelve Hong Kong artists. The juxtaposition encourages conversations across generations and time, with works created in response to a year of political strife that has forced people to consider departing the city altogether.
Jovanka Kalaba, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Serbia
In 2019 the Paul Zsolnay Verlag publishing house in Vienna published Michael Martens’s biography of Ivo Andrić, the only Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner for literature, under the title Im Brand der Welten: Ivo Andric. Ein europäisches Leben (In the Worlds’ Fire: Ivo Andrić. A European life). As can often happen when a new study of Yugoslavia’s cultural legacy appears, the biography’s publication and subsequent translation into the Serbian language in April 2020 by the Laguna publishing house has stirred public debate in recent weeks.
On October 13, The KROKODIL’s Center for Contemporary Literature in Belgrade held a discussion to address contemporary misuse of Ivo Andrić’s legacy for non-literary purposes entitled “Dismembering Andrić: Ivo Andrić in the world’s fire and trenches of the Internet.” The invited speaker were Michael Martens himself and Croatian scholar Nebojša Lujanović, whose book about nationalist interpretations of Ivo Andrić’s life and work is soon to be published.
Part of the controversy lay in the fact that the Yugoslavic aspect of Andrić’s life and work cannot be fitted into the narrow nationalist perceptions of his place in, and significance for, the region today. In an interview given to the Serbian weekly magazine Nedeljnik, Martens points out that Andrić was a child of Croatian parents from Bosnia, raised by a Catholic foster family, and that most of his greatest works take place in Ottoman Bosnia. Bosnia was his emotional homeland, but he spent most of his life in Belgrade and considered himself a Serbian representative of Yugoslav literature. For this reason, Martens claims that the question of Andrić’s preferences is not irrelevant, but is nonetheless of secondary importance.
Another part of the controversy can be found in the inopportune (to say the least) moment in time when Andrić served as a diplomat, the ambassador of Yugoslavia in Hitler’s Berlin. The book raised concerns on the possibility of Andrić being falsely represented as a collaborator with the Nazi regime. Additionally, as a young man, Andrić supported the idea of the unification of the South Slavs as a member of the Young Bosnia movement, whose member Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and the Archduke’s wife in Sarajevo on June 28 1914, which led to the outbreak of WW1. In Martens words, the young Andrić saw the unification of the South Slavs as the only opportunity for the peoples in the region to take destiny into their own hands and avoid the fate of being toyed with by the great powers. The failure of this idea is more than evident today, but Martens reminds us that, from the perspective of a young person in 1914, it was a very legitimate concept.
All this has contributed greatly to the instrumentalization of Andrić’s work. Martens sees Andrić as one of the modern European greats, unjustly marginalized, and hopes that his biography will find its readers among the lovers of world literature across different literary cultures.
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