This week our writers bring you the latest news from Austria, where the annual European Literature Days took place; Singapore, where Singapore Unbound has launched a new translation imprint; and Vietnam, where Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk has been translated into Vietnamese. Read on to find out more!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-large, reporting from Austria
The rolling hills of Austria’s Wachau are usually alive with the sound of music and literature in November as writers from all over Europe converge on the picturesque wine-growing region on the banks of the Danube for the annual European Literature Days. This year, however, since Austria went into lockdown just days before the festival began on 19 November, the words and the music emanated from the empty auditorium of the sound space (Klangraum) of the Minoriten Church in Krems. Writer Walter Grond and his colleagues from Literaturhaus Europa, joined by co-hosts Rosie Goldsmith from England’s Wiltshire and Hans-Gerd Koch from Berlin, linked up digitally with writers and musicians across Europe for four days of readings and discussions. The last-minute switch to digital format went without a hitch and the loss for those who had been looking forward to meeting old friends and enjoying autumn walks and the delicious local wine proved to be a gain for the rest of the world, as the entire festival was live-streamed (the recordings are available on the Elit YouTube channel). More Wilderness!—the festival theme that, as had happened so often before, proved to be uncannily prescient in view of the pandemic—was introduced by Austrian writer Robert Menasse in conversation with German philosopher Ariadne von Schirach, who continued exploring the wilderness inside and outside the following day in a dialogue with biologist and biosemiotician Andreas Weber. Over the weekend, a dizzying range of authors discussed and read from their works: from stars such as Sjón, Petina Gappah, and A.L. Kennedy (the recipient of this year’s Austrian Booksellers’ Prize of Honour for Tolerance in Thinking and Acting); through those who made their name more recently, like Olga Grjasnowa (Germany), Filip Springer (Poland) as well as Polly Clarke and Dan Richards from the UK; to writers who have yet to make their name in the Anglophone world, such as the Hungarian Gergely Péterfy, the Italian Fabio Andina, the Czech-born Austrian writer and musician Michael Stavarič, the Slovak Peter Balko, and Miek Zwamborn, a Dutch author based on the Scottish Isle of Mull. In addition to Menasse and Grond, the home-grown talent included writer and musician Ernst Molden, whose balcony concerts helped to keep up the spirits of his neighbourhood in Vienna during the first wave of the pandemic, and Daniela Emminger, whose reading from her dystopian novel set in Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau, was enlivened by the appearance of a banana-munching gorilla. Emminger’s succinct summaries of the whole festival can be read here.
The autumn calendar was chock full of events showcasing literature from Europe. On 9 November, as part of the 2020 European Writers’ Tour organized by EUNIC London, the Poetry Society hosted European Poets’ Night chaired by poet and translator George Szirtes, in discussion with Charlotte Van den Broeck (Belgium), Ana Luísa Amaral (Portugal), Julia Fiedorczuk (Poland), Mária Ferenčuhová (Slovakia), and Antonis Skiathas (Greece), complete with poetry readings in the original and in English translation. On the other side of the pond, in the US from 16 to 20 November the Cultural Forum New York paired up with Trafika Europe for European Literature Days NYC 2020, an exclusive podcast mini-series hosted by Trafika Europe Radio, featuring John Portelli (Malta), Anna Goldenberg (Austria), Pavla Horáková (Czech Republic), Veronica Raimo (Italy), and Dan Coman (Romania).
Romania Rocks—a Romanian-British literary festival (see full programme here), co-organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) and European Literature Network (ELN)—was held from 19 October to 12 November and the recordings are all available on ELN’s website and ICR’s YouTube channel. ELN’s Rosie Goldsmith launched the Romanian Riveter magazine, and hosted panels with major Romanian authors Ana Blandiana, Ioana Pârvulescu, Norman Manea, and Matei Vișniec in conversation with the likes of Deborah Levy, Elif Shafak, David Mitchell, and Ben Okri. Several of the events also featured translators (the riveting debate between Philip Boehm and Sean Cotter is particularly worth watching). And on 7 December, Rosie Goldsmith hosted Literally Swiss, a special one-day UK–Swiss mini-book-festival, organised by Pro Helvetia featuring an array of Swiss authors, which included a book launch and a discussion with leading translators. Hats off to the indefatigable Rosie, who must have broken the European, if not the world, record by hosting forty-three events since the start of the pandemic!
Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore:
With this year’s restrictions on live events, the usual energetic suite of physical book promotions did not happen. To remedy this, Sing Lit Station will be hosting the panel “This Is My Actual Book Launch” this Sunday (20 December, 3–5pm, GMT+8) at their Facebook page, revisiting five exciting poetry titles from this year. This includes the lyrical and frank collection, a first from a female migrant worker in Singapore, Rolinda Onates Española’s No CindeRella: Poems of a Filipina Domestic Worker (published by Migrant Writers of Singapore). You can read an interview with her here, conducted by Theophilus Kwek—former Editor-at-Large for Singapore at Asymptote—who will also be featured for his fourth full-length poetry collection, Moving House (Carcanet Press) that touches on migration. The other featured titles are Hold the Line (Pagesetters), an essay by French translator Pierre Vinclair on modern French poetics for a Singaporean readership; Mok Zining’s docu-poetic debut, The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books); and the anthology Crazy Little Pyromaniacs (Math Paper Press, edited by Crispin Rodrigues and Andrea Yew), featuring poets under thirty-five. In a time of seemingly-indefinite lockdowns, these books meditate on porous borders and claim a far-sightedness beyond the nation-state or the present—a fitting literary close to the year.
If any new initiative is doing the work of looking far and beyond, it is Singapore Unbound’s new translation imprint, Gaudy Boy Translates. In a recent newsletter, Gaudy Boy’s Editor-in-Chief Jee Leong Koh points out how “[all] too often such publications focus on the bigger countries and the more well-known authors”, contextualising the imprint’s mission to publish translations from minoritised countries, languages, and communities. Their first title, Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (forthcoming March 2021), demonstrates this ambition. The book draws together the best writing from an archipelagic nation—one where over 150 languages are spoken, and where previous efforts at literary anthologisation have remained, as the editors note in their introduction, stubbornly Anglophone. The translation world should watch closely for the intervention Gaudy Boy is proposing as a model for the kind of literary activism that translation can perform.
Finally, it is not only contemporary work, but classics that are brought back in style with Singapore-based Penguin Random House South East Asia’s release of their first two titles under the Southeast Asian Classics catalogue. The first title, translated by Muhammad Haji Salleh, is The Genealogy of Kings (Sulalatus Salatin), one of the region’s most important literary works dating to the fifteenth to sixteenth century that charts the rise and fall of the Malaccan Sultanate. The second is Princess Vibhavadi Rangsit’s coming-of-age novel set in 1938, Prisna (translated in two volumes by Tulachandra), described by the Bangkok Post as “probably one of the best-known works of popular literature in Thai history.” A look at Penguin SEA’s catalogue reveals two more projects in the pipeline, including former Asymptote Interview Editor Nazry Bahrawi’s translation of Raja Ali Haji’s 1847 poem, Syair Abdul Muluk. With this series, we can hope for renewed interest in the region’s literary history, as more untranslated or out-of-print works become available in English.
Quyen Nguyen, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Vietnam
Despite the second wave of COVID-19, after several months of a quiet autumn for the literary scene in Vietnam, November and December comes with exciting changes for readers, including the launch of a classic Czech novel and a symposium on translation.
The extraordinary novel The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War by the great writer Jaroslav Hašek, with all the original illustrations by the artist Josef Lada, was officially launched on 14 November in Hanoi to Vietnamese readers through the first-ever direct completed translation into Vietnamese from the Czech language by Binh Slavická. It was a joint project between the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese Women Publishing House in the year 2020. It was a meaningful mission to honor the seventieth anniversary of Vietnam-Czech diplomatic ties in 2020. The launch was the first event in the one-month literary festival aiming to promote Hašek and his timeless novel to Vietnamese readers in which there were two movie screenings and one book talk comparing Hašek to Kafka.
The end of November brought about another refreshing event. The first twenty years of the twenty-first century in Vietnam have witnessed an abundance of fresh translations from various languages into Vietnamese. Translation, thus, is considered not only a substantial drive in the publishing industry, but also the creative realm where translators work as artists whose performance involves recreating the original work in the Vietnamese language. Even though many outstanding writers have been translated into Vietnamese and are well received by the readers, their translators are mostly standing in the shadow. Moreover, the lack of a theoretical framework on literary translation makes it difficult for Vietnamese translators to raise their individual voices. It is this challenge and neglect that Zzz Review and Goethe-Institut set out to tackle in their project. They shed light on the vital role of literary translation and translators by holding a reading workshop on 28 November and a symposium on 12 December in Hanoi, where prominent translators gathered together to discuss the art of translation.
To the surprise of the organizer, almost one hundred people, mostly young and aspiring readers and translators were present and more than seventy people joined the Zoom meeting to listen to the presentations and participate in the discussions. Four speakers from various parts of Vietnam, France, and the U.S gave their speeches on the art of translation. The first speaker, Dang Thu, a famous translator of English language literature, who translated A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and The Golden House by Salman Rushdie into Vietnamese, compared literary translation with transcription of instrumental solo music. The second, Ngo Ha Thu, an experienced translator of Christopher Isherwood and a lecturer in translation studies at ULIS, shared with the audience the translation assessment in Translation Studies. Toan Q. Nguyen, a PhD student at University of Notre Dame working on (Neural) Machine Translation for low-resource languages discussed Artificial Intelligence vs. literary translation via Zoom. And the last talk was lead by Thuan, a well-known writer and translator of French language literature based in Paris. Best known for bringing Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots (The Words) into Vietnamese, she spoke about translation as an art of metamorphosis in which she took turns in her translations to imitate Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Sartre . . . to name a few. The translation symposium was one of the rare chances where newcomers to this art and profession have a chance to meet and learn from their peers and predecessors.
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