This week our writers bring you exciting news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine! In Argentina, the legalization of abortion has been celebrated and supported by many, including renowned feminist writer Nora Domínguez; in Japan, leading women writers and their translators will be in conversation for the Japan Foundation New York, whilst translator Yukiko Konosu shared her recommended new reads from Japan, including Rin Usami; and in Palestine, four great new works of Palestine literature are soon to be published in English. Read on to find out more!
Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina
Two days before 2020 slid into history and memory, an anxious crowd gathered outside Argentina’s Congress in Buenos Aires. They watched the Senate debate on big screens and the summer heat dissipated as day turned into night, Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Many—though not all—of those who stood outside wore green scarves, the symbol of a yearlong movement to legalize abortion in the historically conservative country. In the small hours of Wednesday morning, after a long and suspenseful Senate session, they found out that their work had paid off: Congress legalized voluntary abortion through the fourteenth week of pregnancy.
Several of the pro-choice activists who advocated for this major legislation were writers. The day before the senators took up the bill, a collection of Argentina’s most notable writers, including Claudia Piñeiro, Florencia Abbate, Agustina Bazterrica, and Gabriela Saidon, released a statement and video expressing their support. “The green wave puts an end to hypocrisies, inequalities, injustices and replaces a long dark violence with dignity,” they wrote. “Like the deep and living heartbeat of the sea, it instills in us a pulse to continue fighting.”
Nora Domínguez was among the writers who endorsed the statement. She’s one of three directors of an ambitious project to publish the history of Argentina’s literature through a feminist lens. The first of six volumes, En la intemperie: poéticas de la fragilidad y la revuelta (In the Open: Poetics of Fragility and Revolt) was published by Eduvim late last year, but it’s chronologically the last in the series, focusing on the period between 1990 and 2019. The work features a collection of analysis and criticism from Argentina’s leading feminist thinkers—part of the project’s larger effort to give form to “certain absences, not to build a counter-canon but rather to provoke detours, scandalous stops, fissures, divisions, and contradictions” in the existing canon. In a December interview, Domínguez confirmed that Argentina has experienced a boom in recent years of new voices in the country’s literature, not just women but trans writers and young people as well. This century’s feminism is a culmination of both feminist and literary genealogies. The work to interrogate and revise a patriarchal canon and the work to advocate for laws that respect women’s autonomy go hand in hand.
Argentina’s recent explosion of women writers will continue making its way into English this year. Some highly anticipated releases include Fernanda García Lau’s Out of the Cage, translated by Will Vanderhyden (Deep Vellum, March); Betina González’s American Delirium, translated by Heather Cleary (Henry Holt and Co., February); Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, translated by Adam Morris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March); and Patricia Ratto’s Proceed with Caution, translated by Andrea G. Labinger (Schaffner Press, January). Ratto’s novella centers on a protagonist stuck on a submarine during the Falklands War. The situation spirals and the sailor harbors an illusion that “everything might return to the way it was in the old days.” But it’s only that—an illusion.
David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan
Japan Foundation New York recently announced that they will host a series of online discussions between Japanese women writers and their translators. The talks will be curated by the members of the Strong Women, Soft Power collective: Allison Markin Powell (Hiromi Kawakami’s Ten Loves of Nishino), Ginny Tapley Takemori (Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman), and Lucy North (Natsuko Imamura’s Woman in the Purple Skirt [to be published this June]). The series will begin with Yu Miri (author of Tokyo Ueno Station) and her translator Morgan Giles. Stephen Snyder will serve as moderator.
At the end of December, translator Yukiko Konosu shared a list of twenty-three recommended books for lockdown reading. Some of her choices are classics—The Plague by Albert Camus, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe—but Konosu also recommends a few new titles from Japan, including Tomoyuki Hoshino’s Damasareya-san (published in October 2020) and Aoko Matsuda’s Jizoku-kanō na tamashii no riyō (published in May 2020). Konosu concludes her list with Rin Usami’s 2020 novel Oshi, moyu, saying that she was “shocked by the final scene. An amazing twenty-one-year-old writer has emerged.”
Usami is twenty-one now, but she was nineteen when she submitted her debut novel, Kaka, for the Bungei Prize. She recently won the Mishima Prize for the same book. Her acceptance speech is available online here. Both of Usami’s books—Kaka and Oshi, moyu—explore themes of attachment and faith, but in radically different ways. Kaka tells the story of the narrator’s attachment to her own mother. Oshi, moyu focuses on the narrator’s attachment to a pop idol. As announced in December, Oshi, moyu is a finalist for Japan’s top literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, along with novels by Mitsuko Kizaki, Yusuke Norishiro, Sekaikan Ozaki, and Bunji Sunakawa. The winner will be named on January 20. According to Kawade Shobo, the rights to Usami’s novels are still available in English. An Italian translation of Kaka is currently underway.
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine
January is a liminal month in the publishing world. It is the month when readers look back on the previous year and also look ahead to the next. To see a few of 2020’s most widely read features of Arabic literature in English, you can read ArabLit‘s review. But for those who have put 2020 behind, the first quarter of 2021 is promising for readers of Palestinian literature, with new four books in the pipeline.
My Heart Became a Bomb is the first collection of poetry by Syrian-Palestinian poet Ramy al-Asheq to be translated into English (University of Texas Press). A result of a long collaboration between Al-Asheq and Levi Thompson (the translator who also edited this collection), the collection introduces an important new voice to the world of contemporary poetry.
Exhausted on the Cross, a much-anticipated follow-up to Nothing More to Lose, is only the second poetry collection translated into English from the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish. Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, and with a foreword by Raul Zurita (whose poems were published in Asymptote), “these poems cross histories, cultures, and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the gardens of Samarkand and the open-air prison of present-day Gaza.” (NYRB Poets)
Also in February, the next book in Comma Press’s The City series, The Book of Ramallah, will be published. Edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat (read her Six Poems translated by Fadi Joudah and published in Asymptote), the anthology features ten translated short stories (by nine translators) from established and emerging Palestinian writers. You can read an exclusive guest blog written by the editor for The Comma Press Blog.
Ten years after the original Arabic version told the story of Nidal, who returns to Nablus in Palestine and looks back on her country and life in the final days of the British Mandate, Hoopoe Fiction will be offering the English-reading audience My First and Only Love, by Sahar Khalifeh, translated by Aida Bamia. Here’s an interview with the translator, published by ArabLit, with more information about other books by Khalifeh in English.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog: