This week our writers bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and Serbia. In Palestine, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award winners have been announced, including Iman Mersal taking the Literature Award; in Serbia, a new anthology of Miloš Crnjanski’s poetry has been translated into English; and in Bulgaria, a conference about Bulgarian Literature as world literature was held at the National Book Center. Read on to find out more!
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine
It is an unusually hot spring, Ramadan is in its last third, and the country has been under partial lockdown for a long time, which leaves no reason to wonder that the literary scene in Palestine is suffering from Frühjahrsmüdigkeit (aka springtime lethargy)! One cannot but wonder how people in hotter regions, such as in the United Arab Emirates, not only manage to get through with their days, but also make international literary news.
Seven authors and researchers, from Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, as well as a publishing house from Lebanon, have been declared the winners of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award. The winners were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 submissions, the most the annual award has received since it was founded in 2007. The awards will be formally presented via a livestream ceremony on Youtube during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (23–29 May 2021).
This year’s Literature Award went to Iman Mersal for her 2019 work of creative nonfiction Fee Athar Enayat Al Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat). This look into the life of the Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, who killed herself in 1963, illuminates the challenges of writing while female, of attitudes toward mental health, and life in mid-20th-century Egypt. It is part detective story, part biography, and part memoir, and unfolds tender and surprising connections. It recently came out in Richard Jacquemond’s French translation as Sur les traces d’enayat Zayyat.
An English translation of Al-Hariri’s Impostures by US author Michael Cooperson won the Translation Award. Originally written by the Arab poet in the twelfth century, the work is known to be notoriously challenging to translate because of the way it incorporates a medley of linguistic styles, rhymed narratives, and idiomatic language. The work follows the shady adventures of Abu Zayd around the medieval Middle East, taking readers on a wild ride as he impersonates a preacher, pretends to be blind, and lies to a judge.
Jovanka Kalaba, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Serbia
After last year’s publication of the English translation of one of the most important novels by the modernist Serbian writer Miloš Crnjanski, Roman o Londonu (A Novel of London, Lavender Ink / Diálogos, March 2020), an anthology of Crnjanski’s selected poems has now also been made available for English-speaking poetry aficionados. Named after one of Crnjanski’s most important poems, Lament nad Beogradom (Lament Over Belgrade) was published in a bilingual edition in April by two Belgrade-based publishers, Treći trg and Srebrno drvo, as part of the Homage editions of the Belgrade Poetry and Book Festival Trgni se! Poezija! (Snap Up! Poetry!). Dejan Matić selected the poems, while the translation into English was done by Novica Petrović. The edition was published with the help of the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia.
The anthology contains thirteen poems, including the most important Crnjanski’s poems “Sumatra,” “Stražilovo” and “Lament over Belgrade,” as well as the author’s essay “The Explanation of Sumatra.” The selection of poems relies heavily on “Selected Poems” from 1954, for which the poet himself made the selection while still in exile.
So far, eleven books by eminent Serbian poets with translations into three languages (English, German and French) have been published in the Homage editions. The editions were launched in 2009 with the aim of publishing bilingual poetry collections by the authors to whom the annual Belgrade Poetry and Book Festival was dedicated. In 2013, the festival was also dedicated to Miloš Crnjanski, marking the 120th anniversary of the birth of the great Serbian poet. The poets whose work has been published in English translation in the series are Rastko Petrović, Rade Drainac, Ivan Rastegorac, Raša Livada, Miloš Komadina, and Aleksandar Ristović.
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria
Is world literature nowadays really as inclusive as it is thought to be? What are the necessary steps to be taken if an underrepresented culture and its language want to occupy their rightful place side by side with already well-known written traditions and schools of thought? How do our mundane duties sometimes create obstacles on the path to wider visibility? These and other pertinent questions were raised during a recent bilingual virtual conference entitled “Where is Bulgaria? Literature between global and local,” which was organized under the auspices of the National Book Center.
Among the luminaries who participated in the various discussions over the course of two days were the translators Angela Rodel (a couple of her renderings into English can even be found on Asymptote’s pages!), Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, and Giuseppe Dell’Agata, together with representatives of various European publishing houses such as Jensen & Dalgaard, Voland Edizioni, and Fraktura. Moreover, the seminar highlighted a key accomplishment resulting from the Center’s close partnership with the National Culture Fund—the compilation and subsequent publication of two annual catalogues devoted to contemporary prose and children’s books, the latest English language editions of which are readily available and could be perused here and here. Host of the event was Svetlozar Zhelev, a prominent literary activist and publisher whose concluding remarks ended on a more positive note:
“A number of challenges, problems, and opportunities were identified and considered, with everyone agreeing on the need for a unified, sustainable, and focused strategy for promoting and supporting the translation of Bulgarian literature into other languages . . . It is only by working together that we can achieve our goals . . . I am convinced that this was not only a fruitful, but also an important meeting that could kickstart the process of drawing a “roadmap” for the promotion of Bulgarian literature around the world.”
The talks were held just a few months after the publication of Bulgarian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020), which examines the interactions between domestic and universal in the broader context of roughly the last one hundred years, appeared in print.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature (April 30, 2021)
- Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature (April 23, 2021)
- Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature (April 16, 2020)