As certain places are heating up with a flurry of events, others are remaining cautious and mindful. Still, the good thing about the page is that it remains steadfast, and our work remains something that we can always turn to, celebrate, and share in. This week, our editors are once again bringing you the latest in world literature news, with a new Japanese literary translation workshop centering on heritage speakers and people of colour, a newly virtual Taipei Literature Festival, and a new winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award.
MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon
Poet and academic Iman Mersal has won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award! Her creative non-fiction work, In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat, is part journalistic excellence, part poetic elegy, all while maintaining the sensibility of writing in the life of a complex character. It traces chronicles the late Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayat, her struggles with mental illness, and her tragic death in the 1960s.
What’s new in Arabic literature? Banipal Magazine’s Spring issue is out, and it’s dedicated to Jerusalem and the acclaimed Palestinian auteur, Mahmoud Shukair, who has penned over forty-five books and six television series. This comes at a time when the Arab literary scene has overwhelmingly expressed its solidarity with the Palestinian people. Also on the subject of Palestine—this spring, I interviewed Palestinian-French writer and researcher, Karim Kattan, over here at Asymptote where we discussed belonging, the craft of writing, and other curious things. Also, Palestinian-Chilean writer Lina Meruane has a new novel out; Nervous System, translated into English by Megan McDowell, deals with the daunting specter of writer’s block. Read a review of the acclaimed work right here on the Asymptote blog!
How about some Arab cabaret? Well-read academic and translator Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring 20’s is an engrossing retelling of vagabonds, feminists, and performers as they defied gender norms, transgressed class lines, and created iconic productions. Another beautiful and timely publication by Saqi Books is We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. Edited by British-Palestinian writer, Selma Dabbagh, the anthology celebrates and examines the tradition of erotic writing in Arabic literature and its many women pioneers. Lastly, yours truly has a short story out with The Bombay Review, dealing with censorship and artificial intelligence.
Now friends, I will leave you with Kuwaiti artist Fatima Al Qadiri’s new album, Medieval Femme, inspired by Arab women poets of the Middle Ages. “Sheba” is my favorite track.
David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan
Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Kenji C. Liu recently announced “Hybrid Hallucinations,” a workshop for heritage speakers and people of color on the theory and practice of Japanese literary translation. The workshop, which will be led by Andrew Leong and Asa Yoneda, will be held online on July 10 and July 11.
Hofmann-Kuroda notes a long-standing disparity in the world of Japanese-English translation; while heritage speakers and people of color find work translating manga and light novels, they are far less represented in the field of literary translation. “Hybrid Hallucinations” asks: “[how] do our identities and experiences as BIPOC and/or heritage speakers shape our relationship to language, to the practice of translation, and our mode of engagement with the text? How might we organize collectively with one another to rethink and remake the practice of Japanese literary translation on our own terms?” Click here to apply for the workshop. The deadline for applications is June 30.
Hofmann-Kuroda has also recently participated in a group translation of Heart Mountain Bungei, a Japanese-language literary magazine created by Japanese-Americans interned in Wyoming during World War II. The magazine’s translation has been arranged by The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the stories of the fourteen thousand people who were interned there. The magazine, which features a wide range of poetry, essays, and more, ran for six issues. An English translation of the first two issues will be made available online this summer, alongside the original Japanese.
Leong is also currently working on the translation of a Japanese-American magazine that was produced at the Tule Lake internment camp in California. Leong has previously translated Nagahara Shōson’s 1925 Lament in the Night, published by Kaya Press in 2012, which contains a pair of stories about a first-generation day laborer and a working mother living in Los Angeles in the 1920’s.
Vivian Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan:
With the COVID-19 island-wide alert raised to Level 3 on a four-tier system on the island, authorities and the health experts in Taiwan are continuing the battle with the recent outbreak, and most live or on-site activities have been held off, moved online, or cancelled at short notice. Among them, all the workshops and talks held by the 2021 Taipei Literature Festival are moving online. From June 4 to 6, three discussion panels hosting different generations of Taiwanese writers can be accessed and participated online through the festival’s official Facebook page.
On another note, the Taiwanese doctor-writer 張渝歌 Chang Yu-ko’s horror novel, Whisper 荒聞, originally released in 2019, has been translated into English by Roddy Flagg, and is scheduled to be published in October this year by the London-based independent publishing house, Honford Star—who announced this piece of news with pre-ordering available now on their website. Different from Chang’s previous detective stories, Whisper is based on a true incident involving the novelist’s friend; its plot revolves around the life of a taxi driver in Taipei, weaving together the island’s Japanese colonial past and history of the oppressed indigenous peoples, with the novel’s horror elements deriving from the strange sounds and voices haunting its characters.
The Center of Taiwan Studies at SOAS released an exciting lineup of film-screenings and workshops for this summer, entitled “Taiwan Post-New Wave Cinema Project.” Starting from June 21, the center will be screening post-new wave Taiwanese films, including 楊雅喆 Yang Ya-che’s The Magician on the Skywalk and Girlfriend, Boyfriend; 黃熙 Huang Xi’s Missing Johnny; and 陳玉勳 Chen Yu-hsun’s Love Go Go, The Moveable Feast, and Hippocamp Hair Salon, among others. From June 28, directors of the screened films will be invited to join Q&A panels with audience participation, and a roundtable will be held with the purpose of introducing contemporary Taiwanese cinema from the perspectives of female directors. The screening events are open to audiences registered with a UK email address, whereas the Q&As and the roundtable are accessible to the public.
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