This week, our intrepid team members report from around the globe as Poland honors one of the country’s greatest poets, UK independent publishers reckon with new tax regulations, and a Palestinian podcast kicks off with a special video presentation, which also serves as an introduction to some of the brightest lights in Arabic poetry. Dive in!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland
Long snubbed by Polish literary critics as popular literature, the satirical novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma (1932), about the accidental rise of an opportunistic swindler, by the political journalist Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz (1898–1939) remained inaccessible to English-language readers until 2020, when Northwestern University Press brought it out in a translation by Ewa Małachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas. Their commitment and excellent rendering of the book’s universality made the translator duo worthy recipients of the 2021 Found in Translation Award. Explaining the book’s importance and enduring relevance, Ursula Phillips notes in her #Riveting Review that its “resonance extends well beyond the Poland of 1932: in our age of misinformation, post-truth, fake news, the discrediting of expert knowledge and widespread conspiracy theories, it is not hard to recognise other Dyzmas.”
Modern Poetry in Translation has teamed up with the Polish Book Institute to mark the two hundredth birthday of Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883). Now recognized as one of Poland’s greatest poets, the visionary romantic spent most of his life in exile and died virtually unpublished, deaf and destitute, in Paris. Hoping to “ignite the gentle curiosity of the imagination of the viewer towards the legacy that this man left in writing and in art that was simply never validated in his lifetime,” animation supremos Brothers Quay have created Vade Mecum, a short visual tribute taking its title from Norwid’s poetry collection. On 21 June MPT released a special digital issue featuring Adam Czerniawski’s translation of Norwid’s last play, Pure Love at Sea-Side Bathing. Set by the French seaside, the play “anticipates Maurice Maetelinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Henry James’s late novels,” says Czerniawski, introducing this work by a “master of the implied, the half-said, the unsaid.” And the journal’s summer 2021 issue will present new commissions from poets Wayne Holloway Smith and Malika Booker, writing in response to Norwid. Back in Poland, as the Cyprian Norwid Prize celebrates its own twentieth birthday, Józef Hen, author of over thirty books, many film scripts and plays, as well as four TV series, has been named winner of the “Award for Lifetime Achievement”. Prizes in the remaining categories—literature, music, visual art and drama—will be announced in September.
Meanwhile the Literature Prize of the City of Warsaw has revealed the winners of its fourteenth edition. Zyta Rudzka received the the prize for her novel Tkanki miękkie (Soft Tissues), Radosław Jurczak for his poetry collection Zakłady holenderskie (Dutch Factories), Aleksandra and Daniel Mizieliński for their illustrated children’s book Którędy do Yellowstone? Dzika podróż po parkach narodowych (Which Way to Yellowstone? A wild trip around the national parks), and Grzegorz Piątek for the best book on Poland’s capital, Najlepsze miasto świata. Warszawa w odbudowie 1944–1949 (The Best City in the World. Warsaw reconstructed 1944–1949). The winners were announced from aboard a literary barge on the river Vistula, and for a series of readings from all the winning books as well as those nominated, to be held through July and August, the organizers also picked unusual venues ranging from a hairdressing salon, a nursery school, a fruit and vegetables store, to a bike repair shop.
Daljinder Johal, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from the UK
Following 2020’s cancellation, this year’s London Book Fair is taking place online from June 29 to July 1. Creating opportunities for a global audience to come together do business, network, learn and share ideas, there were numerous events catered to the literary translation community including languages that garner little attention at other events such as “Translation Challenges in Catalan and English” or more challenging conversations on “Who Gets to Translate? Who Gets to Be Translated?”
If you missed the festival’s event discussing Saqi Books’ new anthology We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers with feminist writer and activist Lisa Luxx, attend Shubbak Festival (June 20–July 17) for the launch of this collection of writing on love and lust by Arab women.
Live in London, online and broadcasting from Beirut, Gaza, Marrakech, Slemani, Riyadh, Khartoum and Doha, audiences are helping to celebrate its ten years of recognizing the creativity, responsiveness, and imaginative power of Arab artists to speak to our times.
In a program spanning theater and dance to music and visual art, the first UK solo exhibition by Berlin-based art collective Fehras Publishing Practices is Borrowed Faces: Future Recall. The exhibition is playful in its use of performance, installation and publications while considering at the Cold War and its effect on cultural practices in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa region. This generated one of the most fertile periods in the history of Arab culture and publishing but the exhibition also looks into the future. From this to the aforementioned anthology launch featuring writers like Jena Al-Ansari, Sabrina Mahfouz, Selma Dabbagh, Laura Hanna and Saeida Rouass, the festival uncovers a history in need of more attention in the UK, but also shows the potential in finally showcasing these voices.
Nevertheless, as a result of post-Brexit taxation changes on July 1, independent publishers in the UK are facing more uncertain times. Many have been hit by the financial implications of VAT on online sales to buyers in the European Union, choosing to halt deliveries to these countries as many review the feasibility of now having to register for VAT in the countries they would sell to as a small business.
Finger on the pulse again, a London Book Fair seminar discussed this challenge from the long-reaching shadow of Brexit, but with many industries affected by both Brexit and the pandemic, it remains to be seen if strides forward made by the industry questioning who gets to write, publish and distribute their work will stand up against such unfavorable odds.
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine
The Arabic word “Maqsouda” shares a stem with qaseeda and qasd. The former, qaseeda, means a poem, where the latter, qasd, means intention. Solving the math of it, maqsouda carries the two meanings. Wittingly, the podcast Maqsouda is defined not as solving, but rather “dissecting” Arabic poetry. Although intended to be in Arabic only, the podcast’s co-hosts, poets Zeina Hashem Beck and Farah Chamma, announced that its first episode would be a one-time video, with subtitled translation.
“In order to empty our anger, to remember our beauty, and to remember the beauty of literature and resistance that is found in our great country,” Farah explains in the introduction, “Zeina and I have gathered some poems by Palestinian poets we admire.” Deliciously different in their orations, both Zeina and Farah shine in their choices of the poems, in showing the poems as alive, and in speaking their minds by responding to Hind Shoufani’s probing “why” questions from behind the camera, in a brief discussion after the readings.
The half-hour video is such a delight, in both content and execution. The team even went the extra mile to mark the video per poems recited. The lineup reads like a who’s who in Arabic poetry and features many Asymptote contributors:
- Ghassan Zaqtan (“The Trumpet”), who was featured in Fall 2013 issue;
- Sama Abdel Jaber (“Four Years without You”);
- Marwan Makhoul (from his collection Where is My Mother?);
- Asmaa Azaizeh (“The Road to Joy”), who appeared in the Winter 2017 and Winter 2019 issues;
- Samih al-Qassim (from his collection The Noise of Days);
- Ghayyath Almadhoun (“Adrenaline”);
- Raed Wahesh (“Street 6”);
- Ahlam Bsharat (a poem published a month ago);
- Maya Abu Al Hayyat (“A Road for Loss”);
- Mahmoud Darwish (“The Butterfly Effect”);
- Mourid Barghouti (“A Small Eternity”);
- Tamim Barghouti (“Our Grandmothers”);
- Dalia Taha (“Illusion”);
- Najwan Darwish (“You Think of a Small House”), featured in the Winter 2021 issue; and
- Samer Abu Hawwash (from his collection Ruins).
Except for Maya Abu Al Hayyat’s poem, translated by Fady Joudah (read five more of her poems in the Winter 2020 issue), the poetry was translated by Zeina Hashem Beck.
Maqsouda is part of the wider Arabic podcast project Sowt.
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This week on the Asymptote blog: