Want to keep up with the newest literary developments across the world? This week, our team members cover: an academic conversation on the state of Central American literature, the gargantuan literary output commemorating the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the politics and poetics of translation in the film and literature of the Vietnamese diaspora. Read on to find out more!
Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador
Cátedra Centroamerica, an online space for academic analysis of Central America, recently held a series of talks on Zoom focusing on the state of art and literature in the Central American region since its independence about 200 years ago. The conversation, held on July 2, revolved around the question of the future of Central American art and literature after 200 years of independence.
Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, a researcher who specializes in Central American literature and culture at the Freie Univesitat Berlin, presented a “literary roadmap” on how Central American literature has developed after the turn of the century. Currently, Central America is in a postwar era following the wars, dictatorships, and political upheavals of the 1970s to the 1990s. The transition from war to democracy and peace has had two notable effects in the identities, histories, and cultures of Central Americans. The first effect is the mass exodus of Central Americans to settle in other parts of the world. This mass migration has redefined the borders of Central America and the identity of Central Americans as people living in the region of the isthmus. Because of the large and growing size of the Central American diaspora, Central Americans are redefining themselves as global citizens. Secondly, the rise of alternative publishing through social media has provided new spaces that welcome new literary voices in postwar Central America. These new literary voices have led the movement in reconstructing political and cultural identities as well as histories of individual Central American countries into a new, shared regional identity and culture that includes the diaspora.
Wallner also shared an example of postwar literature, Horacio Castellano Moya’s novel El Arma En El Hombre, which describes a new aesthetic of violence. This new violence is born in the urban environment of a postwar city. There is no explanation as to where this violence originated from and the main character of the novel, a displaced ex-soldier, is left alone in the city to combat this new urban violence that attacks from every corner: politics, economy, education, society, family, etc. El Arma En El Hombre is a key novel that aptly foretells the state of affairs in Central America. It describes perpetual chaos and oppression as the normal state of everyday lives of Central Americans.
Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China
Has it only been a hundred years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party? With its power near-absolute and its means inimitable, one can hardly imagine a time in which the Party did not hold its overarching command over the Chinese populace. Still, such is how a century passes, with all the turmoil of evolution and regression, the China of even recent years being annulled gradually by the gradations of change, rendering the past into the minute distance, even as it lives very much with us.
In commemoration of this centenary, the Chinese Writers Association has released a handsomely bound and overwhelmingly crimson set of revolutionary works, inspiringly entitled the Library of Classic Red Reprints, First Editions. Consisting of sixty seminal works that impress both with imagination and ruthless realism upon the vast landscape of Chinese history, the cumulative set heralds the writers of past generations and their pennings of the Party’s path, from brutal beginnings to modern glories. Some of the authors included are Qu Qiubai (the “neurotic” Chinese pioneer on Russian land), Jiang Guangci (the radical novelist whose “crude and violent” motifs capitalised on the glory of dying in patriotic battle), Ding Ling (the bold feminist who doubted that revolution should come before art), her husband Hu Yepin (one of the Five Martyrs executed under Kuomintang rule), and Xiao Jun (the prolific diarist who recorded faithfully the chaos of this time). This hefty collection, rivalling the World Book Encyclopedia in girth, represents as much of an intellectual weight as much as a physical one, detailing those fierce and Daedalian revolutionary years.
One box set is never enough, so it is that the equally vast and ambitious set of One Hundred Plays of Excellence was published in tandem, edited by the Chinese Dramatists Association and consisting of ten volumes and over 5.5 million characters. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the Communist Party is a great advocate for theatre—the stage’s propagandist potentials are second to none. With broad populist appeal and fervent audience involvement, it is truly the people’s genre. All art created under authoritarianism serves the power conglomerate, and whether it be the story of the young proletariat women who fight valiantly against villainous Japanese colonisers, or the cunning young man who defeats a band of bandits by infiltration, the singular, dominating music is that of revolutionary fervour, of love for one’s country, of devotion to one’s people.
What all these works have in common is an acknowledgement of the passion of ideals, innate within the Communist Party. It is an ardor consummate as the most saccharine of romances, an all-consuming definition of one’s guiding purpose in life. China was an impossible country in 1921—plagued with the devastation of famine, the wreckages of internal war, and the utter impotence of government authority. Communism was a lifeline—a sturdy raft of knowing that things shouldn’t be this way, didn’t always have to be this way; today, it is a façade for a concentric, sequestered architecture of power. It no longer seeks to elucidate, but to obscure.
These revolutionary works, no matter how transparently propagandist its presentation, are precious even if simply cements the origins of Communist axioms: that work should not be for nothing, that no one should feed themselves while another starves, that the world should be an object for change—that people have the unalienable right to change it.
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora
From June 1 to July 1, California-based Viet Film Fest presented Under the Same Roof: Short Films About Family, a free online retrospective celebrating diverse stories from the Vietnamese diaspora and Vietnam. Two distinguished shorts among the series are Hiếu (2018), by Vietnamese-American director Richard Van, and My Father’s Truck (Xe Tải Của Bố) (2013), by Japanese-Brazilian director Mauricio Osaki. While Hiếu portrays the unresolved emotional liens between a divorced couple, and My Father’s Truck illustrates Vietnam’s growing pains in the doi moi period when a market-based economy policy has eroded socialist ideals, both films show how family relationships can be deftly, and yet not fully, illustrated by the audiovisual medium.
The translated effects of film are analogous to those in a literary context whenever language—via subtitles—plays a factor in the narrative. Vietnamese pronouns, inflections, or deliberate pauses in spoken dialogues may not be adequately represented by English subtitles. The target audience would therefore only experience one interpretation among several others. In Hiếu, for example, the subtitles translating the pronouns anh (revered/beloved brother) and em (little sister) simply as you and I only partially capture the bittersweet kinship between two estranged individuals. Their complicated bond, as reflected by their instinctive use of the above pronouns in Vietnamese, irreconcilably conflicts with their situational differences. Similarly, the father in My Father’s Truck, when calling his ten-year-old daughter mày (little slave) in a moment of frustration—a seemingly drastic shift from con (child), his usual term of endearment—still reveals his enduring love for her. The subtitles can convey the father’s anger, but perhaps not fully, the intimacy embedded in this anger.
Cultural variations between the original text and the target language also seem most visible in the context of spoken word poetry. Alexandra Huynh, recently named 2021 National Youth Poet Laureate, has generated some debate in the Vietnamese diasporic community with “Life Cycle of a Catcall.” At least since 2018, catcall has prompted different responses in Vietnamese translation, i.e., as an English term for sexual harassment; as “teasing word” (lời trêu ghẹo); as a calque highlighting the feline qualities of an attractive woman (gọi mèo); or summarily as “dismissive words” ([lời] ngao ngán). These interpretations may approximate, distort, or partially capture Huynh’s intersectional ambivalences—her complicated feelings on language, race, gender, and cultural identity—as expressed in her original work.
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