“Braid your hair, my boys, with greener leaves / We still have verse among us.” In Adonis’ s long work, “Elegy for the Time at Hand,” the poet enchants with the perseverance of language and beauty throughout all things. This week, our editors from around the world bring news of writers weaving, observing, resisting, and changing the world around them. In the Czech Republic, poetry enjoys its moment in the spotlight. In Myanmar, the illegal regime continues to jail and silence its writers and poets. In Hong Kong, the young generation of writers prove their capabilities, and a new volume of poetry traces the current precarious politics.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Czech Republic
Czech poetry is enjoying something of a moment in the new millennium, says writer and translator Pavla Horáková in the latest installment of her series for Prague Radio International, Czech Books You Must Read, which presents two “poets of the everyday”—Petr Hruška and Milan Děžinský. As his collection, A Secret Life, translated by Nathan Fields, comes out from Blue Diode Publishing, Děžinský—who is also a translator and has introduced Czech readers to leading American poets such as Sharon Olds, Robert Lowell and James Wright—explains in this brief video (in English) how much it means to him that his own work has now found its way to Anglophone readers.
Both Děžinský and Hruška are past recipients of the Magnesia Litera Prize for poetry; this year, the award—the Czech Republic’s most prestigious—went to Pavel Novotný for his collection Zápisky z garsonky (Notes from a Bedsit). Another poet, Daniel Hradecký, bagged the prize in the prose category for Tři kapitoly (Three Chapters), an autofictional work described by one critic as “brimming with cynicism, causticity, alcohol and the existential philosophy of those on the margins of society.” One of the five authors that Hradecký beat to the prize, Lucie Faulerová, had the consolation of being among the winners of the 2021 EU Prize for Literature, for her novel Smrtholka (The Deathmaiden). You can read an excerpt translated into English by Alex Zucker here. The winner of the 2021 Magnesia Litera Book of of the Year is veteran translator and emeritus professor of English literature Martin Hilský’s Shakespearova Anglie, Portréte doby (Shakespeare’s England. A Portrait of an Age), nominated in the non-fiction category. The jury praised this monumental work, which explores Elizabethan society in extraordinary detail and represents “the culmination of Hilský’s lifelong interest in the work of William Shakespeare and makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Elizabethan culture.”
Meanwhile, in Prague: Belonging in the Modern City, recently published by Harvard University Press, Chad Bryant explores the Czech capital. In an excerpt featured on LitHub, he takes the readers on a tour of the city’s literary cafés, favourite haunts of the likes of Franz Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Jaroslav Hašek. The last, however, was more likely to be found in one of Prague’s numerous pubs, which is where those of us who make our living as translators may soon be drowning our sorrows if CUBBITT, a new machine translation system developed by a team of Czech researchers from the Department of Maths and Physics at Charles University, continues to significantly outperform not only Google Translate and neural machine translation service DeepL but also professional translators, as it did when tested on a sample from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Lucas Stewart, Correspondent, reporting for Myanmar
On June 30, almost exactly five months to the day that the Myanmar armed forces (the Tatmadaw) overthrew the elected government, the new, illegal regime released nearly two thousand and three hundred political prisoners. Widely seen as a sham effort to appease what small, international condemnation there has been of the coup, three poets were among those released. Many more writers remain in jails across the country, but exactly how many is difficult to determine.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a civil society organization founded in the mid 1990s to track and trace the thousands of democracy activists jailed in the years after the 1988 revolution, currently list eight writers and poets in prison, and a further two writers have gone into hiding with arrest warrants out for them; two have been released, and four murdered.
Meanwhile, according to the Guardian, PEN International—in collaboration with their Myanmar chapter—records thirty-two writers in detention, though PEN International themselves haven’t publicly released that number nor the names of all those detained. A New York Times article from May claims over thirty poets alone have been arrested, sourcing the National Poets Union, though there is no such so-called association in Myanmar.
This discrepancy can be attributed to the sheer numbers of citizens arrested, detained, charged, imprisoned, missing, released, and murdered over the last five months. But it can also reflect the shifting identities of writers in Myanmar and how they are prominently recognised by the wider public.
Neither PEN International nor the AAPP appear to recognise U Pe Myint as ‘writer,’ with the AAPP listing him under his former position as Minister of Information, despite his twenty-five books, a National Literature Award for Short Fiction, and his International Writing Programme fellowship. They did, however, release a statement in April expressing outrage at the arrest of poet and PEN Myanmar member, Wai Moe Naing. The AAPP currently place him as an activist.
Whatever the true figure, Myanmar writers, poets, publishers, translators, and booksellers are in peril, with the junta resolute in silencing those who write against them, however they can.
Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
British sinologist John Minford is not only a renowned translator of ancient Chinese classics, such as Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone and Sunzi’s The Art of War, he is also an important translator of Hong Kong literature, most prominently for his translation of Hong Kong novelist Jin Yong’s martial arts novels and Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan’s poems. In a series of online lectures organised by the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong in June and July, titled “John Minford Culture and Translation Series: Online Lectures – Hong Kong: Literature and Translation,” Professor Minford shared with the audience the history of the translation of Hong Kong literature and his life-long career as a translator of literature in Chinese.
The vibrancy of Hong Kong literature and its translation continues to manifest as younger translators discover gems of Hong Kong writers amongst their generation. Jennifer Feeley’s new translation “Empty Rooms,” published by Two Lines Journal, was written by emerging writer Leung Lee-chi, who, in her twenties, has already won the Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts) in the 14th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. “Empty Rooms” is a literary response to Liu Yichang’s short story “Turmoil,” which was set in the 1967 riots. Following Liu’s use of the perspective of inanimate objects, Leung’s story is told from the points of view of a series of objects and a family cat, reflecting a new wave of mass migration due to collective pessimism towards the authoritarianism in Hong Kong by elegiacally telling the emigrating of an ordinary local family.
A recent volume of poetry anthology on the anti-extradition protests, Hong Kong Without Us, serves as a good literary witness to the recent political events that led to the current authoritarian situation of the city. Cha: An Asian Literary Journal published a number of reviews of the anthology by Arwi Y. Wong, Sam Cheuk, and Michael Tsang. The anthology is completely anonymous, collecting not only translated poems, but also Cantonese materials collected by the editors and translators who render them in a poetic way. The anthology provides the readers powerful testimonies of the city’s struggle for freedom.
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