This week, our editors around the world report on the exciting developments in publishing and journalism. From expressions of the free press to Nobel laureates, read on for the latest from the ground in world literature!
Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand
Launching this week, the web publication series Justice in Translation brings together urgent works from Southeast Asian languages; its first releases include an incendiary poem about children’s rights translated from Malay, a short story about how to write about dispossession translated from Filipino, and essays on legal reform and educational equity translated from Indonesian. Part of a five-year initiative on Social Justice in Southeast Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the series brings the institutional capacity of the academy in sustaining the practice of translation as advocacy in the region, giving both international exposure and small honorariums.
What “international exposure” looks like is being reconfigured through digital academy-fueled efforts like this one. As the anti-dictatorship three-finger salute drawn from The Hunger Games has spilled over Thai borders to Myanmar and other countries, so has the “broad” English-speaking audience for domestic issues, which increasingly includes people in one’s neighboring countries.
And as the “Milk Tea Alliance” spreads beyond East Asia, a sense of transregional solidarity has also pervaded public works of scholarship. Last week, the Southeast Asia-focused academic blog New Mandala, hosted by the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, announced a partnership with the Indo-Pacific-focused independent platform 9DashLine. One can hope to see more transregional essays such as this recent one by Show Ying Xin about literary translation in plurilingual Malaysia and Singapore, which troubles the distinction between translating “within” and translating “out.”
In a similar transregional vein, the online platform Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories, created last year, is calling for submissions for its new issue “Short Notice: Keywords for Our Moment.” Committed to making use out of overly-professionalized critical theory in the face of ongoing crises of the present, the publication is looking outward from East Asia as well, with this latest issue guest edited by Vincenz Serrano, from the Department of English at Ateneo de Manila University.
In our moment of precarity for an increasing number of scholars, there is indeed a flourishing of freely accessible content spanning the worlds of scholarship, literature, and journalism.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America
Recently the Association of American Publishers (AAP) awarded Guatemalan editor Raúl Figueroa Sarti the 2021’s APP International Freedom to Publish | Jeri Laber Award. Awarded annually since 2017, the Jeri Laber Award recognizes a published outside the United States who has demonstrated courage and fortitude in defending freedom of speech. Raúl founded F&G Editores in 1993 and has published authors such as Miguel Ángel Asturias, David Unger, Marco Antonio Flores, Marta Elena Casaús Arzú, and Carolina Escobar Sarti.
El Salvador’s Editorial Los Sin Pisto released Guillermo Barquero Ureña’s novel Horca a few days ago, which won the coveted Premio Monteforte Toledo a Novela.
Guatemalan author and translator David Unger also recently announced the publication of his translation of Nobel winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’ classic El señor presidente. With a forward written by fellow Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Unger’s take on Asturias opus will be released in July of next year by Penguin Classics.
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