This month has seen the publication of new essays in Mexico highlighting the importance of editors, literary festivals in the Armenian capital, and the screening of restored screen adaptations of Czech literary classics. Read on to find out more!
Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico
The literary community has not been discouraged by the global pandemic. February is already blooming with a host of literary events and new publications, some of which—announced early to build excitement—will reach readers later in the year.
On February 4 and 5, the fourth edition of the Kerouac International Festival took place. The event featured poetry readings and performances, showcasing work that disturbs traditional boundaries between visual art, music, and literary creation. The festival takes place every year in Vigo, New York, and Mexico City. This year, the lineup included several nationally and internationally recognized poets. Among them was Hubert Matiúwàa, who has been translated by Paul M. Worley for Asymptote. Poet Rocío Cerón also participated in the festival, presenting performances that blurred the lines between digital art and poetry. Shortly after the Kerouac Festival, she also kicked off a solo video art and poetry exhibition called Potenciales Evocados (Evoked Potentials), hosted in the convent where Early Modern poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lived.
Four hours north of Mexico City, in the state of Querétaro, another event of international importance took place: the publication of Editar Guerra y paz (Editing War and Peace) by the independent publishing house Gris Tormenta. Written by Argentine editor Mario Muchnik, the book is part of Gris Tormenta’s Editors Collection, a series that highlights the work behind designing, planning, and putting out a book.
Finally, February also brought thrilling news to writers. Translated by seasoned Asymptote contributor Christina MacSweeney, Daniel Saldaña Paris‘s novel Ramifications was featured in the longlist of the Dublin Literary Award. Similarly, poet, translator, Asymptote contributor, and champion of contemporary literature in Spanish Robin Myers had her poem “Diego de Montomayor” selected for the compilation The Best American Poetry 2022.
Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia
Newmag WinterFest 2022, a two-day literary festival to celebrate Book Donation Day, will commence on February 19 in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan. Attracting a wide range of readers, translators and publishers, the forum aims to bring together the best conversations about Armenian literature in one place. Free to enter, the festival offers an exhaustive programme of literary events on a wide range of themes, including political discussions about the recent war and diplomacy with Russia. Among the guests is Narine Abgaryan (previously featured on Asymptote), a multi-award-winning Russian novelist whose humanistic, sentimental prose is famous for being a translation of Armenian experience.
The host of the festival, Newmag, is known for advancing translation and publishing initiatives through their partnership with the most prominent advocate of Armenian literature abroad, ARI Literature Foundation. ARI works with an independent Russian-Dutch press, Glagoslav Publications, which continues to support Armenian literature in translation. Among the ARI authours published by Glagoslav is Aram Pachyan, the pioneer of a new generation of Armenian writers whose novel P/F is expected to come out in English later this year. Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature 2021, P/F is an auto-fictional mosaic of experiences of the city and self that plays with the notions of genre and form.
It is promising to see more Armenian female authours gaining more recognition. An example is Anna Davtyan’s 2020 debut novel, Khanna, which captures the complexity and tribulations of female experience and is expected to be released in English later this year. Khanna is a novel that not only tells a captivating story but invites the reader to re-think contradictory social norms and the role of human agency.
44 Days: Diary from an Invisible War, an illustrated chronicle of the recent war by Lika Zakharyan, is now available in English. Combining collage, illustration and diary, this first-person account attracts the reader with its unique eye-witness account of the people at the forefront of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Czech Republic
In 2016, Bianca Bellová’s novel The Lake, a coming-of age story set in a ravaged fictitious landscape, won the Magnesia Litera, the Czech Republic’s most prestigious literary award, and in 2017 it was one of the winners of the European Union Prize for Literature. The book was translated into some 20 languages, yet as late as 2020, when the author was interviewed by Radio Prague International (part of a series called The Czech Books You Must Read) it had still not found an English-language publisher. Now the Welsh-based Parthian Books has stepped up, announcing the publication of Alex Zucker’s translation of Bellová’s novel this April.
Between 12 and 18 February, audiences at the Berlinale Film Festival had a chance to see a freshly restored print of Jiří Menzel’s adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal’s story Skřivánci na niti (Larks on a String). This satirical take on the communist re-education camps was banned soon after its original release in 1968. It gathered dust on the shelves until 1989, winning the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlinale (more details in this informative interview with Michal Bregant of the National Film Archive). The film director’s collaboration with Hrabal is probably one of the the longest-standing author-director collaborations ever: Menzel made his name internationally with the Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains (1966). He later adapted and directed two further stories by the author (Cutting it Short in 1980 and The Snowdrop Festival in 1984) and went on to create a film version of Hrabal’s novel I Served the King of England in 2006.
Budding translators have until March 31 to enter this year’s contest for the Susanna Roth Translators’ Award. Young translators (the generous definition of young includes everyone up to the age of forty) can try their hand at an excerpt from Přípravy na všechno (Preparations for Everything), a novella in the form of a lyrical diary by the pseudonymous author Elsa Aids.
The contest’s organizers, the Czech Literary Centre, continue their tireless quest to make Czech poetry better known in the English-speaking world. On their website you will find a highly informative survey of the genre from 2010 to 2020 by the critic Karel Piorecký. And building on their recent collaboration on a Czech poetry issue, Modern Poetry in Translation and the Czech Literary Centre raided their archives for an exhibition at StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, with poet Milan Děžinský in attendance. If you find yourself in or near the city of St Andrews, don’t miss the event Modern Poetry in Translation: The Eastern European Story, opening on March 10.
“April,” a poem by Josef Kučera (translated by Joshua Mensch) appeared in the Prague-based online journal BODY.Literature, which has also recently featured “Relay,” a powerful short story by Marek Šindelka (translated by Graeme Dibble).
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