This week, our editors from around the world present reimaginings of Sophocles in Hanoi, memorials and debuts from Japan, and witness writing from Southeast Asia. Read on to find out more!
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora
Since November 2021, The Goethe Institute in Hanoi has been in collaboration with the Youth Theatre of Vietnam (Nhà Hát Tuổi Trẻ) to produce six interpretations of Sophocles’s Antigone, exploring a variety of salient themes—fate versus freewill, the family versus the state, moral integrity and political order, feminism versus patriarchy, reason and emotion, loyalty and disobedience. While most of the productions were performed live in Hanoi after the gradual easing of COVID-19 restrictions, “Portrait” (“Bức Chân Dung”)—Antigone’s fifth iteration—is shown online from February 19 through February 26, 2022.
Directed by Lê An of Ho Chi Minh City’s Saigon Theatreland, “Portrait” shifts the first act of Antigone into 1970s wartime South Vietnam, where An (Huỳnh Ly)—whose name means peace and contentment—must forge her identity out of her family’s traumatic past. Creon, Antigone’s uncle in Sophocles’s play, is transposed into her emotionally repressed father, Đắc (Công Danh), a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Đắc forbids An to bring home Kỳ’s dead body—his son and An’s brother—an enemy soldier who fought and died for the Communist cause. Despite the obvious ideological landmines evoked by this premise, director Lê An, in a pre-performance podcast, sidestepped politics by discussing her heroine’s psychological quest “to find herself”— possibly to detract from the production’s more provocative implications.
While ideological heresy still cannot be addressed explicitly in modern adaptations of Antigone within Vietnam (despite the heroine’s Greek name which can mean “one who resists/is of the opposite bend”), this theme plays a central role in Vũ Thư Hiên’s oeuvre—including his newest story collection, Confessions at Midnight (Lời Xưng Tội Lúc Nửa Đêm) (California: Văn Học Press, 2022). A well-known dissident writer and translator, Vũ Thư Hiên has become Vietnam’s persona non grata since the 1997 publication of Night at Midday (“Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày)—a memoir, inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which recounts the nine years (1967-1976) he spent in various North Vietnamese prisons after being charged with “anti-Party, anti-State, spying and revisionist conduct.”
Unlike his previous memoir in which “literature is mostly displaced by brutal truth,” Vũ Thư Hiên’s current story collection fully displays his literary verve, from cinematic descriptions to biting dialogues, to evoke history’s destabilizing forces upon ordinary lives. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vũ Thư Hiên believes evil comes from an authoritarian’s need to dispel all ideological differences. From this vantage, Polyneices’s body—which symbolizes intellectual freedom—remains cursed and unburied outside Thebes’s city wall.
David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan
Two major figures in Japanese literature passed away this month. Novelist Shintaro Ishihara died on February 1 at the age of eighty-nine. In 1955, when Ishihara was still in college, his novel Season of Violence (Taiyo no kisetsu) won the 34th Akutagawa Prize. The novelist’s brother, Yujiro, made his screen debut in the film adaptation of the book the following year, and went on to become an iconic actor. The English translation of Season of Violence was published in 1966. Shintaro Ishihara later entered the world of politics and served as governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012; as a politician, he often made racist remarks and was known as an ultranationalist.
Novelist Kenta Nishimura died in a Tokyo hospital on the morning of February 5 at the age of fifty-four. The author had apparently lost consciousness in a taxi the night before. Nishimura began writing in 2003, publishing his work in the coterie magazine Brick (Renga) before breaking into major literary journals the following year. Known as an author of autobiographical fiction, Nishimura received the Noma Prize in 2007, and won the Akutagawa Prize in 2011 for his depiction of a day laborer’s life in Drudgery Train (Kueki ressha), which was made into a film in 2012. Drudgery Train has yet to appear in English translation.
Several new English translations of Japanese fiction will appear in the coming months. New Directions will publish Margaret Mitsutani’s translation of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth (Chikyu ni chiribamerarete) on March 1, Soho Teen will publish Takami Nieda’s translation of Chesil’s The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart (Jini no pazuru) on April 5, Two Lines Press will publish Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation of Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Woods (Mori no hazure de) on April 12, and Penguin Classics will publish Stephen Dodd’s translation of Yukio Mishima’s Beautiful Star (Utsukushii hoshi) on April 28.
Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia
The Myanmar Spring Revolution and its Civil Disobedience Movement against the military coup crossed its one-year anniversary on February 1[1], and with physical book distribution services paralyzed by strikes, the words of resistance are being disseminated online through citizen journalists and international organizations. On February 5, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, in partnership with PEN America and Singapore Unbound, hosted a virtual event launching the anthology of witness poems and essays picking off new shoots will not stop the spring, edited by ko ko thett and Brian Haman—the e-book can be read free of charge here. The majority of the contents are translated from Burmese, although some outstanding pieces are written in English by people of diverse ethnicities. Much of the work is written movingly in first-person, leaving the reader breathless after a description of running for one’s life (“We had to outrun the soldiers to be free.”) or of an escapee’s painful knowledge (“I knew exactly what would happen to me in prison, as I used to work with former political prisoners, including female political prisoners, and learned their survival stories. I wasn’t sure I would survive in a Myanmar jail.”).
The term “witness writing” resonated with contributor Ma Thida, a surgeon and former prisoner of conscience from 1993 to 1999, who wrote the essay that gave the book its title. According to Thida, there are three kinds of people: the victims (those who didn’t know the risks and were in harm’s way), the martyrs (those who knew the risks and put themselves in harm’s way), and the witnesses—us—who have a role to play: “Even though writers just sit and write their own individual response, their response is to the globe.” It is a response that asks the world to do more than lament. As Rohingya poet Dialogue Partner pointedly observes in “Two words I hate most”: “Like a series of natural disasters, / our decimations came in waves, / We have been washed ashore / on the land of lamentations.” The poet forces us to confront the inadequacies of our feeble “demands” and “urges,” so that we may instead empathize and act with the powers we do have.
The virtual event featured some bilingual poetry readings. In “The clarion call of a rainbow,” the slain poet K Za Win, through the voice of his friend and tireless translator ko ko thett, sings a dazzling ode to the people who have bored through the muck of history. The living poet Mae Yway, meanwhile, conveys numbness in “Pretence”—her ironic musings working as a sort of distraction from the ultimately inescapable void of loss.
On related news, the ARUNA Global South blog is an emerging hub of intimately revolutionary Burmese thought and literature in translation. For example, the short story “မမ်မိုရီ / Memory,” written by Ma Chinthe and translated by Nicole Tu-Maung, depicts a young woman coming into revolutionary consciousness, leading to her sentient smartphone’s questioning of its own assumptions about the idyllic non-Western romance it has helped sustain.
[1] Earlier this week, the Asymptote blog featured an essay by our Myanmar correspondent, Lucas Stewart, on the present condition of literature under the country’s military rule. It can be read here.
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