This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!
Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist
The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).
In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!
Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan
The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.
Navoi is known for his championing of Turkic-language (specifically Chagatai) writing at a time when Persian was the more widely used literary medium. Modern Uzbek narratives around Navoi often depict him as a national hero. Uzbekistan’s national theater bears Navoi’s name, as does its national library, a park in Tashkent, and the largest region in the country (Navoi Region’s capital city, for an added bonus, is likewise named for the poet).
Though Navoi was born and died in Herat, twentieth-century literary scholarship cast him as a key figure in Uzbek literature, a move that modern scholars like Edward Allworth today see as anachronistic. As they point out, Navoi was critical of the Uzbek nomads of his era and would have been unlikely to identify as Uzbek during his lifetime. The Soviet-era rebranding of the Chagatai language in which Navoi wrote as “Old Uzbek,” Allworth argues, likewise “distorted the literary history of the region” for jingoistic ends. Indeed, as recently as the 1920s, both Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan were claiming Navoi as part of their own literary pantheons, demonstrating the malleability of national literatures. Today, standard school curricula are unlikely to present a more complicated picture of Navoi’s origins and identity, but the anniversary of his birth might provide an opportunity to reflect on how literary canons intertwined with nationalism in pre- and post-independence Central Asia.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Poland
Over the past few weeks it has been impossible to tear one’s mind away from the senseless war Russia has unleashed against Ukraine and not be horrified by the bombing of innocent civilians, the images of children cowering in cellars and babies being born underground. More than two million people have fled the war-torn country at the time of writing, and Poland, the neighbour with the closest ties and longest border with Ukraine, has seen the greatest influx of refugees. The literary establishment has rallied in support of its neighbour, with many book distributors and publishers raising funds for refugees. On 25 February Unia Literacka (the Writers’ Union) appealed to the Polish government, which it argues “has a moral and political obligation to provide every possible help to the Ukrainian state and its citizens, especially people fleeing war.” Their open letter concluded with a plea to the Polish Ministry of Culture “to set up a system of grants for creatives from Ukraine who end up in Poland, in the form of residencies as well as stipends and subsidies for Polish-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Polish translations that would help provide an income for Ukrainian writers and translators at a time when, for obvious reasons, local publishers won’t be able to give them work.” Nearly 100 acclaimed authors have signed the letter, including Jacek Dehnel, Julia Fiedorczuk, Mikołaj Grynberg, Małgorzata Rejmer, and the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk.
On 23 February, upon receiving an honorary doctorate from Warsaw University, Olga Tokarczuk began her acceptance speech by declaring: “I see the attack on free Ukraine as an attack on free Europe. The state of war has no borders, and a war, once begun, will continue in our minds until we do everything in our power to put a stop to it.”
Meanwhile, only someone with no interest in literature could have failed to notice the flood of rave reviews that followed the U.S. publication of Tokarczuk’s magnum opus, The Books of Jacob. What is especially noteworthy is that The New York Times has recognized the work of her translator, Jennifer Croft, with an extensive interview that focuses not only on her work as a translator and author in her own right but also highlights her activism, specifically her push to get translators’ names on book covers. Since Croft published her open letter with writer Mark Haddon, their joint appeal has attracted over 2,600 signatures (and counting), and a number of big publishing houses have publicly committed to adopt this practice.
Here’s hoping that the events in Ukraine will not overshadow the success of Mikołaj Grynberg, whose remarkable collection of stories I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To: Stories (trans. Sean Gasper Bye) was published in February. Reading this “real bomb of a book” has left Anna Błasiak, who reviewed it for the European Literature Network, “stunned and gasping for air.” Basia Winograd noted: “To achieve as much as he does in this slim and elegant volume, Grynberg forgoes traditional narrative conventions, such as scene setting and character description, and hones in on his characters’ vivid voices to evoke their sad, strange worlds. Each vignette takes the form of a monologue: a plea, a complaint, a cry for help, a joke, a rant, a history lesson.”
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature (March 4, 2022)
- Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature (February 25, 2022)
- Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature (February 18, 2022)