This week, our editors from around the globe report on publishing trends in India, the memorialization of the author Wat Wanlayangkoon in Thailand, and an exciting new development in Chinese to English interpretive translation, led by the Accent Society. Read on to find out more!
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
Temperatures are soaring and the country is experiencing grueling heatwaves. Indians have taken to social media to critique the Modi government’s negligent response to the climate crisis. Many are also sharing their memories of the devastating and nightmarish second wave of the coronavirus that led to numerous deaths in the country this time last year.
The pro-Hindutva, right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party is known to instigate violence, especially against Muslims, in the name of the Hindu religion. In the latest reform to eradicate voices of dissent, verses by Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been dropped from the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) class 10 textbook. Faiz, one of the most celebrated Urdu poets and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, addressed the issues of military dictatorships and tyranny in Pakistan. According to Scroll.in, “the verses were part of the ‘Religion, Communalism and Politics—Communalism, Secular State’ segment of the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s textbook called “Democratic Politics II.” The two poems are “Let Us Walk in the Market in Shackles” and “Upon Returning from Dhaka.”
In 2021, the New India Foundation (NIF) announced its inaugural grant for writing books relating to India’s history. The three winners of the NIF Translation Fellowship were chosen from ten Indian languages and each awarded a stipend of INR 6 lakhs for a period of six months with mentorship opportunities as well as publishing and editorial support. The three winners are Venkateswar Ramaswamy (literary translator) and Amlan Biswas (statistician) who will translate Nirmal Bose’s Diaries 1946-47 from Bangla; NS Gundur (academician and literary historian) who will translate DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from Kannada; and Rahul Sarwate (academician and historian) who will translate Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad from Marathi. More can be read about the winners here.
Though literary translation is gaining more ground in India—especially after the shortlisting of Tomb of Sand, the first ever Hindi translation to contend for the International Booker—regional language writers still face problems in publishing, particularly with the lack of transparency about royalties. In early March 2022, renowned Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla went public with allegations against his publishers. These claims have sparked a nationwide debate on the state of regional language publishing, as well as a lack of writer-publisher contracts and records of book sales. A full report by Scroll.in can be read here.
Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand
On May 22, a widely and highly anticipated last work by author Wat Wanlayangkoon will be published by Aan (Read) Publishing to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the coup d’état that led to his exile. It is an 832-page account of exile, first to the other bank of the Mekong, then fleeing a death squad to Paris, where he could afford to commit to writing again and for the last time. In March, he died a proud republican political asylee. The title ต้องเนรเทศ straddles the line between the victimhood and the agency of someone who “shall” go into exile. The physical book itself straddles another line with two cover designs: one is a “romantic” oil painting of Wat’s face profile, while the other a “realistic” black-and-white photograph of Wat standing in front of a charcoal stove.
Born in 1955, Wat first gained notoriety in the mid-1970s when his first novel Tambon Cho Makok about land conflict between farmers and blue bloods was banned by the far-right junta and became samizdat. Like many writers of his generation, he turned to the communist jungle only to leave some years later, defeated and disillusioned. In the following decades, absent the guiding light of socialist realism, Wat found major success in novels with memorable characters of rural and lower-class origin. After Thailand descended into the ongoing political crisis with the 2006 coup, Wat’s literary output changed once again—no more novels, mainly poems and songs—when he was one of the few writers to join pro-democracy Red Shirt protestors before it was cool.
The romantic-realistic dualism surrounding the memorialization of Wat Wanlayangkoon was explored at length in a panel discussion on April 24 with three veteran literary editors. Wad Rawee, pointing out his mid-career dilution of class struggle, contended that Wat’s legacy was not so much an unwavering ideology of a lone hero as the grounded sensibility of a writer of rural origin—a dying breed. Meanwhile, Ida Aroonwong, identifying auto-romanticizing heroism as the greater obstacle for politically committed Thai writers, valorized Wat’s humility towards Red Shirt people and fellow refugees. Rereading a 1981 poem where Wat reflected on the error of forsaking the paddle to take up the sword in his quest for the golden land, Ida injected new life into its final lines: “The moon vanishes / The sound of the paddle blade breaching the water, steady and slow / A paddle makes a boat go / A paddle is a paddle—what else can it be.” Rather than a futile expedition, the poem represents an authentic striving that remains undefeated.
Perhaps romanticism and realism can be two sides of the same coin. The oil painting extends to the back cover, depicting Wat sitting in a boat on a pond. Upon closer inspection, this leisurely scene painted by one of Wat’s children reveals a rather unromantic detail: the pond is nearly dry; the boat is trapped. The black-and-white photograph, meanwhile, draws the viewer’s eyes as much to the man’s wiry body as to the big grate made of concentric circles where the light comes in. That light may be imagined as the color gold.
Asa Chen Zhang, Guest Contributor, reporting for China
“A translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife,” opines Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator.” This afterlife, and its daringly prismatic reverberations, are evidenced by the works of young Chinese poets who submitted to Accent International Poetry Contest’s Creative Translation Award—wherein they performed experimental translation on the works of three Scottish poets: Don Paterson, Sophie Collins, and Jen Hadfield. Held by Accent Society (重音社), a New York-based literary organization connecting Sinophone writers and artists across language and national borders, this award calls for creative translations that attend to both fidelity and originality. The Ekphrastic Poetry unit of the contest also explored the intersections between visuality and textuality, where poets interpreted a set of photographs taken of Glasgow, by French photographer Raymond Depardon.
The jury sessions, featuring Michelle Yeh, Haoming Liu, Huiyi Bao, Xiaobin Yang, Na Zhong among other invited scholars, translators, and writers, took place on 1 and 2 April. Within the gathered works, all of which redefined and subverted the traditional tenets of translation, Paterson’s colloquial cluster of “Ten Maxims” metamorphosed into a lush array of yuan-verse, a Chinese poetic form centuries old under the pen of Feixu (废絮); Hadfield’s pithy visual poem proliferated in Peichao Li’s imaginary meander around the “fog dark sea” of thoughts, gaining a fresh vista of feelings; Collins’s “About the Body and Likeness”—itself a translation of Lee Bul’s sculpture “Monster: Pink”—genre-switched back into a visceral map of broken medical parlance in Shuqing Li’s hand . . . Triangulating the original, the translation, and the role of the translator, these experiments juggle the task of faithfulness and the thrill of good betrayal.
No less remarkable are these poets’ translingual re-embodiments of Depardo’s Glasgow in the Chinese language—one of which juxtaposes the decaying landscape of this “phantom city” with the not-so-dissimilar industrial geography of dong-bei (northeastern China), opening the camera’s localized gaze to a porous global horizon. As one poet, Shen Wang, ruminates in her artist’s statement, “If poetry carries our relationship to the world, the work of translating poetry is to construct a simulacrum of that relationship and enable a portal to a parallel universe.” Such has been the service of Accent’s poet-translators, who take poetry as the locale for translation, re-creation, and better still, “trans-creation,” fringing the moving tapestry of Sino-Scottish literary encounter with a polyvocal poetics of relationality.
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