Our team of editors from around the globe bring you the latest in literary news on the ground. Read on to find out about regional language promotion in Catalonia, author talks in Hong Kong, and translation awards in the Philippines!
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Catalonia
The old part of the city of Barcelona is getting drowned in the infectious salsa and rumba rhythms of the Festa Major de Gràcia this week, with the burro’s alleys and pedestrian areas being taken over by local crafts and cuisine alongside decorations ranging from overhead wooden chairs to colourful balloons to giant dragons you can walk through. But another more discrete yet equally pervasive phenomenon is also underway. The fiesta’s versatile mobile app is indicative of the overwhelming digital initiatives in the city and across the province of Catalonia, which are more often than not closely tied with the region’s rich literature, arts, and assertive linguistic and cultural individuality.
The exhibition Nova Pantalla. El videojoc a Catalunya (New Screen: Videogames in Catalonia) at Palau Robert, for instance, boasts a wide range of on-site interactive pieces from both small/indie studios and major players committed to making Catalonian language and culture more present in the industry. As short of sixty percent of the sector’s output involves games and apps in the region’s language, the featured designers and programmers make clear statements about the creative multi-art poetics of their endeavors. Innovative technology is informed by traditional storytelling, visual arts, and text, resonating with other strong trends in present-day Catalonia.
A rich repository of Catalonian and transnational cultural data is represented by the free digital journalism platform VilaWeb, which claims the legacies of writers as diverse as Albert Camus and the thirteenth-century Catalan poet and Neoplatonic-Christian mystic Ramon Llull as inspirational for the development of the contemporary Catalan language. Another example of Catalonian culture in the digital space could be experienced in May of this year, when the festival Barcelona Poesia reemerging from the pandemic with a vigorous multilingual and cross-artform approach to poetry (as did the more avant-garde but less publicized Festival Alcools) substantially present in digital space and social media.
Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong
Hong Kong poet, editor and translator Tammy Ho Lai-ming will join around thirty emerging and established writers from around the world to take part in the Fall Residency of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. The program was established in 1967 and is the largest international writing residency in the world. The residency will take place in Iowa City from August 21 to October 31, during which time writers will participate in a series of events, such as translation workshop, panel series, collaborations with theatre and dance, cultural activities, field trips and visits to local community groups. Previous residents from Hong Kong include Dung Kai-cheung, Hon Lai-chu, Dorothy Tse, Tang Siu-wa, Chan Chi-tak and Lau Wai-shing.
Although Hong Kong’s poetry circle is not big, it is vibrant and surprisingly international. On August 14, Kubrick Poetry Society organised a talk with Egyptian poet, novelist and translator Sayed Gouda, who is now based in Hong Kong and teaches at Lingnan University. Gouda, who is also the editor-in-chief of the online poetry magazine Nadwah: Poetry in Translation, talked with the audience about his recent novel Serina, in which the titular character witnesses political atrocities in Egypt and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Reader Bookstore hosted an online session with local poet Fu Hou, who talked about his poetry collection Pre-historic Animals and issues related to the use of Cantonese in Chinese poetry. There will also be a poetry meeting on August 25 organised by Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine to celebrate the publication of the magazine’s recent issues, which cover the special poetry features themed “Boar” and “Wall”, as well as a section devoted to Ukrainian poetry.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
Mona P. Highley’s translation of Lázaro Francisco’s The World Is Still Beautiful (Maganda Pa Ang Daigdig, out withAteneo de Manila University Press) won the 39th National Book Awards for Best Translated Book on July 30. Francisco’s novel was first serialized in 1955 in the century-old Tagalog weekly Liwayway (Dawn), and in 1982 it was published in book form by ADMU Press. In his praise of Highley’s work, translator-poet Marne Kilates said that this atypical farmers-versus-feudalists post-war socialist novel “survives the stormy gulf between languages…arriv[ing] at the other port intact and as gleaming as the original.”
Other finalists in this category were Lisandro E. Claudio’s Jose Rizal: Liberalismo at ang Balintuna ng Kolonyalidad, translated from English into Filipino by Mikael de Lara Co; Alice Tan Gonzales’s In The Womb of Earth and Other Stories, self-translated from Hiligaynon into English; John Iremil Teodoro’s Sommarblommor: Poems Written in Europe, translated from Kinaray-a and Filipino into English by Alice Sun-Cua; Karl Čapek’s R.U.R.: Robot Unibersal ni Rossum, translated from Czech into Filipino by Rogelio Sicat; and Liwayway Arceo’s Canal de la Reina: A Novel and Servando de los Angeles’s The Last Timawa: A Novel, both translated from Filipino into English by Soledad S. Reyes. (See full list of finalists and winners here.)
The NBA’s awards are divided into Non-Literary (journalism and writing on food, history, social sciences, humor, sports, etc.) and Literary Divisions. Dominating the nominee list, not surprisingly, are the publishing houses of major Manila universities. With the nomination guidelines excluding “publisher[s who are] not duly registered” with the National Book Development Board and a strict registration/accreditation process, this is perhaps to be expected. Moreover, with the exception of Tagalog, the basis for the “national language” Filipino, books written in other Philippine languages—all 180+ of them—are also nowhere to be found in the nominee list, nor have they ever been, unless first translated into Filipino/English or relegated to a “special” category.
Apart from ADMU Press, also named as Publisher of the Year, and Anvil, the country’s largest commercial press and affiliate of the country’s largest bookstore chain, other participants this year include 19th Avenida, Adarna House, Chamber Shell, Everything’s Fine, Isang Balangay Media Productions, Komiket, LIRA, PageJump Media, San Anselmo, along with the presses of Ateneo de Naga University, Far Eastern University, University of the Philippines, Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan, and University of Santo Tomas.
Founded by critic Isagani R. Cruz in 1981, the NBA is annually conferred by the Manila Critics Circle and NBDB.
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