In India, the country mourns the loss of Kerala’s groundbreaking tribal novelist. In Hong Kong, a genre-bending poet is being celebrated across the nation. And in Sweden, two talented writers have won the prestigious Klas de Vylder’s Grant Fund for Immigrant Writers. Read on to find out more!
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
On August 16, India’s first tribal novelist Narayan passed away in Kochi. Born in the Mala Araya tribe in Kerala, Narayan gained nationwide recognition for his book Kocharethi (1998), which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award. The book was a way to counter the misrepresentations of his community from outsiders, and Narayan struggled for ten years to find a publisher willing to release it; despite critical acclaim, many complained his work lacked literary merit. Translator Catherine Thankamma, who translated the text into English—winning the Crossword Book Award for it—wrote a tribute to him for Scroll.in. Her tribute honors the struggles and biases he faced in the literary world.
August has seen many new releases in translation. A significant one is Satya Vyas’s Banaras Talkies, translated from Hindi by Himadri Agarwal. A campus novel, the book is centered around three law students from Banaras Hindu University. The translation was facilitated by Ashoka Centre for Translation from Ashoka University, where Agarwal graduated from. According to Mohini Gupta’s review, “The Hindi novel seamlessly accesses Bhojpuri and English words and phrases and the translation captures these linguistic variations beautifully.”
Many translators in India are also turning to writing fiction. Aruna Chakravarti, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for her translation of Sarat Chandra’s Srikanta, is known for her dedication to Bengali literature. Her first translation, Tagore: Songs Rendered into English, came out in 1984, and her critically acclaimed novels explore the lives of women in the household of Rabindranath Tagore. Her latest book, The Mendicant Prince, explores the Bhawal case—an extended court case from 1920-46 about a man claiming to be the prince of Bhawal. An excerpt of the book can be read here.
Chakravarti is not the only translator who is known for fiction writing. Jerry Pinto, popular Marathi translator, also recently released his latest novel, The Education of Yuri. The book explores life in Mumbai during the 1980s for the protagonist Mahim, who discovers friendship, politics, and sexual desire. An excerpt from the novel is available here.
Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
The 46th Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) was held from August 15 to 31, featuring an attractive roster of films from Hong Kong and abroad. Originally scheduled for this spring, the festival was postponed due to Hong Kong’s COVID-19 regulations, and was eventually organized in a hybrid of in-person and online screenings and events. The program includes 204 films from sixty-seven countries, including thirty-eight world, international, or Asia premieres. This year, HKIFF has a special focus on Latin America, presenting seven films from the region, including New Order by Michel Franco, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, as well as 2015 Golden Lion winner Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box, and more. It also pays tribute to Tanaka Kinuyo, one of the most prominent actresses of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema and the country’s second-ever female film director, by screening all six of her seminal films foregrounding female representation and gender discourse in twentieth-century Japan.
From September to December, Hong Kong poet Yam Gong’s Moving a Stone, his first collection available in English, will be the selected publication for Hong Kong’s One City One Book program. One City One Book is a community program run by the Education University of Hong Kong with the aim of promoting reading and community engagement through events surrounding one publication over several months. Co-translated by James Shea and Dorothy Tse, Moving a Stone is a bilingual volume of Yam Gong’s poetry, with forty-three poems covering four decades of his creativity. Yam Gong was known for writing during breaks while working as a laborer since his teenage years; his poetry blends the everyday with philosophical musings, exhibiting a brilliant mix of Cantonese wordplay with slang, and folk tales with reported news. To provide more context for the general reader, the collection explains some of the Cantonese usage in its ending notes. Moving a Stone is published at more or less the same time as Yam Gong’s latest poetry anthology in Chinese, with a selection of 112 poems written from the 1970s onward.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Jasim Mohamed and Sami Said are this year’s two recipients of Klas de Vylder’s Grant Fund for Immigrant Writers, and both will receive 100,000 SEK. Every second year since 1994, the Swedish Writer’s Union has selected one or several immigrant writers to receive the grant, including the current Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed (1996) and Swedish-Czech-Polish writer Andrzej Tichý (2020), whose novel Wretchedness was reviewed in Asymptote’s 2020 July issue. This year’s recipient, Jasim Mohamed, is an Iraq-born poet and translator who debuted with the poetry collection Övningar i ett annat språk (Exercises in another language) in 2005, and is publishing his fourth book of poetry this year. The other recipient, novelist Sami Said, was born in Eritrea and grew up in Gothenburg. His first book, Väldigt sällan fin (Very rarely nice), was published in 2012; since then, he has published two more novels.
Another migrant writer from a different time is Signe Aurell, who migrated from Sweden to the US in 1913. She was only twenty-four years old when she arrived in Minnesota, where she became an activist for workers’ and women’s rights. Before moving back to Sweden in 1920, she published both poetry and essays, and her writing describes both homesickness and the struggle for a better future. Some years ago, translator and folklore scholar Marcus Cederström sent Signe Aurell’s poems to musicians Maja Heurling and Ola Sandström, and the couple has since toured Sweden with music based on Aurell’s poetry. This October, the tour crosses the Atlantic to visit Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois—all areas with large groups of Swedish settlers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In preparation of the US tour, four of the songs based on Aurell’s poetry have been translated into English by Maja Heurling, Ann-Charlotte Harvey, and Marcus Cederström.
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