This week on Asymptote, we’re your eyes and ears for updates on award seasons, special national literature features, and postcolonial discourse and strategy. Polish literature is soaring at a high after celebrated adaptations and translations are introducing new readers to long-loved works. From Hong Kong, the national security law once again catalyses questions in its suppression of writing, even as local writers are seeing much love abroad. in Puerto Rico, writers are questioning US-backed funding and its entrapments. Read on to find out more.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Poland
Autumn is Poland’s award season, and this year saw the prizes go to a variety of genres. For the first time since 2009, NIKE, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, went to a book of poetry: Jerzy Jarniewicz’s “erotically daring” collection Mondo Cane. Edward Pasewicz, whose novel Pulverkopf was also shortlisted, took home the coveted Angelus Prize for literature from Central Europe—only the second Polish book to win the accolade in the award’s twelve-year history. The Readers’ Angelus Prize went to Czech writer Jaroslav Rudiš for his novel Winterbergs letzte Reise, written in German and translated into Polish by Małgorzata Gralińska, and his publisher Książkowe klimaty scored another success with Bartosz Sadulski’s “literary fable and anti-historical reportage” Rzeszot, garnering the Kościelskich Prize.
Polish literature has enjoyed something of a boom in English, placing second in a recent survey conducted by The Bookseller, which is based on Nielsen BookScan data for the fifty-two weeks since April 16, 2022. The results show that in this period, translated fiction accounted for 11.4% of total fiction revenue, proving that we have moved even further from the proverbial 3%. Broken down into languages, 60% of the translations were from Japanese—unsurprising given that 99.7% of the total revenue was generated by manga. The next language, French, trailed at 6.1%, and Polish came in at third with 4.6%, beating translations from Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Norwegian. Much of this success appears to be linked to Andrzej Sapkowski’s blockbuster fantasy The Witcher, which has filled the Game of Thrones-shaped hole on Netflix; the first two volumes of the eight-part saga were translated by Danusia Stok and the remainder by David French, who went on to translate his Hussite Trilogy. Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize has also contributed to this success, as has the fact that Polish literature was the market focus at the 2017 London Book Fair.
Here’s hoping that this interest will extend to a slew of recent translations from the Polish. According to Her, “a book-length interview with the Mother of God” by Maciej Hen (recently interviewed on the Asymptote blog by fellow writer Wioletta Greg), was published by Holland House in Anna Blasiak’s translation on November 3. On the same day, Penguin Books released Anna Zaranko’s long-awaited translation of The Peasants, one of Poland’s most famous twentieth-century epics by the 1924 Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont. In What We Leave Behind: A Birdwatcher’s Dispatches from the Waste Catastrophe, translated by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and published by MacLehose Press on October 13, ornithologist and writer Stanisław Łubieński shows how consumer society has spun out of control, leading to the point of environmental catastrophe. Finally, Vine Editions, a new non-profit publisher based in Detroit with a focus on world literature, is about to bring out its first title, Piotr Paziński’s Bird Streets (Ptasie ulice) translated by Ursula Phillips.
Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
Controversy soon arose when the list of winners of the 16th Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature was released on October 24. Organised by Hong Kong Public Libraries since 1991, the Biennial Awards aims to commend the achievements of Hong Kong writers and promote the publication of their works. This year, though three works by Hong Kong poets Chow Hon-fai, Tsang Wing-chung, and Raymond Chan Li-choi were initially recommended for the prizes, they were omitted in the final list, likely due to the fact that their works have been banned from the shelves of Hong Kong public libraries for sensitive content—deemed inappropriate under Hong Kong’s national security law.
Despite the local political restrictions on literature, Hong Kong writing continues to make its way onto the international literary scene. French literary magazine Jentayu—a publication dedicated to the introduction and translation of Asian literature to the French-speaking world—recently published a special issue on Hong Kong letters. The works of fifteen Hong Kong writers and poets were translated into French in the issue, including prize-winning authors such as Xi Xi, Dung Kai-cheung, Xiaosi, and Tammy Ho Lai-ming. A launch party was held at the Hong Kong-based French bookshop Parentheses Librairie Française on November 11. Dung Kai-cheung, Lawrence Pun, Wong Yi, Louise Law, and Nicholas Wong—who were also among the authors translated and published in the issue—attended the event and read their works in their original languages, while Matthieu Motte provided a reading in French.
Meanwhile, German translator Karin Betz was invited to read and discuss her translation of renowned Hong Kong writer Jin Yong’s martial arts novels in Frankfurter Buchmesse this year. Although Jin Yong has been widely read among Chinese communities, and his works repeatedly adapted for TV and film throughout the years, his name was rarely known in Germany. Karin Betz’s German translation of Jin Yong’s The Legend of the Condor Heroes, published in 2020 in four volumes, brought the wonders of the author’s world of martial arts to German readers for the first time.
Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Puerto Rico
Funding for literature in Puerto Rico is rare; the local government is void of programs, and elites (customarily subservient to the colonizer and their own pockets) do not care much for local letters. However, this changed after the devastation left by Hurricane Maria in 2017 drew the attention of a few philanthropic organizations, but the sudden possibility of having literature funded by the United States has not come without anxieties. It has sparked a heated debate, mostly on social media, about the problems embedded in the asymmetrical colonial exchange and the perceived loss of artistic freedom.
While most writers in Puerto Rico have historically been against the colonial status of the island, younger writers are working around the conundrum from a different stance. The logic seems to be somewhat along the lines of: perhaps it is after all with the master’s tools that we will dismantle the master’s house—and in this case, the tools are the money. If our exploitation and the historical crime of colonialism continue to produce so much surplus for the United States, why shouldn’t take some of that money to ensure, at the minimum, our right to a dignified life and, while at it, bite the hand we do not want feeding us?
It is a well-known subversive strategy of postcolonialism. The problem, the other side of the debate thinks, is that it is not so easily executed; money comes at a high price. While most grants and prizes do not impose restrictions on writers regarding what they can and cannot write about, the risks they can take, or the forms they might explore, they have their own stated or unstated agendas. If they don’t impose at first, they certainly do reward those writers working along the lines of what such agendas seek to address. By rewarding only the writers that conform, they ultimately end up imposing certain styles, topics, or trends on the literary scene. Such agendas are also perceived by some as obeying to transient fashions, with an eye on market profits, and reward recipients are seen (justly or unjustly) as inauthentic, producing work that fits in nicely only to be rewarded. A critical claim is that, while these writers might think that they are outplaying the master in his own game, they are playing exactly by the master’s rules.
The debate presents us with a series of binds proper to the colonial situation, and the anxieties on both sides are grounded in real problems. Money is always represented in colonial discourse as a benevolent gift from the master; that narrative is untrue. Money is no gift, but the discourse that represents it as such holds power over the imagination of many, feeding the perception that Puerto Ricans are incapable of autonomy, perpetually in need of its colonizer for survival. Even when we know that the money is no gift, the colonial situation assures that the transactions, whereby it is given and received, are never taking place between equals. There is always an asymmetry, and in a sense, every time we receive money from the United States, we sign (willingly or not) the contract of our own submission.
In terms of freedom of speech, the bind is similar. At its most earnestly benevolent, colonial power creates tiny niches for the oppressed to speak out. The oppressed are allowed to speak only in as much as they speak the language of oppression, of catastrophe, of suffering, of inequality, etc. The oppressed are rewarded by the benevolent liberal master for crying out their outrageous and untenable situation—the more brilliantly, the more movingly, the more intellectually and literarily informed, the better. If the oppressed care to talk about something else, refusing to occupy the position of speech so kindly carved out by the colonizer, they are bound to accept invisibility and all the consequences invisibility entails. But visibility, which prizes and grants bring with them, is not an ancillary matter to artistry. Most artists and writers work with the hope of reaching a substantial audience, even if not necessarily to enter the mainstream. That is not a crime, nor should that by itself call into question the writer’s “authenticity.” Yet visibility has always been an issue for Puerto Rican writers, as commercial transactions with other Spanish speaking countries are impossibly expensive, and literary exchanges with the United States have been hindered by linguistic differences and a historical neglect in translation, not unmarked by racism.
But how to step outside of the system? It is impossible to shed dirty implications off of colonial money (and not only in art). Yet were there any “local money” allocated to writers, it wouldn’t be any less colonial, nor any cleaner nor less determined by specific agendas. Money does not grow on Papaya trees, and like everyone else, artists and writers should be able to live a decent life off of their work. While it is true that money does not make art good, it certainly enables the life and the production of the artist. At a time when making a living is becoming harder and harder, not only for artists but for everyone, claiming moral superiority because one hasn’t “given in” but has rather accepted the condition of living in economic precarity (or inherited family money or property) is not going to work for everybody. Nor is it a position necessarily worthy of praise. Perhaps some writers care for something other than moral purity—a willingness to impurity, which some also believe to be a mark of good art.
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