This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large bring us news on literary festivals, award-winning works, and poetry open-mics in Bulgaria, India, and the United States! From discussions of disinformation and machine translation at the Sofia International Literary Festival, to a poem performed in the Metaverse, to double-Booker wins in South Asia, read on to learn more!
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria
Writers are powerful creatures. They think up imaginary worlds that sometimes appear more tangible than the mundane reality most of us face on a daily basis. What happens, however, when malicious groups deliberately blur the line between illusion and fact in an attempt to sway public opinion in a specific direction? How does one fight disinformation, and can literature teach us to differentiate between the plausible and the ridiculous? These are only some of the questions the 2022 edition of the Sofia International Literary Festival, held December 6–11 during the Sofia International Book Fair, endeavored to answer.
Amelia Licheva, a literary critic and professor of literary theory at Sofia University, “St. Kliment Ohridski,” recently elaborated on the festival’s goal: “This year’s theme is Reading Comprehension, with a special emphasis on the ‘comprehension’ part. To illustrate this point, I will mention here one of the discussions that will be held under the title Forms of Substitution. The participants will tackle a variety of phenomena, such as the replacement of facts with fiction, the practice of imposing false interpretations, and manipulative statements in modern societies.”
Additionally, translator of Italian literature Daria Karapetkova hosted another notable event—a talk with the AI expert Yordan Darakchiev. When asked about the purpose of the discussion and its broader literary context, Karapetkova answered: “After the many critical remarks and jokes targeting the quality of machine translation, we are now realizing that artificial intelligence has actually come a long way. Thus, it is only natural to ask if machines are threatening to replace human professionals. Can we artificially reproduce the creative imagination of a translator? What areas of fiction remain within the domain of human interpretation alone?”
Last but not least, the most widely recognized participant in the discussions was Margaret Atwood, who attended via Zoom and explored the nature of war, the concepts of utopia and dystopia, and life and death in Eastern Europe.
Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
Last month, The Paradise of Food by Khalid Jawed was finally announced as the winner of the 2022 JCB Prize for Indian Literature. Translated from the Urdu by Baran Farooqi, it is the fourth translated book—and the first not originally written in Malayalam—to win the prize in the last five years. Furthermore, it was selected from a shortlist composed solely of translated books, a first in the prize’s history. Saloni Sharma, in her review for Scroll.in, writes that the novel subverts “reader expectations of the implied ambrosial pleasures of the kitchen, [as] Jawed’s protagonist quickly establishes the kitchen as ‘a dangerous place’, and food as portent, trigger, often a portal to unimaginable tragedy.” You can read a post-win interview with Jawed at Telegraph India, and an excerpt from the novel can be accessed on the JCB Prize website.
Indian translators—emerging and established—have done well when it comes to recent PEN grants. The PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, which give preference to “translators at the beginning of their career, and to works by underrepresented writers working in underrepresented languages,” recognized two projects by Indian translators for the grants awarded in 2023: Noor Habib and Zara Khadeeja Majoka’s translation from the Urdu of Oblivion and Eternity Within Me by Miraji, along with Priyamvada Ramkumar’s translation from the Tamil of White Elephant by B Jeyamohan. PEN Presents is a new award to support sample translations, with a first edition focused on India. Six winners across a spectrum of experience in translation, chosen from an extremely solid shortlist of twelve, represent four languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Kannada.
Finally, in a perceptive article for The Guardian, Sana Goyal muses about influence of the 2022 double Booker win—with Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Ameida/Chats With the Dead bagging the Booker, and Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, taking home the International Booker—on South Asian Literature. Meanwhile, continuing on from the last Around The World with Asymptote dispatch, the Hyderabad Literature Festival is set to be held from January 27–29 in hybrid format with live YouTube coverage. The sessions include many translators, among them Maya Pandit (Marathi), Shashi Trevett (Tamil), J Devika (Malayalam), and Sawad Hussain (Arabic). This literature festival has been running since 2010 and is back after a two-year pandemic break.
Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States
On Wednesday, November 30, the Mexican-American poet Mónica de la Torre opened the poetry open-mic Se buscan poetas/Poets wanted. Hosted and curated by Marcos de la Fuente, the event takes place on the last Wednesday of each month at the legendary Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, New York. Shortly before the event, De la Fuente gave a surprise performance of a poem about artificial intelligence in the Metaverse from New York to an audience in Miami.
De la Torre’s reading was the main event. She read both old and new poems, starting with one from her 2004 collaborative collection Taller de taquimecanografía, roughly translated to Typing Workshop, a common course in twentieth-century Mexican basic education. De la Torre performed a conceptual poem from this collection that drew from the language of advertisements selling women’s clothing—comical, irreverent, and absurd, it made us in the audience laugh. After this poem, de la Torre read from her 2020 collection Repetition Nineteen, a creative and experimental approach to translation. She began by performing the poem “Divagar,” which presents everyday life as both absurd but marvelous, exploring “a method that would be more open and porous to [her] everyday experiences in NYC,” which instead of distractions became material for creativity. After “Divagar,” she read two experimental self-translations into English of a poem she wrote in Spanish when she arrived in New York. Defying the idea of traditional translation, de la Torre’s are based on a creative principle or method. She commissioned the first translation to someone who knew little to no Spanish, resulting in a hilarious poem, while for the second translation she used the language of soccer, germane for the day in which Mexico was disqualified from the World Cup.
After de la Torre’s reading, many other poets, including myself, stepped onto the stage to read their work. Colored by the comforting purple neon-like lights of the club, the environment was joyful, warmed by a community relishing its love for poetry.
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