Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering newly released audiobooks by the unofficial “hero of the Philippines,” the passing of one of Bulgaria’s most notable political figures and literary critics, and an award-winning translator’s appearance in New Delhi. From a night of chilling literature in Sofia to a bookstagrammer’s compilation of all Indian books in translation from 2022, read on to learn more!
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria
Although usually uneventful, January has so far proved a surprise for everyone who has taken a keen interest in the Bulgarian cultural scene.
Earlier this month, the local community lost the literary critic Elka Konstantinova. Throughout her life, the scholar, who passed away at the age of ninety, managed to balance an innate passion for the written word with a desire to bring about broader societal change by being an active participant in the country’s political life. In a recent report, the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency described her as “one of the key figures in Bulgarian politics after the fall of communism in 1989.” Her research encompassed diverse topics from the relationship between the fantasy genre and the world of today to the general development of the short story during specific periods of the twentieth century.
In other news, by the time you are reading this dispatch, the French Cultural Institute in Sofia will have begun preparations for its first Reading Night (Nuit de la Lecture). The event, organized in collaboration with the National Book Centre, is set to start today, in the late afternoon, and will last well past midnight. This year, the theme is “Fear in Literature” with a focus on fairy tales, criminal investigations, fantasy, dystopian science fiction, chilling essays, and more. Younger readers and their parents will have the chance to participate in several literary workshops and specially designed games that aim to ignite the public’s enthusiasm for books and stories.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
Two of Spanish-language writer José Rizal’s novels, The Lost Eden (Noli me tángere, 1887) and its sequel, The Subversive (El filibusterismo, 1891), are now available as audiobooks, read by BAFTA-nominated Liswati-British actor Richard E. Grant. Rizal, unofficially called “the national hero of the Philippines,” was an ophthalmologist, polyglot, nationalist, and polymath who advocated for institutional reforms of the colonial policies in the Philippines—a Hispanophone colony at the time. In 1896, at the age of thirty-five, he was executed by the Spanish colonial government, as his writings inspired the 1896–98 Philippine Revolution. His novels, Noli me tángere and El filibusterismo in particular, were—according to literary historians—emblematic of the birth of the Philippine’s collective consciousness as a “nation,” and also of the death of the Spanish Empire.
These novels in translation were first translated into the English by León María Guerrero III and published by Longman in the United Kingdom and the Indiana University Press in the 1960s, in time for the centenary of Rizal’s birth. ANC described Grant’s reading of Rizal as “a commanding, cinematic delivery, . . . [adding] new ways of imagining the author’s cast of characters.” The same Rizal novels were also part of the 100 titles recommended by the late National Artist for Literature, F. Sionil José. Released by the José family in time for the first anniversary of his death, the list also includes other titles from the best of Philippine literature in English (Nick Joaquin’s A Question of Heroes and Culture and History, Marra P.L. Lanot’s The Trouble with Nick and Other Profiles, and stories by Gilda Cordero-Fernando and Gregorio Brillantes). A recipient of Chile’s Premio Pablo Neruda (2004) and France’s Ordre des Artes et des Lettres (2000), José was considered as the country’s leading candidate to the Nobel and the most translated Filipino Anglophone writer.
Readers can learn more about Rizal from the biography, The First Filipino (1961), written by the botanist, pharmacist, statesman, and revolutionary, Guerrero, which won the José Rizal National Centennial Commission’s biography prize.
Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
International Booker Prize winning translator Daisy Rockwell was in the capital this past week for a layover between literary festivals as she made her way from the Dhaka Lit Fest to the Jaipur Literature Festival, the latter of which is currently ongoing. While here, she held a flurry of sessions and signing events, and was awarded the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award for 2023. In a report in The Indian Express, she says: “Languages are like people, sometimes you just like a language, sometimes you really don’t. And sometimes, you fall in love with a language. I don’t know why, but I fell in love with Hindi. It was like it became my life partner.” Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand also recently jointly won the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
In January, the Sahitya Akademi and Jnanpith Awards winning Kashmiri poet Rehman Rahi passed away at the great age of ninety-eight. In an obituary published in Outlook, Naseer Ganai describes his vital contribution to Indian literature: “Rahi is credited with salvaging Kashmiri from the shadow of Persian and Urdu which otherwise dominated the Kashmir Valley literary scene.”
On the subject of keeping languages and literatures alive, The Book of Bihari Literature, edited by Abhay K. has been rightfully praised for highlighting the linguistic diversity and literary history of the north Indian state of Bihar, available for the first time in English translation. Here is a short review.
Chittajit Mitra, an Indian book blogger on Instagram, painstakingly compiled all Indian books in translation that were published in 2022 on Twitter over the course of the year, which resulted in a final list of ninety-one translated works. He has already taken on the task of continuing it for 2023. One hopes that the International Booker win last year for the first South Asian book (and the first translated from the Hindi) is a marker of the rich variety of Indian literatures just waiting to be “discovered” and will lead to an even greater number of new English translations this year, especially from languages that remain largely missing and underrepresented in these arenas.
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