This week, our editors bring news of literary realms colliding, collaborating, and interchanging in future- and truth-seeking dialogues. In Kenya, a titan in publishing is commemorated, and a Nobel Laureate establishes presence in a Swahili translation. In Mexico, World Poetry Day is celebrated wit aplomb. And in the UK, the London Book Fair brings vital interrogations pertaining to literary translation in the age of AI. Read on to find out more!
Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from for Kenya
To paraphrase V.S. Naipaul, the world is what it is, and men who allow themselves to become something have a place in it. Such men, when death waylays them, come to define particular eras. Henry Chakava, a pioneer African publisher, is such a man.
On Sunday, March 24, Chakava was laid to rest. For a man who, from a young age and until his untimely demise, redefined publishing in Africa in many ways: publishing in Swahili and promoting publishing in African languages, focusing on educational publishing to promote literacy, diversifying traditional publishing to incorporate new literary thought besides the infamous African Writers Series. With this legacy, his death attracted reverential eulogies from across the book and knowledge industry. He had become the face of African book publishing when he became the managing director of Heinemann Educational Books, which he would eventually steer to a new dispensation under the banner of East African Educational Publishers, and his work endeared him to many in Africa and beyond, attracting global assignments including being named the chairman of Global Book Alliance in 2021. An ode to Chakava, surely, cannot be captured by a word-bound dispatch. All in all, go well, Chakava.
On Friday, March 24, Goethe Institute hosted a book reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise, in its Swahili translation, Peponi, by Dr. Ida Hadjivayanis of SOAS London. According to Dr. Hadjivayanis, whose translation of Paradise began before Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her translation was not word for word, but one of sense-making. Her reading of Peponi was appreciated by the audience for its sharpness and lyrical, Zanzibari islander tone, and it was followed by a panel on the politics of translation with Professor Geoffrey Kingei of Kenyatta University, Professor Elizabeth Orchardson-Mazrui, writer Tony Mochama of PEN Kenya, and veteran journalist Khainga Okwemba of Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, KBC. Attending the event made me appreciate the complexity of translation as practice, with the audience and panel exchanges ranging from gender differences between translators and authors, ethical choices, copyright issues, and inevitably, royalties. For instance, where Hadjivayanis made the point that translation has much to do with foreignising and not domesticating, Kingei argued that even when not translating word for word, sense is lost in a forest of words. Similarly, Kingei, who translated Orchardson-Mazrui’s children’s book, The Adventures of Mekatilili, commented on the gendered sensibility of translation, sharing an anecdote of the latter having intervened when she felt that the translation was masculine in its tonality.
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico
As happens every March 21, many authors, publishers, and institutes celebrated World Poetry Day. In Mexico City, Círculo de Poesía organized a “Poetry Night” at Casa de Francia, where they presented the book El gallo y la serpiente, an anthology of contemporary French poetry translated by Audomaro Hidalgo. They also recommended some of their newest books: Abismos quise decir by Sandra Lorenzano, which won the Clemencia Isaura Poetry Prize; Memoria del Desierto by Mijail Lamas; and La aguja en el pajar by Carmen Boullosa, winner of the Inés Arredondo Fine Arts Prize for Literature last year.
At Casa del Poeta—originally the house of Ramón López Velarde, and later turned into a museum—twenty-two poets reunited to read some texts written by David Huerta, one of Mexico City’s most beloved poets, who passed away a couple of years ago. The authors who came together included Coral Bracho, Javier Sicilia, and Hernán Bravo Varela.
Finally, as the perfect end to a poetry week, the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature awarded the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize 2024 to Luis Ángel Vargas Castro for his book El estómago de las ballenas. As the author stated, it took three years to write this collection, in which he delves into the role of human beings in climate change. “Maybe I arrived late to these topics, but I feel that I wrote the book at the right moment, after certain phenomena confirmed to me that this whole process of devastation is caused by the hand of human beings.”
Matthew Redman, Digital Editor, reporting for the UK
The event on everyone’s calendars this month was the London Book Fair, a place for publishers large and small to swap stories, conduct deals, and generate hype. As was the case in the last few fairs (forming a happy trend!), literary translators were out in full force, with stalls on the second floor and a post-fair gathering of translators at a pub around the corner. But a lot of the talk and thinking struck a fairly sombre note, with the spectre of AI looming over the publishing industry—and translators in particular.
The advent of complex AI hasn’t been good for translators, and te commercial translation sector has been effectively gutted as a result. Businesses have flocked to generative AI, leaving translators out in the cold—and why not? A machine can do a passable job at the kind of fluffy marketing copy or technical document that used to be the freelance translator’s bread and butter—and, crucially, they’re cheap and quick. As the tech gets better, there are fears of a similar ‘AI-pocalypse’ playing out in the arts. Much of the debate at the London Book Fair can be summed up as: “How worried should we be?” If the panel on AI in translation hosted by the BCLT was anything to go by: pretty worried indeed. There are signs that some publishers are already dabbling with generative AI on translation projects, as a time-saver if not a full-on replacement of the human element. Worse, the translations themselves are verging on the ‘good enough’; if you want a book translated on the cheap, you can put it through a machine and it won’t be total dross. The small ray of hope for literary translators is that it’s an open question as to whether discerning readers would ever tolerate reading a mechanical interpretation of a foreign author’s work. Would you read a machine-translated novel? Would you enjoy it?
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