A world of news in this week’s roundup! From Ireland, discover the ambitious and innovative work of Macha Press, a collective pursuing a literature that is “international and intergenerational”; from Hong Kong and China, the fifteenth edition of the renowned International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong highlights the topic of translation; and from the Asymptote team as a whole, catch up on Han Kang, this year’s Nobel laureate in Literature.
The Asymptote Team, Reporting from our Fortnightly Airmail
And the winner of the Nobel is . . . Han Kang! After Annie Ernaux, the latest female winner in 2022, Han Kang is the eighteenth woman—and the first from South Korea—to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee’s citation commends her “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. Her works confront acutely difficult subjects with a rare fearlessness and sensitivity, whether it be the personal, as in the Booker International Prize-winning The Vegetarian—a feminist classic of modern Korean literature that offers a powerful rebuke to a world that too often silences women—or the historical in Human Acts, where she depicts the Gwangju student massacre of 1980. In an exclusive essay for our Winter 2016 issue, her longtime English translator Deborah Smith describes the impenetrable potency of her style in this book: “Whenever I translate her work, I find myself arrested by razor-sharp images which arise from the text without being directly described there . . . the images themselves are so powerfully evoked by the Korean that I sometimes find myself searching the original text in vain, convinced that they were in there somewhere, as vividly explicit as they are in my head.”
After checking out our coverage of her latest novel in English translation, Greek Lessons, dive into more Korean Literature in the two Special Features we organized in partnership with LTI Korea, available for free in our Spring 2018 and the Winter 2023 editions.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Ireland
One of the most significant events in recent Irish letters was the establishment of Macha Press in August and the subsequent announcement regarding its first two book launches, the debut already scheduled for October 17. Macha Press is a collective endeavour recently founded by seven poets with wide-ranging practices and experience: Siobhan Campbell, Ruth Carr, Natasha Cuddington, Shannon Kuta Kelly, Kathleen McCracken, Alanna Offield, and Lorna Shaughnessy. As stated in their first newsletter; “all founders are currently based on the island of Ireland and share a vision for the press that is international and intergenerational.” According to Lorna Shaughnessy, one of the founders, a poet-translator (featured in Asymptote Spring 2020), and a personal friend of mine, the aim of the press has always been to produce two books of poetry a year, one by an established or historical poet whose work the editors feel merits recovery, and one by an emerging poet.
Now, the first two poets have been selected: Eilish Martin—established Northern-Ireland poet and visual artist, whose last collection was Slitting the Tongues of Magpies no less than ten years ago—will see her newest collection published first, launching October 17; and Sam Furlong Tighe, a young Dublin-based poet, will have their first ever collection published in Spring 2025. People interested in poetry in Ireland (traditionally if not proverbially numerous) and media outlets are excitedly looking forward to the events of October 17—events, plural, as Macha Press already lives up to its word regarding interdisciplinarity and hybridity in its releases. For not only is Eilish Martin a poet as well as a visual artist, but she also combines the two in her work and specifically in the forthcoming collection, ! All’arme / ? And what…, replete with “verbal-visual improvisations” and presented in the event announcement as a “tête-bêche (head-to-toe) double book” of innovative hybridity. The book release, to be celebrated on Ulster University Campus in Belfast, will itself be a double event involving the book launch proper followed by an exhibition reception (‘sing/what draws/the eye’s belief’) coming with an alluring tagline: “book works, paintings & ephemera by Eilish Martin”.
These first two launches are indicative of the ambitious, innovative nature of the work being done at Macha Press. Lorna Shaughnessy herself being a celebrated, experimental, and subtle page-poet and editor-translator, and further internationally awarded for her collaborative film poems, reflects her and her co-editors’ approach to language and poetry as cross-artform innovation. From this fall’s return to a veteran Irish poet, to the spring’s fresh debut, and the many more launches from there, we can look forward to much mould-breaking Irish literature to come.
Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China and Hong Kong
In 2018, the poet Bei Dao held an extraordinary event at the edges of the Li River in Guilin, called “Back Then We All Had Dreams”. Across the waters, you could see a setting sun quieting the mountains into serrated layers of baby and dusky blue, distance drawing a translucent gradient into the sky setting lilac. As the poets read aloud, one was drawn at once to the starlight, to the shivering celestial cast upon the river currents, to the scent of green that unshrouded in innumerable scatters of leaves and fronds. The language touched everything and brought it into itself, multiplying in fragrance and colour and dimension. I imagine that Bei Dao must’ve had some sense of that resonance in mind when he said the following words: “Despite the clamour around us, we are actually experiencing a state of aphasia in the age of globalisation. And it is only poetry that can save our voice.”
This conviction of poetry’s necessity is a hallmark of Bei Dao’s work, and it is evident not only in his own powerful writings, rich with literary reference and cross-cultural dialogues, but in his continuous work to cement poeticism into public consciousness. From that effort has come countless workshops, lectures, and even a cultural space dedicated to reading and contemplation—but perhaps the most impactful fruit of this labour is the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, an annual event that rounds up poets from all over the world to conversate, engage on a common theme, and share their work.
Now in its fifteenth year, the 2024 edition of IPNHK took place from September 28 to October 1 in Hong Kong, and has since moved to the mainland for the rest of its tour, stopping at Nanjing, Shanghai, Qinhuangdao, and Shenzhen. Participating poets include Adonis, Masayo Koike, Eliot Weinberger, Frank Báez, Matthew Cheng Ching-hang, Olga Sedakova, Chen Xianfa, Daniela Danz, Wang Yin, and Lu Yating, among other invaluable voices, all giving their takes on this year’s theme: “The Margins of the Mother Tongue”. That’s right—it’s the subject most inextricable from an international poetry event: translation.
Bei Dao has said that translation exists within the bounds of the mother tongue–that it is “a part of one’s mother tongue”, which at first seems a bit contrary, considering that a great many translators work outside of their mother tongues, with some learning new languages simply for the sake of translating a certain beloved text. Yet we can also see the innate truth in what Bei Dao outlines when we elucidate the role of translators as writers, and translations as singular creative works. A “mother tongue” is the foundation of one’s voice, the base infrastructure of understanding and of expression; in translating, one is always trying to bring the foreign word within the realms of the mother tongue, within the boundaries of one’s own comprehension. As one critic posed the question: “Beyond the mother tongue, is it only silence?”
But as Adonis wrote: “The best thing one can be is a target— / crossroad / between silence and words.” The poets all sat in one room, bringing with them their different languages, their different countries, and their same dedication to language. As writers, we may be accustomed to thinking of margins as those sacred white spaces that we dare not muddy with text, but as Masayo Koike described the use of Chinese in her work, or as Frank Báez described using music to lead the unsuspecting to poetry, one began to conceive of margins more as the moving walls of the gallery, shifting to always accommodate new brilliances, drawing new formations and routes between them.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: