This week, the Asymptote team takes us across the globe for updates on all things literature. From the inaugural launch of a book fair in Japan, to the appearance of a popular novelist and throat singer at a book festival in Sweden, to the commemoration of a prolific poet and dear friend in Scotland, read on to learn more.
Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan
Tomorrow, March 22, Kobe, Japan will see its first ever KOBE BOOK FAIR & MARKET, held on Rokkō Island with over sixty vendors, some bookish and some local food booths. While the majority of participating booksellers and publishers are based in the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan district, companies from across the country will amass tomorrow to promote literature and reading as part of the Kobe BOOK Culture Revitalization Project, created in response to the dwindling number of bookstores in recent years.
The fair will feature four panel events, including a tell-all on the nitty-gritty of running a bookstore and a deep dive into the production of local magazines. The former will bring together three booksellers working in markedly different environments: Tatsuya Isogami from toi books, a small local bookstore, Osamu Horiuchi from the gargantuan bookseller Junkudo, and Takashi Sesako from Page Pharmacy, a half-pharmacy-half-bookstore designed to encourage more random encounters with literature for his patients. The three will share the challenges and rewards of their respective environments and together ruminate on their role as booksellers. Later in the afternoon, Chief Editor of SAVVY and Meets Regional magazines Masaki Takemura will sit down with Youhei Sanjou of ORDINARY BOOKS to discuss the status of bookstores in the Kansai region and the intricacies of editing a magazine rooted in local life.
Between shelves of new titles and local coffee stands, book enthusiasts at the inaugural KOBE BOOK FAIR & MARKET will take part in the revival of Japan’s literary culture, face to face with some of the industry’s top professionals. I myself look forward to dropping in to get a glimpse of where this community is headed.
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Sweden
This past weekend, March 14–16, Sweden’s largest literary festival Littfest took place in the northern town Umeå. Each year, around twenty thousand visitors gather for three days to enjoy seminars, author talks, and literary festivities with over 150 invited participants. This annual festival started in 2007 as a grassroots movement and a counter-effort against the increased commercialization of the book industry. One of the most popular participants this year was Inuk novelist, artist, and throat singer Tanya Tagaq, whose Saturday evening concert had to be relocated to the festival’s largest venue to accommodate the big interest. As a writer, Tagaq is most known for her novel Split Tooth from 2018 (Penguin Random House), which has been translated into multiple languages, including the French Croc fendu by Sophie Voillot, and the Swedish Spricktand by Nika Abiri. Last year, Tagaq published the children’s book It Bears Repeating. Tagaq is a member of the Order of Canada, and a Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner. She is from Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay) in Nunavut, in northern Canada.
Another Littfest participant was Innu poet and songwriter Joséphine Bacon from Pessamit in Quebec, whose work as a translator of Innu-aimun over the past four decades has played a key role in documenting and transmitting the Innu linguistic and cultural heritage. Just last month, Bacon was introduced in Swedish translation for the first time, with her poetry collection Uiesh / Någonstans (Rámus Förlag). One of the events at the festival included a dialogue between Bacon and her Swedish translator Johan Sandberg McGuinne, a South Sami and Scottish Gaelic writer and yoik artist, living in Likssjuo (Lycksele) in Sweden.
Further south, the Swedish audio streaming service Spotify announced recently that their in-house publishing house Spotify Audiobooks is looking for new fiction scripts written for audio. Spotify is only interested in the audiobook rights, leaving authors free to publish on paper and in ebook format elsewhere if they wish to do so. The streaming company is primarily interested in short novels of ten to twenty thousand words, written specifically for the audio format, in the genres romance, mystery/thriller, or sci-fi/fantasy.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Scotland
Jerome Rothenberg passed away last year aged 92 after a career spanning short of seventy years of poetry writing, anthologizing, translation, and performance. Collections such as Poland 1931, anthology series such as Poems for the Millennium, assemblages such as Technicians of the Sacred—alongside their poetic-shamanistic background—or concepts like “total translation”—informing both writing and performance—are just a few of his internationally acclaimed contributions. After a number of commemorating events in North America, University of Glasgow (GU) is now—through its Advanced Research Centre (ARC)—the first major non-American institution to host a celebration of the poet’s international legacy: The Anthology as Manifesto.
The event is taking place today and tomorrow (March 21–22) in the ARC Building and the Memorial Chapel, both on GU campus, and the rich programme includes talks, performances, exhibits, and a film-screening. The featured poets, translators, and academics represent, as the organizers put it in the announcement, Jerome Rothenberg’s “influence [and following] outside that of North America,” that is, from continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Ibero-America. Among the highlights are Chilean-born Cecilia Vicuña (who contributed an article on Rothenberg’s milestones and her own lifetime collaborations with the poet to the latest issue of Poetry), Zoë Skoulding, Scott Thurston, Jeffrey Robinson, Maggie O’Sullivan, Jane Goldman, Felipe Cussen, Rachel Robinson, Rhys Trimble, the poet’s son Matthew Rothenberg, and an impressive host of others. Legendary poet, poetics essayist, and translator—and lifetime contributor of Rothenberg’s—Pierre Joris was also initially on the bill but unexpectedly passed away last month.
One of the most appealing items on the rich program will be the launch of Rothenberg’s posthumous anthology The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to the Present (2024), coedited with Javier Taboada, who will be there in person for the event. Another much sought for event is the showing of Colin Still’s Vot Am I Doink Here?, a ninety-minute film on the life and work of Jerome Rothenberg.
I had the honor to be invited myself to participate in The Anthology as Manifesto in my capacity as poet, translator, and computationally assembled poetry anthologies editor, having collaborated with Rothenberg on several occasions. I met Jerry, as Rothenberg would generously have everybody call him, at University of California San Diego and San Diego State University—where my Fulbright research project sponsor, Ilya Kaminsky, introduced us to each other—thirteen years ago, in person, when I was in fact already a longtime fan of his. Our multiple writing and performance projects took us together from California to Romania to Vietnam among other places, and this event, while a commemoration, feels in fact like picking up where we left off just yesterday and rocking the house once more as only he could enable people around him to do.
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