Posts by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

A Word Misunderstood, A Siege: An Interview with Maria Borio on the Italian Lyric

June 18, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Translation is, rhythmically, a second twin birth.

Plunging into poet and literary historian Maria Borio’s Italian-language collection, Trasparenza (2019), one finds a riveting poetic study on the human gaze, dis/connections of touch, and visual intimacies of modernity. This collection was later brought to the Anglosphere as Transparencies (2022/2025) in Danielle Pieratti’s translation for World Poetry Books. In Braci: La poesia italiana contemporanea (2021), the celebrated scholar Arnaldo Colasanti painted an intriguing portraiture of Trasparenza, describing a blend of the pure and the impure, like the digital screen, an evocation of the imagistic clarity of snow and glass, ether and windows. For Colasanti, Trasparenza reveals desire only for it to be erased and emptied. However, he cautions against reading Dr. Borio’s poetry merely as abstract and argues instead that her work presents a resistance against the concrete, existing in a space that is tactile yet fleeting, spiriting language away towards solitude, lyrical disunity, and oblivion.

In this conversation thoughtfully translated from the Italian into English by Danielle Pieratti, I spoke with Dr. Borio, currently in the central Italian city of Perugia, on her poetry collections, particularly Trasparenza (Transparencies), and the poets and critics that define the Italian lyric tradition.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut into the Anglosphere, Transparencies (trans. Danielle Pieratti, World Poetry Books, 2022), saw a re-edition in May 2025. Could you tell us what your creative ethos was when writing the poems in Trasparenza (2019)?

Maria Borio (MB): The English translation of Trasparenza led to a book that is slightly different from the Italian original; in fact, we even reconsidered the order of the poems and their division into sections. I would say that it became a transcontinental collection or, if you could call it this, a form of transatlantic poetry. I believe that the book’s core—thinking about transparence in our time—resonated naturally in response to these changes. How can poetry represent certain issues pertaining to those who live in the Western part of the planet—a realm in the midst of redefinition? Transparence connotes our relationships, real and mediated, as well as our way of living, of constructing, of being in the world. Isn’t the language of algorithms also presented as transparent? And can’t we say the same about AI? With one provision: taking care to avoid reducing our relationships and actions to a surface-lacking substance, which has only instrumental ends. From Italian to English, therefore, the book’s interrogation of these problems intensified: how do we avoid making transparence a double game? How do we prevent ourselves from getting caught up in common sense, or slipping into hypocrisy (even when we need it to survive…), or forgetting what responsibility means—and not just responsibility to ourselves.

AMMD: Looking back at your first poetry collection, L’altro limite (2017), and then to Trasparenza, what would you say are the most notable shifts in your poetic vision and approach to writing? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 13, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Miranda Mazariegos

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and Latin America!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on the global literary scene. In the Philippines we celebrate the anniversary of the country’s most significant superheroine, and in the United States scholars of Latin American and Caribbean literature convene to discuss methods of promoting alternative and countercultural literary production.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the Philippines

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the Philippines’ iconic komiks superheroine Darna, honouring a dramatis personae turned cultural cornerstone. Created by writer Mars Ravelo (1916-1988) and artist Nestor Redondo (1928-1995), Darna debuted on 13 May 1950 in Pilipino Komiks #77 during the ‘Golden Age of Comic Books.’ The character has since headlined fifteen movies, four primetime television series, stage plays, video games, and more, securing her status as a queer pop icon and an emblem of the nation’s unyielding spirit.

The story centres on Narda, a working-class girl with mobility impairment who transfigures into a flying superheroine by swallowing a stone carved with ‘Darna’ and shouting her name. The stone, originally from another planet, remains in her body, with only her grandmother and younger brother Ding, her sidekick, knowing her secret. José B. Capino, in Contemporary Asian Cinema (2006), outlines Darna as ‘arguably one of local cinema’s most popular and representative figures,’ comparing her with America’s Wonder Woman. Unlike Diana’s aristocratic (even demigod) roots, Narda’s working-class, disabled background reflects her Global South origins. READ MORE…

Death Will Come in a Single Reckoning: An Interview with Oisín Breen on the Irish Avant-Garde

June 4, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

People do, in fact, want to read and hear work that is pursuing art, first and foremost. . .

Irish poet and performer Oisín Breen’s second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was released in 2023 by Downingfield Press and has been highly praised by World Literature Today, The Scotsman, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. The collection draws on the sagas of the goddess Étaín from Irish mythology, weaving together a brocade where the mythic past meets an experimentalist future. Breen describes his work as employing ‘a smattering of other languages’ alongside English, most notably his Irish native-tongue.

Born in Dublin, Breen has established himself as a prominent voice in the Irish avant-garde, with his work featured in more than a hundred literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across over two dozen countries. He is a poet at home in the so-called ‘world republic of letters’, connecting the local with the universal. His next book, The Kerygma, is due in September through Salmon Poetry.

 In this interview, I spoke with Breen, currently in Edinburgh, about Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, his creative process, his use of language, and the intersection of myth and modernity in his work.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, was re-released last year by the Melbourne-based Downingfield Press. Could you tell me about how you wrote the title poem?

Oisín Breen (OB): The title poem, ‘Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín’, owes its genesis to the moment the curtain fell at the committal of my oldest and dearest friend’s mother.

My friend was so strong throughout the day, and in the run-up, joking, sharing, helping, always there for all those who loved his mother—including many who knew the iterations of her long before my friend was a glint in her eye. She was wise, kind, deeply loving, spiritual, playful, cheeky, mischievous, and passionate. Yet when the curtain fell, well, I saw my friend shatter, briefly, into so many pieces; but it was the way he shattered that was astoundingly beautiful. The word that came immediately to mind was ‘Godstruck’.

I knew then that I had to write this physical reality, this metaphysical reality. It had the awe of a medieval painting. It was inspiring in the truest sense of the word. So, write it I did, in my own way, weaving together myth, narrative, and a long meditation on the way in which iterations of ourselves through time form a communal being that perennially negotiates its own status as an identity creature/function/process. And then juxtaposing that with the total awegrief at a funeral, at a death, when one is present to a whole human for the first time, as they cohere slowly into a single vanished point that then branches out again into so many new forms. The fact that she who had passed was not only a mother, or a friend, she was a lover, she was sexual, she was playful, she probably carried a million doubts, and a million seeds of friendships, some of which bloomed, and some that didn’t—it is all this that I worked to try and capture, to hew and to weave, and I do hope that, in some small measure, I did. READ MORE…

Along a Spine of Dreams: An Interview with Judith Santopietro on Nahuatl as Heritage Language

May 15, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I attempt to have my writing reflect the process of not having inherited a language due to colonization.

 Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa (translated by Ilana Luna and published by Orca Libros in 2019) was sketched by the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi as “a book that dialogues with nature” with “a sensitivity that picks up on the sublime, the cosmovision, the song and the spiritual elements.” Through those poems, Santopietro enables her readers to hear Incan hymns from a distance while marveling at the mountainscape of the great Andes. Her debut poetry collection, Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010), was praised by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón in Indigenous Cosmolectics (2018) as a mold-breaking contribution to Nahua women’s poetry, in league with Yolanda Matías García, another Nahua poet. In mediating on her heritage language and its capacity to evoke such vivid scenes, Santopietro reveals: “I experiment with the language, Nahuatl, into my poems to recreate sounds, rhythms, and even some memories of my foremothers.’”

In 2004, Santopietro, whose writings in Spanish have elements of the Nahuatl, Quechua, and Aymara languages, also founded Iguanazul, a translingual literary magazine that promotes the oral literatures and traditions of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The publication has since featured vital contemporary voices such as Irma Pineda, Macario Matus, Inti Barrios, Martín Rodríguez Arellano, Celerina Patricia Sánchez Santiago, Esteban Ríos Cruz, Mikeas Sánchez, and Kalu Tatyisavi—in both original texts and Spanish translations. Following this intersection between languages and heritages, individual expression and political representation, I spoke with Santopietro on how Mexikano as a silenced heritage percolates into her original writings in Spanish as a Nahua descendant, the collection Tiawanaku, and how she probes into displacement, language extinction, and indigeneity. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You write mainly in Mexican Spanish, your mother tongue. Your writings, however, borrow from other languages such as Quechua, Aymara, and most especially your heritage language, the Nahuatl of Mexico’s largest group of indigenous peoples, the Nahua. Could you tell us more about these choices, political, ancestral, and beyond—as a poet, essayist, and translator?

Judith Santopietro (JS): Yes, as you mention, my mother tongue is Mexican Spanish—which is so close to the Nahuatl language because of all the influences that remain in our daily speech, like the diminutives that show affection. We say, “¿quieres agüita?, ¿se te antoja un tamalito? ¿te sirvo un chocolatito?”; and without realizing it, Nahuatl words slip in.

Beyond the lexicon that has remained in Mexican Spanish, there are also other, more specific manifestations like forms of healing, prayer, sowing, cooking, and even the arrangement of space in my aunt’s house, all of which led me to make the political, ancestral decision to study Nahuatl—which is called Mexikano in the town where my paternal family is from. My aunt once told me that my grandmother Otilia spoke Mexikano, but unfortunately she died young, and I couldn’t hear her speak. Still, that was doubtlessly another reason I decided to study this language.

I wasn’t immersed in the natural listening-learning process of this language because after her, no one else spoke it, but Nahua stories and beliefs remained in the rural-indigenous region where my family comes from, and they have completely influenced my writing to this day. That’s where my decision to consider myself a Nahua descendant comes from. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 9, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from the Philippines, Canada, and Guatemala!

This week, our team members report on writers resisting governmental oppression, newly collected poems, one of the largest multilingual literary festivals in North America, and more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Writer, translator, and Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women organiser Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, whose imprisonment PEN International has denounced as ‘a stark reminder of how governments silence female voices to suppress dissent’, has rolled out an unprecedented bid for the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman student council while incarcerated under questionable charges.

The 36-year-old Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Malikhaing Pagsulat (Creative Writing in Filipino) student was arrested in 2020 for alleged illegal possession of firearms—an allegation she and several civil liberties organisations say is made-up. Amanda continues to write and translate behind bars, publishing her collection of poems, prose, and plays, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation, Gantala Press) in 2023, and receiving fellowships from writing workshops like the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (which she attended virtually) in 2024. READ MORE…

Devoured, Like Snow Into Sea: Ye Lijun and Fiona Sze-Lorrain on Chinese Nature Poetry

April 9, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Art is from the same source as poetry, and what comes from the mind will eventually return to the mind, as long as one keeps exploring.

 In an interview from The Kenyon Review, the poet Ye Lijun (叶丽隽) confesses: “I feel and think of myself as a nature poet, not a contemporary Chinese pastoral poet,” perhaps revealing the specificities of genres in Chinese ecoliterature. Poetry within Chinese nature writing comes in loose nomenclatures: among others, there is shanshui shi (山水詩), the poetry of mountains, rivers, and landscape; tianyuan shi (田園詩), the poetry of fields, gardens, and farmstead; and shanshui tianyuan shi (山水田園詩), nature poetry. This latter category is brilliantly displayed in My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019), the first bilingual publication of Ye, a promising poet of the post-70s generation.

The book explores the visceral connections between the poet and the landscape she inhabits, with its poems taken from Ye’s three Chinese-language poetry collections and translated by her long-time translator, the award-winning writer, poet, and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain—named in Chinese Literature in the World: Dissemination and Translation Practices (2022) as one of the most prolific translators of modern Sinophone writings. In this conversation, kindly mediated by her translation, I spoke with both Ye (in Lishui) and Dr. Sze-Lorrain (in Paris) on this English-language debut, and how their book speaks to the larger body of Chinese nature poetry.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

April 4, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Charlie Ng, and Sofija Popovska

A growing boycott movement in the Philippines, Macedonia's most prestigious poetry award, and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival!

This week, our editors bring you the latest on a prestigious poetry award in North Macedonia; a Filipino comics movement leading the boycott of the Frankfurt Book Fair; and Hong Kong’s ever-exciting and evolving international intersections in letters.

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

Throughout the years, the main event in the Macedonian literary scene has been the Struga Poetry Evenings’ awarding of the prestigious Golden Wreath, which has gone to lauded writers such as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes. This year, the prize is given to the Slovak poet Ivan Štrpka; the decision to crown him as this year’s laureate was unanimous, for his “rich, authentic and significant poetic corpus created over six decades.”

Štrpka, born in 1944, has maintained an engaged approach to art from the beginning of his career, committing himself to both moral and aesthetic values and continually incorporating contemporaneous cultural themes. In the 1960s, together with the poets Ivan Laučík and Peter Repka, he founded the poetry group Osamelí bežci (Lonely Runners), and together they composed a manifesto celebrating “freedom of thought . . . individual responsibility and the rejection of communist dictatorship and censorship”—which  was subsequently banned. (For those interested in finding out more, a documentary titled Lonely Runners: Moving On!, directed by Martin Repka, was released in 2019 and focuses on the friendship of the three members.)

Štrpka’s priorities are embodied in his writing, which illuminates—in the words of poet and member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts Katica Kulavkova—“everyday life . . . fragments [of] interpersonal relationships, the relationships between man and woman . . . individual and society . . . the physical and the emotional.” Kulavkova also notes that the “intimate, meditative, communicative . . . dimension” of Štrpka’s work is in many ways achieved via his poetic style, which she describes as “unpretentious [and] subtle” and “filled with detail.” READ MORE…

The Cosmos, in Rhythm: Rebecca Kosick on Hélio Oiticica and Brazilian Neoconcrete Poetry

March 24, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Language can’t instantiate an experience of, say, touch in the same way that actually touching something can, which is language’s limitation.

Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) remains one of most visionary artists to emerge from Rio de Janeiro’s Neoconcretismo movement, along with prominent artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, and poet Ferreira Gullar. Oiticica’s art has been described as a “radical and compelling rethinking of mid-century Modernism,” and he is known as a painter, installation artist, and sculptor. He eventually moved to New York in 1970 partly because of the state-sanctioned censorship in the arts by the then-militaristic authoritarian regime in Brazil.

 Less widely recognized is Oiticica’s contribution as a poet. More than four decades after his death, Soberscove in Chicago and Winter Editions in New York jointly published Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics (2023), a collection of his handwritten poems from 1964 to 1966, translated from the Brazilian Portuguese. Dr. Rebecca Kosick’s translation of this visual poetry collection demonstrates that Oiticica’s poetry is, as she has argued elsewhere, “a lyric that stills the sensible for the “reader” to perceive.” Dr. Kosick, herself a poet and scholar whose studies revolve around the question of how language and media intersect in contemporary pan-American poetry (Anne Carson, Augusto de Campos, Lygia Pape, Juan Luis Martínez), has previously debunked the idea of Latin American visual art (and visual poetry) as “a passive recipient of inherited European forms.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Kosick about the enduring legacy of Hélio Oiticica and the Neoconcretismo movement of mid-twentieth century Brazil, as well as her own body of work as a theorist and practitioner of poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The art historian Claire Bishop describes the work of Hélio Oiticica as “social and political in inclination, engaging with the architecture of the favelas and the communities that lived there.” Bishop also makes the case for Hélio’s focus on viewer perception, interactivity, and lived experience (vivências) as pivotal to the history of installation art. Could you tell us about Oiticica’s socioaesthetic and ethnopolitical roots and beliefs as a visual artist?

Rebecca Kosick (RK): In a 1966 interview for the magazine A Cigarra, the interviewer, Marisa Alvarez de Lima, asks Oiticica: “Are you an anarchist?” and he replies, “in body and soul.” Oiticica’s grandfather had been a prominent anarchist and was publisher of the newspaper Ação Direta (Direct Action), so these were ideas that Oiticica grew up with. What anarchism meant for Oiticica can sometimes be a little hard to pin down, and he wasn’t as directly involved in organized political activity as, say, his poet-collaborator Ferreira Gullar, who led the Communist Party in the state of Rio de Janeiro for a time. But it’s clear that elements of anarchism were central to Oiticica’s framework for being in the world, and for being with other people. In later interviews, he talks about certain values he picked up from his grandfather that stayed with him for his entire life—for instance, his grandfather, when being summoned to take part in a jury (which was compulsory), talked about how he would agree to show up but would say right away: No matter the crime, I will never vote to convict. Oiticica talks about this as an extremely important lesson and says that sending someone to prison is the worst crime of all. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Mary Noorlander

The latest in literary news from the Philippines and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us from the Philippines to the United States for updates on literature around the globe. From an eclectic and exciting annual book festival to the grand re-opening of a local queer-owned bookstore, read on to learn more. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the Philippines

The 2025 Philippine Book Festival (PBF) is set to take place from March 13-16 in SM Megamall’s Megatrade Hall in Mandaluyong City of the country’s capital region.

While I’m particularly excited to dive into Ang Propeta (Southern Voices, 2023), Layla Perez’s Filipino translation of Kahlil Gibran’s book of prose poems, The Prophet, the 2025 PBF lineup offers something for every participant: a cosplay event of characters from Philippine literature, panel discussions of contemporary queer and women writers, and a book talk on graphic novelist M.A. del Rosario’s Gods of Manila. The festival’s itinerary also includes a crime fiction panel, workshops on zine-making, book illustration, and writing in Baybayin (the script used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century central Luzon), and sessions on pitching stories to filmmakers (led by studios Gushcloud Philippines and J Creative Entertainment). Festival-goers can enjoy a poetry slam, a Balagtasan (Filipino debate using rhymed verse), and book talks with authors of boys’ love (BL) and girls’ love (GL) fiction.

READ MORE…

Return to the Prodigal Country: Gilbert Ahnee and Ariel Saramandi on the Mauritian Novel

February 26, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

As a writer, translator and most of all reader, I appreciate it tremendously when I see characters speaking in a way that feels true to themselves.

In 1989, Gilbert Ahnee, a then-rising figure of Mauritian journalism, ventured into the world of fiction with the release of Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel to date. Published by Éditions du Centre de Recherches Indianocéanique, Exils is an intimate inquiry into self-banishment and belonging, described by Charles Bonn and Xavier Garnier in Littérature francophone: Le roman (Éditions Hatier, 1997) as a largely autobiographical novel that was written upon Ahnee’s return to Mauritius after a period of study in France, illustrating the sense of exile that is felt even by those living in the very heart of the homeland—the novel being an explicit cri d’amour, or cry for love, for the French language.  

Thirty-five years later, in 2024, Exils was introduced to the Anglosphere when The White Review, a London literary magazine, included a translated excerpt in an anthology celebrating fiction and nonfiction prose from across the world. The translator, Ariel Saramandi, is a British-Mauritian essayist whose book Portrait of an Island on Fire (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June 2025) was described as ‘a searing account of Mauritius’. Her translation offers a delicate rendering of Ahnee’s prose, sustaining its emotional nuances while opening it up to a new audience. 

In this interview, I spoke with Ahnee and Saramandi, both in Mauritius, on the resonances of Exils in today’s world and the evolving legacy of exile in Francophone Mauritian novels.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The excerpt of Exils (Exiles) published in The White Review’s ‘Writing in Translation’ anthology (in Ariel Saramandi’s translation) bespeaks alienation—cultural, geolinguistic, spiritual—mixed up with indifference, boredom, and frustration. I love that we have the character Jean Louise, in his quarter-life crisis, who embodies how exile gnawingly takes on different shapes:  

But I felt that true apathy of not being able to share in their pleasures. I was indifferent to the sea. The sea and its transient vehemence, always the same.

Gilbert, could you take us back to the years leading up to the novel’s publication in 1989? Could you share insights into your creative process?

Gilbert Ahnee (GA): When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, I was 16. I felt, deeply, that my generation would make an unprecedented, but as yet undefined, contribution to our country’s evolution. As a matter of fact, the most groundbreaking changes of the time—political, societal, cultural—were brought about by those who came back from university.  My high school classmates were preparing to go abroad, but my family couldn’t afford to sponsor my university education and so I landed a secondary teaching job as an undergraduate physics teacher. In class I taught physics to young boys and adolescents, but in the staff room I benefited from senior colleagues’ advice as regards to literature. I first started by reading nineteenth-century authors: a few English writers, but many more French and Russian novelists such as Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. That was my first real exposure to the novel. Over the years, I kept on consolidating that interest for novels from around the world, from Truman Capote to William Boyd, Mark Behr to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mario Vargas Llosa to Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk to Pierre Lemaitre. My curiosity for novels is unquenchable. I’m happy that readers noticed, in Exils, allusions to the world of Camus and Proust.

AMMD: Ariel, what inspired you to translate Exils, a French novel published nearly four decades ago, into English? What significance does the novel hold for you as a British-Mauritian writer who grew up in Mauritius?

Ariel Saramandi (AS): This is such a wonderful, intricate question! So perhaps, to start: I’ve used ‘British-Mauritian’ a lot in describing myself abroad, not so much out of a sense of dual nationality—though I am indeed both British and Mauritian—but because all the essays I produced until November 2024 were written under an autocratic government regime. Saying I was ‘British’, even if I never really felt British, was a way for me to signal—hopefully!—that I couldn’t be charged with defamation or imprisoned without the British embassy knowing about it. Asserting my dual nationality in that way felt like a ‘word of warning’ to Mauritian authorities, a ‘technique’ that felt ridiculous—I’ve never been to the British embassy in my life or know anyone who works there. But I’ve also never been troubled, politically, for my work. READ MORE…

Ten Thousand Burdens: Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ on the Hanmun

February 13, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the language is not working in a literal sense; it’s trying to evoke an imaginary landscape, and do so aesthetically.

Translators Ian Haight and T’aeyong Hŏ have forged a remarkable partnership in bringing the timeless beauty of classical Korean poetry to English readers. Their work spans centuries, breathing new life into poetic masterpieces originally composed in hanmun, or ‘literary Sinitic’, the written language of Korea’s past. Together, they have delivered evocative English renditions of Borderland Roads (2009) by Hŏ Kyun and Magnolia and Lotus (2013) by Hyesim—both of which were catalogued in The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature (2022). Their more recent projects include Ch’oŭi’s meditative An Homage to Green Tea (2024) and the eagerly anticipated Spring Mountain (forthcoming June 2025) by the poet Nansŏrhŏn, all from White Pine Press, a New York-based publisher.

Through their Korean Voices series, White Pine Press has long been a bridge between Korean literary tradition and global readership, featuring works by writers Park Bum-shin, Ra Heeduk, Park Wan-suh, Shim Bo-seon, Eun Heekyung, and translators Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee, Suh Ji-Moon, Kyoung-Lee Park, and Amber Kim, further cementing its role as a vital conduit for transcultural dialogue.

In this interview, I spoke with both Ian, based in Ramstein, Germany, and T’aeyong, in Pusan, Korea, on translating poetry originally written in hanmun, as well as the historical and contemporary divides between what’s revered as cosmopolitan and what’s relegated as vernacular—in language and broader cultural contexts.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): For readers who can read Korean literature only through translation, could you briefly explain what hanmun is? Why did Korean poets, before the invention of the Korean script (kungmun or chosŏnmun) in the mid-fifteenth century, write in this orthography? Additionally, how distinct are classical and contemporary language, ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ language, and written and spoken language in the modern Korean literary landscape?

Ian Haight (IH): Hanmun is the Korean use of classical Chinese to write literature. Kungmun is an older term for what we now call hangul in South Korea, which is the contemporary written language of South Korea. Chosŏnmun is pretty much the same thing as hangul, but it is for North Korea. There are some regional dialectical differences between chosŏnmun and hangul, and owing to the political ideologies of North and South Korea, there are also some differences in the words and how some words are written.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

February 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Ibrahim Fawzy, and Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Egypt, and the Philippines!

This week, our team members take us to festivals around the world — from comics in France, to Filipino children’s literature in Italy, to Bedouin poetry in Egypt, read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

A little over a year ago, I wrote a dispatch for this column about the 2024 Festival Internationale de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême, an annual celebration of the art of the graphic novel. Visual storytelling has always been a staple of French literature, going as far back as Renaissance-era illustrated manuscripts, but the modern art of the bande-dessinée (often referred to as the Ninth Art) is thought to have taken root in the early 19th century.

In countries like the US, graphic novels are often considered to be for children, which is a shame because they have the potential to add a fascinating element to storytelling. As someone who is incredibly passionate about the genre, I was thrilled to see the festival come back in full swing this past weekend for its 52nd year. As one of the largest comics festivals in the world, it hosted hundreds of thousands of participants and countless illustrators and authors for a weekend of workshops, exhibitions—including one on the work of last year’s Grand Prix winner, Posy Simmonds—and industry discussion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

January 10, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas and Christina Chatzitheodorou

The latest from Greece and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring us news of ongoing efforts to address the daily relevance of poetry in Greece, as well as lauded film adaptations in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Greece

Various events have taken place to ‘seal off’ 2024. At Zatopeck Book Café, a big poetry night took place on the evening of December 27, in which a dozen young poets read their poems amidst the holiday atmosphere. Among the participants are: Dimitris Angelis, Eleni Athanasiou, Eleni Alexiou, Panagiotis Arvanitis, Anna Afentoulidou, Anna Vasiadi, Eleni Velenza, Gerasimos Voutsinas, Eleni Galani, Valia Gentsou, Thodoris Gonis, Spyros Goulas, Stella Dumou, Stella Dumou, and many more.

On the same day, at a different spot in Athens, the Vakhikon Editions and Enastron Book Café hosted an event organised by the poets Eftichia Katellanaki, Irini Paradisano and Evangelia Tatsis in collaboration with Kapou Opa, entitled ‘Does Christmas “urgently” need poetry?’ Τhe contemporary urgency that penetrates every aspect of daily life within Greece and beyond affects not only the poets but their work as well; sometimes, poetry’s response is to become a political protest against the injustices that we experience, or it becomes the very medicine against the sepsis characterising our world. READ MORE…

Gestures of the Light, Shadow of Things: Kayvan Tahmasebian on Persian Poetry and Activist Translation

January 9, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Why should we accept the universal validity of the categories that the West creates for self-description?

Born and raised in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, Dr. Kayvan Tahmasebian is a writer and scholar whose work examines Persian literature’s place in the constellations of what is labeled as ‘world literatures’, and a poet and translator working on Persian, English, and French. Dr. Tahmasebian’s co-translation of House Arrest (with Rebecca Ruth Gould, Arc Publications, 2022) by Iranian poet Hasan Alizadeh was recently shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, and he has translated and studied Persian-language texts from ancient Persian astrology and dream writing to contemporary Iranian modernist poetry.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Tahmasebian on his translations from the Persianate literary world, both modern and from antiquity, as well as the potential expansion of activism through translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): First of all, congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation for co-translating Hasan Alizadeh’s avant-garde House Arrest (Arc Publications, 2022). You also worked with Rebecca Ruth Gould on your translation of High Tide of the Eyes (2019) by Bijan Elahi, one of the figureheads of Iranian modernist literature. Could you tell us the experience of translating both Alizadeh and Elahi?

Kayvan Tahmasebian (KT): Bijan Elahi is a highly experimental poet and translator in modern Persian poetry. He moves through different language registers—formal, colloquial, archaic, even obsolete ones. He’s also a difficult poet. His poetry is intricate and can be quite challenging in its images and structures. For me, translating Elahi was an exercise in trying to grasp his poetic fluidity. And by ‘grasp,’ I mean something similar to what a photographer does when capturing a fleeting moment—seizing something that’s just passing by. The tough part was that his language is so volatile, and the perspectives he offers on his subjects can be so intuitive, that they sometimes clash with English poetry, which tends to be more discursive and analytical.

Hasan Alizadeh is almost the opposite of Elahi in many ways. It is the simple, the everyday, that speaks through his poetry. But that simplicity is deceptive. It’s a mask that hides the real delicacy of his poems. What I really admire about Alizadeh is how he uncovers the subtleties of spoken Persian, the little hidden dramas that play out in the unnoticed corners of everyday conversations. Translating his poems was about getting in touch with that extraordinary intimacy in his language. I actually had the chance to meet Mr. Alizadeh in Tehran in 2023, and it was fascinating. The way he recited his own poems, the way he seemed almost surprised by the stories his poems tell—about chance encounters, moments of forgetfulness, or the magical appeal of everyday objects—was fantastic.  READ MORE…