Posts by Areeb Ahmad

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 20, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

Literary news from Bulgaria, the Philippines, and India!

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.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 16, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

The latest from Bulgaria, India, and the United States!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large bring us news on literary festivals, award-winning works, and poetry open-mics in Bulgaria, India, and the United States! From discussions of disinformation and machine translation at the Sofia International Literary Festival, to a poem performed in the Metaverse, to double-Booker wins in South Asia, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Writers are powerful creatures. They think up imaginary worlds that sometimes appear more tangible than the mundane reality most of us face on a daily basis. What happens, however, when malicious groups deliberately blur the line between illusion and fact in an attempt to sway public opinion in a specific direction? How does one fight disinformation, and can literature teach us to differentiate between the plausible and the ridiculous? These are only some of the questions the 2022 edition of the Sofia International Literary Festival, held December 6–11 during the Sofia International Book Fair, endeavored to answer.

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Dimensions of Aram: On Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True

December 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

No matter the forces that amass against idealism—such as weapons raised by pragmatic tradition—it cannot be broken, and always spreads.

Stories of the True by Jeyamohan, translated from the Tamil by Priyamvada, Juggernaut Books, 2022

Aram—this was the original Tamil title of Jeyamohan’s collection of short stories first published in 2011, recently released in Priyamvada’s English translation as Stories of the True. Priyamvada deems aram a complex word, even going as far as to call it untranslatable. In other contexts, aram has been rendered as “virtue” or “ethics,” and while the former is possibly the closest in meaning, Priyamvada notes that “aram seems . . . a far more capacious word than ethics.” The familiar Sanskrit word “dharm”’ might be a near-perfect equivalent, and it has a Tamil variation as well, but Priyamvada resisted inserting Hindi or Sanskrit words in place of the Tamil, even if they would be relatively well-known and understood by English readers. This is in part her way of dissenting against the infamous political project of promoting Hindi as a national language, autocratically imposed in an attack on linguistic pluralism. Similarly, this choice served to geographically, culturally, and linguistically ground the stories in Southern India. She writes, “It wasn’t just the stubbornness of someone from the south of the peninsula, but I felt it takes away from the ‘place’ of the stories to be using terms from a different part of the country.”

In her search for a fitting translation of Aram, Priyamvada allowed herself to be guided by the stories themselves and to explore all the “dimensions of aram” that these narratives depicted, as well as the range of ethical codes they encompassed. However, it would be simplistic to consider them, in her words, “simple expositions of virtue.” She writes: “Reaching beyond the understanding of ethics as dichromatic, immutable codes of conduct, the narratives delve into deeper and more complex internal dilemmas . . . It is in this quest that the stories move from podhu-aram, a collective dharma, to thannaram or swadharma, the dharma of an individual.” In her estimation, the stories in this collection feature a mix of characters, some of whom have already finished their journey of self-discovery and some who are still on the way. Among the former, they are distinguished by “their steadfast adherence to ‘their truth,’” and for the latter, by “these ‘moments of truth’ [that] also stand illuminated.” In a nutshell: “The stories hold in tension a truth realized, and a truth to be discovered.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 21, 2022  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Julia Sherwood, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from Macedonia, India, and the Czech Republic!

This week, our editors from around the world are reporting on trailblazing new releases, award winners, and literary festivals! From the return of the Dhaka Literature Festival after two years on hiatus to Czech comic artists at the International Comic Art Festival, read on to learn more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Initially announced in July, more information has emerged regarding the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation in a feature published by World Without Borders. The prize, sponsored by Armory Square Ventures with a jury of acclaimed translation specialists from around the world, aims to “recognize an outstanding translator of South Asian Literature into English.” The winning work will be published by Open Letter Books while excerpts from finalists will appear in WWB. The founders of the prize intend to highlight literatures that are “all but invisible outside South Asia” in the global English-speaking sphere, joining the JCB Prize for Literature in promoting translated Indian literatures both at home and abroad.

The acclaimed Naga writer, Temsula Ao, passed away on October 9 at the age of seventy-six. In her obituary, Chitra Ahanthem explores her legacy and bibliography, highlighting Ao’s focus on the Naga community and her resistance to the homogenizing impulse to club writing from all the Northeast Indian states into a singular literature, which would dismiss the differences across communities and tribes both within and beyond each state. Meanwhile, the 2022-23 cohort of the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorships was recently announced. Among its recipients, Vaibhav Sharma was awarded the Saroj Lal Mentorship in Hindi and will be mentored by the International Booker Prize winner, Daisy Rockwell.

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Reframing Queerness: On Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole

September 26, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

These songs celebrate both queer rights and queer wrongs, the beauty and the madness, the mess that undergirds everything.

Glory Hole by Kim Hyun, translated from the Korean by Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan, Seagull Books, June 2022.

Twentieth-century queer American visual artist Keith Haring was renowned for his pop art that emerged, according to critic Barry Blinderman, from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His work predominantly engaged in queer activism, urging for safe sex practices and AIDS awareness. The poet Kim Hyun cites his 1980 drawing, Glory Hole—also the title of his own collection—in the notes to the poem, “Old Baby Homo.” The drawing shows a standing man with his head out of the frame. Two vertical lines represent the wall the man faces and where the eponymous glory hole is located. His penis is shown on the other side, burnished and luminous like the sun, surrounded by disembodied hands seeking it out. In an academic paper titled “Faceless sex: glory holes and sexual assemblages,” the researchers—Dave Holmes, Patrick O’Byrne, and Stuart J. Murray—posit: “[T]he glory hole affords an intense, temporary escape from the demands of subjectivity . . . The hole itself becomes the site of sexual energy and exchange.” Glory holes, by facilitating anonymous sexual encounters, enable a new politics of desire.

Arriving during the full-blown AIDS crisis in the US of the 80s, the drawing reframes queerness outside of the pathology of promiscuity, depravity, and disease. The glory hole, instead of being a vector for proliferation of the virus, is transformed into a fecund well of possibility. The paper further claims: “[D]ue to the fragmentation—the disorganization—of the body, the glory hole allows the free play of desire and fantasy for both users. Users may feel liberated not only from the social roles and expectations dictated by a predominantly heterosexual world, but also from the codes of the gay world . . .” Kim Hyun’s collection is not interested in being contained within any sort of category. From futuristic dystopias and planet hopping to alternate histories and forged references, from science fiction to pornography and literature to art, between prose and poetry, Glory Hole is unrepentantly queer in every way. The poems desist simplistic readings and are expansive in meaning, using language both in itself and as a vehicle to advance images that transform incoherence into the sublime.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, José García Escobar, and Nestor Gomez

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

Our team of editors across the world is back with the latest literary news as summer winds down. In India, the recently released longlist for a major literary prize has put translations  center stage. In El Salvador, a newly published book of poetry interrogates the concept of terrorism in Central America and the United States. In Guatemala, the city of Mazatenango played host to an international book festival. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting on India

First awarded in 2018, the JCB Prize for Literature is India’s biggest literary prize and is given every year to “a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author.” It is one of those rare prizes that gives equal attention to books originally written in English and translations from other languages, without putting them into separate categories as the Booker does. In a first for the prize, there are six translated titles out of the ten that comprise the 2022 longlist, which came out on September 3. This far exceeds the previous record of three longlisted translations. Two of this year’s longlisted books were translated from Urdu, and the rest were translated from Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, and Nepali. One notable exclusion is Nireeswaran by V.J. James, whose novel Anti-Clock (translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., who also translated Nireeswaran) was shortlisted last year.

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, needs no introduction. After winning the International Booker Prize earlier this year, its chances of taking home the JCB Prize are high. Another promising title is Sheela Tomy’s Valli, a work of eco-fiction translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. Kalathil’s translation of S. Hareesh’s magical realist novel, Moustache, won in 2020 , meaning three of the prize’s four past winners were originally written in Malayalam.

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Uninhabitable Waiting: On Damodar Mauzo’s The Wait and Other Stories

August 22, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Mauzo highlights the failings of human nature and critiques the resort to impulse.

The Wait and Other Stories by Damodar Mauzo, translated from the Konkani by Xavier Cota, Penguin India, 2022

Damodar Mauzo is a short story writer, novelist, and critic hailing from the Indian state of Goa. He writes in Konkani and his works have been translated into English by Vidya Pai in addition to his long-time collaborator, Xavier Cota. The Wait and Other Stories, a short story collection, has been translated by the latter. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. The writer Vivek Menezes calls Mauzo “an exemplar of Goa’s fluid cultural identity, marked by an unabashed pluralistic universalism that persists despite threats and depredations.” His stories seamlessly bridge the gap between timeless and current, invoking the great short story writers of the nineteenth century—de Maupassant, O Henry, Saki—in terms of how often they take an unexpected turn at the end, but also modern practitioners of the form in post-Independence India like Anjum Hasan and Aruni Kashyap, in the way they evoke both a local and national sense of place.

Goa’s history is tumultuous much like the rest of India, but it is also unique due to its separate, and much longer, history of European colonization. In the fifteenth century, it was ruled over by the Adil Shahis of Bijapur. The Portuguese overthrew them and claimed Goa as their territory in 1510, a sovereignty that remained in place for more than four centuries. As such, Goa was never a part of the British Empire and its Indian holdings. Therefore, India’s eventual independence from British rule in 1947 did not impact its Portuguese-controlled status. When the newly established Indian government asked Portugal to cede all its territories on the subcontinent, it refused. As a result, India invaded to annex Goa, along with the Daman and Diu Islands, into the union in 1967. For two more decades, Goa remained just a union territory after a referendum but was eventually designated as the twenty-fifth state of India in 1987.

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