Language: Chinese

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 20, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Josefina Massot

Bringing news from Argentina, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

Book fairs, festivals, competitions, new publications—the literary world this week is filled with a flurry of events and announcements. From the ongoing debate between culture and commerce in Bueno Aires, to new releases from Hong Kong icons Dung Kai-Cheung and Xi Xi, to a celebration of poetry debuts in Haskovo, to a renewal of a beloved book festival in Karlskrona, the world of letters has no shortage of things to offer.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Buenos Aires

In his opening speech at the 46th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, author Guillermo Saccomanno issued a complaint: “When we talk about a fair,” he declared, “we’re talking about commerce. This is a trade fair rather than a cultural one, even if it claims to be the latter. At any rate, it represents an understanding of culture as commerce.” What’s more, he added, the country’s dire economic situation does not bode well for the Spanish-speaking world’s largest industry event.

Saccomanno was both right and wrong: right that the Fair’s pursuits are largely commercial, wrong that they’d be somewhat of a bust this time around. Perhaps to make up for two years of pandemic torpor, over 1.3 million visitors crowded La Rural’s sprawling halls in just under three weeks, from April 28 to May 16—a 30% increase relative to pre-pandemic figures. Sales, too, went up by about 10-20%.

In addition to bestselling genre sensations (American John Katsenbach among them), the Fair featured critically acclaimed writers from over forty countries. Stand-outs included Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Chileans Diamela Eltit and Paulina Flores, Spaniard Jorge Carrión, and locals Mariana Enriquez, Selva Almada, and Guillermo Martínez. There were over 1,500 book stands on display, helmed by everything from multimedia conglomerates to artisanal press co-ops, as well as over 1,000 programmed events that spanned readings, conferences, panels, book signings, and courses for every taste and age group.

It would be impossible, given this near embarrassment of riches, to mention just one or two based on quality alone. I’ll appeal to our journal’s métier, then, and focus on a few events related to the art (and, yes, the commerce) of translation. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 6, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Asa Chen Zhang, Peera Songkünnatham, and Suhasini Patni

Prizes, poetry contests, and new works from India, Thailand, and China!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on publishing trends in India, the memorialization of the author Wat Wanlayangkoon in Thailand, and an exciting new development in Chinese to English interpretive translation, led by the Accent Society. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Temperatures are soaring and the country is experiencing grueling heatwaves. Indians have taken to social media to critique the Modi government’s negligent response to the climate crisis. Many are also sharing their memories of the devastating and nightmarish second wave of the coronavirus that led to numerous deaths in the country this time last year.

The pro-Hindutva, right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party is known to instigate violence, especially against Muslims, in the name of the Hindu religion. In the latest reform to eradicate voices of dissent, verses by Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz have been dropped from the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) class 10 textbook. Faiz, one of the most celebrated Urdu poets and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, addressed the issues of military dictatorships and tyranny in Pakistan. According to Scroll.in, “the verses were part of the ‘Religion, Communalism and Politics—Communalism, Secular State’ segment of the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s textbook called “Democratic Politics II.” The two poems are “Let Us Walk in the Market in Shackles” and “Upon Returning from Dhaka.”

In 2021, the New India Foundation (NIF) announced its inaugural grant for writing books relating to India’s history. The three winners of the NIF Translation Fellowship were chosen from ten Indian languages and each awarded a stipend of INR 6 lakhs for a period of six months with mentorship opportunities as well as publishing and editorial support. The three winners are Venkateswar Ramaswamy (literary translator) and Amlan Biswas (statistician) who will translate Nirmal Bose’s Diaries 1946-47 from Bangla; NS Gundur (academician and literary historian) who will translate DR Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu Mattu Shaiva Pratibhe from Kannada; and Rahul Sarwate (academician and historian) who will translate Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad from Marathi. More can be read about the winners here.

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Spring News: A new educational guide, two paid Special Features, and a final call to join our team!

May 5, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Whether you are an educator, a translator, or a potential volunteer, check out the following opportunities to be a part of our mission!

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Calling all teachers: the Spring 2022 Educator’s Guide is now available for download here! Whether your purview is high school or university students, we invite you to visit the Asymptote for Educators web page to discover new ways to bring translation into your classroom. With writing prompts and reading suggestions galore, this free resource based on articles from the Spring 2022 issue will be sure to spice up any literary discussion. Share the wealth with all your educator friends and be sure to fill out this survey to give us feedback. In this age of division, we can all play a part, however small, to foster empathy across cultures. Grab a copy of the new Educator’s Guide now.

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Considering a career in world literature? Then you should know that Asymptote provides the perfect training ground! (Former team members have gone on to take up positions at Penguin Books, Dalkey Archive, and Words Without Borders.) And now is the perfect time to apply! We’ve just entered Phase II of our mid-year recruitment drive—concentrating on editorial and marketing roles this time. Among the newly available openings are Visual Editor, Nonfiction Editor, Social Media Manager, and Assistant Director of Outreach. If you’d like to join us behind the scenes, check out the newly available positions and apply today. READ MORE…

It Is Wonderful to Survive: On the Literature of China’s One-Child Policy

April 27, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

The literature of witness is not the act, but that journey upon the very long landscape of a single because.

The population control policies of China have been a long, treacherous trial of the invasion of nationhood into the most private corners of personhood. In the following essay, Xiao Yue Shan discusses the literature written under this continual interrogation, the performance of autobiography, and how the intensely personal can come to elucidate the immense.

Halfway through Nanfu Wang’s documentary, One Child Nation, the scale of China’s family planning policies begins to hint towards their true proportions—violence that moves past the triangulation of parent, child, and state, towards a vast chaos of capital and globalism. Following a series of tender but unequivocal interviews—in which the director confronts her own family’s trauma of child abandonment and death—Wang addresses the sensational story of a family who had made a living out of selling found children to orphanages, before being convicted and imprisoned for human trafficking. In an interview with the household’s late matriarch, she speaks without hesitation; the amount received for the first child she handed over was 700 RMB—about 115 USD. The camera, both attentive to and suspicious of her watery gaze, makes few observations of guilt or sorrow. She has that same discrepant, hard youth of many rural Chinese women, an aura of won stoicism and fearlessness, even as she relays the brutal details: “I was inconsolable . . . and the orphanage director [said]: ‘You found her? Her own family abandoned her. Why the fuck are you crying?’”

More Than One Child, a memoir by Shen Yang of “China’s Invisible Generation,” opens with an assertation of presence: “I have to say . . . how we lived. Otherwise, our entire generation really will be buried in the abyss of history.” This mythos of selfhood, in which one rises amongst many to speak as if chosen, is defined by the threat of absence. For a country that has perfected its weaponization of silence, even the sheer presence of an individual voice can be radical. Such is how the book makes its statement, a cover unignorably red in the hands, marking itself as necessary by underlining our fear of silence.

Born second to parents that would eventually go on to have four daughters in total, Shen Yang’s invisibility was a chronological certainty. Neither preciously firstborn nor the only excess child of her family, she recalls being first shuffled to the guardianship of doting grandparents, before the arrival of younger and younger sisters inevitably pushed her to the margins. In the tempestuous years of childhood, she moved through the households of extended family and through the dejections of neglect, ostracization, and loneliness. These trials, described in detail, are what compose the majority of her memoirs—episodes threaded with rage, resentment, and yearning scattered against the artless landscape of rural Henan.

It’s difficult to address Shen Yang’s memoir as a simple work of literature. The writing follows the natural misalignments of raw emotion, wavering with indignance and brashness; it feels much like looking at the mirror-image of oneself as a teenager, enraged by worldly injustices as refracted through the prism of selfhood. The aggrieved consciousness of a recklessly emerging identity pervades each recounting of hand-me-down clothing, schoolyard bullying, and corporal punishment. Explosive tantrums—on the part of both children and adults—populate the accounts, balanced out only by equally acrimonious memories of seething, silent hatred. All the players in this vicious game of attachments are intricated in the tenuous balance-game of reluctant, mutual reliances: heartless, cruel, and ugly. Even Shen Yang herself, fragile and explosive, is cast in a dejected shadow. Yet—how can it be otherwise? The text never proclaimed anything other than testimony. I have to say how we lived. The directive of truth-saying, of the voice as a passageway by which history travels, was there from its very beginning. The witness needs not be graceful—only believable. The truth is not the work of poets alone. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Josefina Massot, and Kristina Tatarian

News this week from Argentina, Armenia, and Hong Kong!

As the scope of literature continues to take in the shifting realms of experiences and global relations, our editors from around the world report the latest updates, from festivals, activisms, and the spotlighting of vital voices both new and familiar. Read on to find out more!

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Last week, we mourned the loss of the great Sergio Chejfec, whose work spanned grammars, genres, and geographies. Chejfec spent his time between his native Buenos Aires and New York City, where he lived and taught at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. During a 2018 interview with Télam, he spoke about the impact of migration on his work: “In my experience, moving from one country to another accentuates the passage of time: the gap isn’t merely geographic. Exiles are far away from their countries, but also from the network of simultaneities they were accustomed to while living there; notable among these is language.” Fortunately, gaps and absences can be bridged through translation. Chejfec’s works are available in French, German, Portuguese, and English, and US readers can delight in them via Open Letter.

Meanwhile, Other Press is on the verge of releasing Kit Maude’s rendition of Camila Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls (incidentally, Sosa Villada’s latest has just come out in Spanish). Equal parts gritty and tender, Bad Girls narrates a trans woman’s exploits at the margins of society; a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2020, it’s bound to take America by storm. The award’s previous winner, Maria Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, just out from Catapult, was also widely celebrated upon its reception. The novel, translated by Thomas Bunstead, follows an auction house employee on the trail of an elusive forger; like Gainza’s The Optic Nerve, it draws from art and literature to great effect. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 18, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, Kristina Tatarian, and Matilde Ribeiro

Dispatches from Ukraine, India, and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the globe are bringing news concerning the pressing issues of our time, from literature and its manifold intersections. From Ukraine, writers are publishing pertinent and vivid texts within the throes of war. In India, the Jaipur Literary Festival boasts an impressive line-up, including most recent Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. In Hong Kong, the prestigious Liang Shih-chiu Literature Prize announces its winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Ukraine

Nominated by the Polish Institute of Sciences, one of the most promising young writers in Ukraine, Serhiy Zhadan, is in this year’s runner-up list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his most notable works is The Orphanage, a novel about the war in Ukraine translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler.

Reinforced by the international community, many Ukrainian writers have been extremely prolific, having emotive, cool-headed reads published in the international press; certain autofictional pieces provide the public with crucial information while relegating to the outside world the feelings of our own. Among them is the war diary of Yuliya Iliukha from Kharkiv—authentic, full of bitterness, hatred, and a sense of impotence; the Kyiv chronicle by Oleksandr Mykhed, translated by Marina Gibson, starts with a tentative description of his unfinished first play, interrupted by the start of the war; a letter from Kyiv by Luyba Yakimchuk, translated by Jennifer Croft, tells us about the power of language to turn into a gunshot.

TAULT, with Zenia Tompkins as its head, has encouraged the war efforts of Ukrainian writers who have laid down their pens and joined the fight for freedom. In the words of TAULT’s associate director Kate Tsurkan, literary translators and writers around the world must join the global translating efforts to “elevate Ukrainian voices right now.” This urgency is felt in the recent publications of Ukrainian literature. Stanislaw Aseyev’s In Isolation—for which he was imprisoned and tortured—speaks about the influence of propaganda in eastern Ukraine, as well as how the place and its people have transformed after the invasion. Another notable work is Larysa Denysenko’s new children’s novel Maya and Her Friends, published in the UK. It is a philanthropic and literary statement about how war ends or cripples our future—an urgent appeal with the “weapon of words” to the international community. In the darkest times like these, it is these kinds of stories we tell our children that have the power to discredit the malignant justifications of evil—for good. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2022

March 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Eva Wissting, Ka Man Chung, and Laurel Taylor

New works this week from China, Sweden, Italy, and Argentina!

March feels like a month of renewal, and our selections of translated literatures this week presents a wondrous and wide-ranging array of original thinking, ideations, philosophies, and poetics. From a revelatory collection of Chinese science fiction, to art critic María Gainza’s novel of forgery and authenticity, to Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays on writing, and a debut collection of poetry from Iranian-Swedish poet Iman Mohammed—there is no shortage of discovery amidst these texts. Read on to find out more!

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The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, Tordotcom Publishing, 2022

 Review by Ah-reum Han

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a trailblazing new anthology of Chinese science fiction and fantasy, created by and featuring the works of an all-female and nonbinary team of writers, editors, and translators. As a lifelong fan of the science fiction and fantasy genre but new to contemporary Chinese literary scene, I found this collection a true gift—warm and generous to the novice like myself, for whom Chinese literature has only ever been accessible through translation. Under the meticulous curatorial vision of Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, the stories and essays within celebrate decorated and emerging voices alike, indicating at an exciting future of sci-fi and fantasy for digital natives in our culturally porous world.

As you enter the collection, leave everything at the door and hold on tight. This book will whisk you away from one uncanny valley to the next—from a world where children raise baby stars as pets, to a near future where parenting is turned into a computer game, to a fisherman’s village where they practice the art of dragonslaying, to a woman on the road mysteriously burdened with a corpse, and much more. The title story, “The Way Spring Arrives” by Wang Nuonuo (trans. Rebecca F. Kuang), situates itself amidst the babbling creeks where giant fish carry the rhythm of the seasons on its back, delivering spring from year to year. In “A Brief History of Beinakan Disaster as Told in a Sinitic Language” by Nian Yu (trans. Ru-Ping Chen), we are caught in a post-apocalyptic world, where people live under the threat of devastating heat currents and history pervades as literal memory capsules passed down by a select few. Despite the imaginative heights these stories reach, each creates enough space in its strangeness for us to reexamine our assumptions about the world and our place in it. Often, folklore and fantasy crosses into sci-fi and allegory, and readers are left feeling unsettled in even the most familiar landscapes.

Between these stories, you’ll find essays on genre, gender, and translation that enrich the surrounding fictions; these intelligent texts help orient readers in socio-political, historical, and global contexts, while looking to the future of this young genre. In “Net Novels and the She Era,” Xueting Christine Ni discusses the role the internet has played in disrupting gender norms within publishing—particularly in the case of the popular online sci-fi serials. In Jing Tsu’s essay on the collection at hand, she points out: “This volume shows that there is also a difference between science fiction about women and other marginalized genders and the ones written by them.” We also hear from translators, such as Rebecca F. Kuang, who writes about the symbiotic relationship between writer, translator, and reader—the choices implicit in the things left unsaid. “What Does the Fox Say” by Xia Jia is a playful de-reconstruction of the famous English pangram—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—as both story and essay, illuminating the act of translation in a modern world of search engines, artificial intelligence, translation software, and media. As the author notes: “intersexuality is the dominant mode to create as well as to read most of the works in our time: quotation, collage, tribute, deconstruction, parody.” This collection pioneers its own conversation around its stories. We are paused at intervals to consider: who are we really, and where do we go from here? READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Feb 2022)

February 21, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What do Asymptote staff get up to when they're not seeking out the best in world literature? Answer: Quite a lot!

Senior Copy Editor Anna Aresi recently translated a selection of Laura Corraducci’s poems for The Antonym.

Various Wanted. An (almost) missing original and five—literary, computational and visual—translations, the latest collection by Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, co-authored with Steve Rushton and Taner Murat, has recently been described by Servanne Monjour at the Sorbonne as “a pioneering translation using topic modeling for the very first time.“

Editor-at-Large for Sweden Eva Wissting was longlisted for ROOM Magazine’s annual poetry contest. She has also had essays published in Nordic literary journal Kritiker, issue #61-62, and Finland-based cultural journal Horisont, issue #2021:3.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska recently published a book review of Nastassja Martin’s In The Eye of the Wild at the KGB Bar Lit Mag.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has new essays in Minor Literature[s] and the Cincinnati Review.

Copy Editor Nadiyah Abdullatif recently published a short extract of her English co-translation, with Anam Zafar, of Lebanese author Lena Merhej’s hit graphic novel Mrabba wa Laban at The Markaz Review. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Chen Xianfa

January 25, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Romaine Scott

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems by the Lu Xun Literary Prize-winning writer Chen Xianfa. Chen’s meditative poems often begin from the plain contemplation of a minute object—a butterfly, the rain, an earthworm—only to draw them into a larger field of philosophical ideas where language and nature’s presumed certainties are interrogated. Reflecting on her translation of these poems, Romaine Scott emphasises “the process of dissolving linguistic and cultural borders to arrive at The Third Shore,” invoking Yang Lian’s notion of translation as forging a new element. So too does Chen write: “There is no such thing as an expression set in stone,” observing a word’s numerous metamorphoses. Immerse yourself in the sparse beauty of Chen’s poems where even a speck of the world can be made anew. 

Lanruo Temple

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’
There is no such thing as an expression set in stone
Nor can I speak unequivocally of a gust of wind
and though the temple may be built upon a speck
of dust, it will, nonetheless, collapse from within
There are moments when a butterfly is motionless
‘To live’ requires fewer strokes of the pen than ‘to take wing’

Taking Shelter From the Rain

It’s raining. In the square many people are running about blindly
a piece of clothing held over their heads
Of course, they are not actually blind
their eyes are simply fixed on taking shelter from the rain

Before the square was built, this was a shantytown
beneath whose poor-quality
bitumen roofs
the smell of poverty, excitement and rebellion rubbed shoulders
with the tavern’s moon. Heaven knows how many nights we
toasted each other READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 14, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MK Harb, and Peera Songkünnatham

From Scheherazade to Avicii, the literary news of the week spans new looks at pivotal figures.

From book fairs to bestsellers, the world of international letters knows no rest. In Qatar, the 31st Doha International Book Fair has launched with an in-person schedule. In Japan, a new project aiming to promote Southeast Asian and Indian literature has published an impressive roster of short fiction, and in Sweden, two beloved figures are immortalized in text. Read on to find out more!

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Happy New Year from the world of Arabic literature! With Omicron, media frenzies, and restrictions around the world, we could all use some escape. Travel might be limited, but how about an escape to the fantasy world of Arabian Nights? The iconic collection that has inspired countless others around the world, from the Brothers Grimm to Naguib Mafhouz, has received a fresh new translation by Yasmine Seale—known for her riveting new translation of Aladdin. Enter the world of ghouls, mystics, and enchantresses, and enjoy your COVID-free time travel (it has some brilliant images!).

The theme of time travel continues with the launch of the Winter issue of Arab Lit Quarterly! Responding to the theme of folk and featuring great writers such as Palestinian author Sonia Nimr, this issue promises to “cover stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between!” You can get your copy here.

That being said, the world is not entirely being relegated to the virtual, as Qatar launches the 31st Doha International Book Fair for the year of 2022, under the theme of “light is knowledge.” Finally, we will visit our first in-person book fair in years, which will host renowned Arabic book distributors such as Samarkand Books from Qatar and Antoine Cachet from Lebanon! READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 26, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng and Suhasini Patni

The latest news from India and Hong Kong!

This week, we bring you news from India and Hong Kong! In India, Suhasini Patni reports on recent controversies in the treatment of translators, while in Hong Kong, Charlie Ng highlights the opening of a politically charged museum for visual culture and the release of a new cross-genre poetry collection. Read on to find out more!  

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Translated literature has been enjoying a boom in India ever since the launch of the JCB Literary Prize. This year, the winning novel is Delhi: A Soliloquy, written by M. Mukundan and translated from Malayalam by Fathima E.V. and Nandakumar K. Although the JCB Prize is committed to honoring translated literature, many noted that the translators were not called onstage to receive the award with the author. Fathima E.V. tweeted: “Frankly, I expected to be called onstage, in keeping with the JCB foundation’s stated commitment towards translated literature. It would have been fitting finale for a graciously organised function in which all the authors and translators were well taken care of throughout.” This incident feeds into the larger question of how translators are treated globally and recent demands for fairer wages and due recognition.

Sanjoy Roy, of Teamwork, the company that organizes the Jaipur Literature Festival across the world, also noted: “Translations earlier were not necessarily good ones, they’re excellent now. The JCB Prize has brought that out,” when discussing the festival for 2022. The festival will return to the city in a hybrid mode, with online and in-person events, and the venue will change from Diggi Palace to Hotel Clarks Amer.

Certainly, translations have gained wider popularity in India during recent years. One of the most anticipated novels of the year was Resolve by Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Resolve is about how marriage is turned into a social contract. Marimuthu, the protagonist, is on the quest to look for a wife. But he constantly must reevaluate his marital prospects when faced with rejections. The novel explores the challenges in a society afflicted by patriarchy and caste.

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The 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature: Who We’re Betting On

November 15, 2021  |  in Essays, News  |  by Darren Huang and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors take you through the shortlist!

The announcement for the National Book Award for Translated Literature is right around the corner; the 72nd ceremony is due to broadcast live on November 17. On the shortlist are five varied and individual titles: Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, translated from the French by Aneesa Abba Higgins; Ge Fei’s Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse; Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West; Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; and Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. Whom will the judges smile upon? Read more for our take.

A friend, not too long ago, once told me that he feels guilty whenever he reads fiction. Just seems a bit indulgent, he said. Yes, I admitted in turn, when pleasure and beauty mix, it feels incredibly indulgent. It was early autumn, dawn was a glorious thing, and we were talking about the first novels we loved—ones I remember for their intelligent presences, their human authority, but most of all, for the distinct, almost secret, pleasure they brought. The indulgence of excellent fiction feels luxurious precisely because of this intimacy: a sense of understanding passed via that most hidden method, of mind to mind. It seems to me that when pleasure and beauty mix, we allow the precocious lies of fiction to move through us, and become truths.

The five titles that make up the finalists for this award are all, in their own respect, remarkable emblems of fiction’s capability to create truth through duplicity. They achieve this through vivid, personal recollections—as in Planet of Clay—or through intensive research—as in When We Cease to Understand the World—or perhaps in what Borges described as “magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy”—something I suspect to be at work in The Twilight Zone. The worlds for which these works contribute their imagination are various, wonderful, horrible, and mercilessly true; it makes me think something else about this triangulation of pleasure, beauty, and truth—that it is in the conciliation of the latter two where the incomparable pleasure of fiction is found.

Beauty is not reliably something one can stand to look at for long, but it always leaves something searing. Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay—the most lyrical and poetic of the five selections—is gorgeously written, and its translation by Leri Price is a definitive work of art, but it feels sick to talk about the pleasures in reading this story of Rima, a young, mute girl in Syria, as she loses one solid fact of her life after another amidst the atrocities and miseries of war. Instead, Yazbek’s prose is a holding thrall, channelling the child’s voice which springs between stark lucidity and dappled abstraction. Elegantly hanging in the balance between the wounded reality and the salve of her reveries, Rima draws an excruciating impression of the pain she experiences and witnesses, intensifying the horror with an unsparing visuality: “I am afraid of the meanings of things when they turn into words, as it is hard for me to understand bare words without turning them into pictures.” The coarse red of blood, the acrid taste of poison gas, the dusty pallor of a face in death—the words of Planet of Clay are both pictures of unflinching witness, and figures of breathtaking reverie. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Jacqueline Leung

The latest news from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week we bring you news from Bulgaria and Hong Kong! In Bulgaria, Andriana Hamas recalls the brilliant life of poet and journalist Marin Bodakov, a significant contributor to Bulgarian letters, after his sudden death; Jacqueline Leung highlights the long-awaited return of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and new book releases centered on personal and social struggles in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

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

These past few weeks in Bulgaria have been marked by the sudden demise of the poet, literary critic, and journalist Marin Bodakov at age fifty. Born on April 28, 1971, in the picturesque city of Veliko Tarnovo, Bodakov studied Bulgarian Philology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” where he eventually earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “Policies of presentation of Bulgarian literature in the print media of the 1990s. Problems of Critical Autoreflection.” Moreover, he was an assistant professor at the Press Journalism Department, as well as a passionate advocate of the path towards a meaningful academic career. His talents were versatile, spanning such different spheres that it comes as no surprise that he also managed to maintain the weekly column, Ходене по буквите (Walking through the letters), published by the renowned Kultura newspaper. His original texts highlighting the best of both local and world literature would come out, without fail, even after the editorial team of Kultura dissolved and reunited shortly afterward as K Weekly. In recent years, Bodakov found a suitable writing platform in the independent outlet, Toest.

His first poetry collection, Девство (Virginhood), was followed by seven others, the latest published in 2018. Another prominent work he authored was Преведе от . . . (Translated from the original . . .), an enchanting volume that comprises of conversations with several Bulgarian translators. The interviews provide an invaluable glimpse into the profession and its “invisibility.” They equip the reader with a better understanding of the social and cultural trends that often play a decisive role by steering the literary scene in unforeseen directions. A year after the book was published, Bodakov received the Knight of the Book Award, granted to journalists and other prominent personalities who have contributed to the publication and promotion of books in Bulgaria.

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Translation Tuesday: “Stranger’s Life” by Yu Müller

September 28, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Yu Müller

A four-part palindromic poem written and translated from the Chinese by Yu Müller

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a four-part impressionistic poem translated and written by Yu Müller. Instead of yielding to the seeming untranslatability of the palindrome in Chinese, Müller’s act of self-translation invents a curious way out of the original poem’s stubbornness towards any attempted act of linguistic border-crossing. As the English’s double translation would have it: when one has “agreed to write poems,” they should have “no worries about poetry”—for it can be infinite malleable. Hear from Müller as she describes how the poem arose from a pedagogical encounter, which in turn teaches us what creative acts of translation can achieve. 

“Stranger’s Life” is a series of poems that hold a special place in my heart. While teaching, I wrote Chinese on the white board, and when my eyes were forced to look at them backwards, it felt like tracing back the words to another reality from a different perspective. That’s when I indulged myself in collecting those altered palindromic words in Chinese and composing poems. However, in the attempt to translate them into English, translation became inadequate because it is impossible to retain the original form of the altered palindrome style from Chinese. As a compromise, I provided two ways of reading the poems in English—left to right and top to bottom and then backwards, but one can try to read them in a “zigzag” or “S-shaped” manner as well.”

—Yu Müller

Stranger’s Life

 

i

adult and me
agreed to write poems—
after car moves, then make faraway departure

sentimental Shanxi
family members get tough on you
what if I

steep myself in liquor on the Broken Bridge
and write books abroad in heartaches

listen
to the singing of boys and girls
an ode to each other while young

the Tomb Sweeping Day
                                       bringing debut homage to the grave mound
wind sweeps
                    rain pours
                                    snow buries
are you afraid?

—

afraid of you?
                        Great Snow
       heavy rain
gale

turn around at the grave mound
moral integrity of Ming & Qing dynasty

teenagers who sing praises to each other
chanting girls and boys
listen

I don’t want
you to make things difficult for others
West Mountain’s sentimentality

walk far, then start driving
—no worries about poetry
me and the People’s Congress

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