Language: Japanese

The It Girl in Her Own Words: Helen O’Horan on Translating Izumi Suzuki

I wanted the translation to feel more emotionally driven, and that’s what I prioritized.

In her first novel to be published in English, the counterculture icon Izumi Suzuki draws from her real-life experiences to craft a musical, vulnerable portrait of nonconformism during a tumultuous era in Japan. From passion to nihilism, dreaminess to self-destruction, Set My Heart on Fire is unafraid of contradiction in its approach to the self, inscribing mind and body in all of its varying desire and directions. As our final Book Club selection for November, Suzuki proves to be a particularly resonant writer for contemporary readers in her audacious pursuit of pleasure and mutability in identity, all told in a vivid voice conjured by translator Helen O’Horan. In this interview, O’Horan speaks to us about how Suzuki channels a sense of disconnection, her knack for performativity, and the centrism of human relationships in her literary work.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Bella Creel (BC): How did you initially discover Izumi Suzuki’s work, and what drew you to her writing?

Helen O’Horan (HOH): I first worked on a short story for Suzuki’s collection, Terminal Boredom, just before the pandemic. I joined the project relatively late; by then, the reports had been written and the research done, so I want to credit the other translators and the publisher. That’s how I first learned about her work.

After that story, I really got into her writing—the timing was significant too. During the pandemic, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from my mind and body. My work as a translator wasn’t disrupted much since most of my clients are outside the United Kingdom, and it’s all online, but I started feeling like my mind and body were splitting apart.

That sense of disconnect reminded me of Suzuki’s writing—she often describes her body as something separate from her mind. Her work resonated with me at that moment, though of course, that’s just my interpretation. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

Izumi feels emotions at their extremes, and she considers ideas to their ends.

When the cult writer Izumi Suzuki debuted in the English language with stunning, subversive short stories of counterculture and fantasy, critics and readers alike were astounded by her utterly individual voice, speaking candidly about emotional heights and lows, womanhood, and the chaotic world of drugs, music, and dreams in which her narrators found themselves. Now, we are given the chance to learn more from Suzuki’s own tumultuous life in the newly published autofiction, Set My Heart on Fire, written in the same mesmerizing, phantasmagoric tone of brusqueness and vulnerability that gave reality to her imagination. As our November Book Club selection, this novel enlivens the sharp mind, loves, and frivolities of a woman who sought and fought for her individuality, as well as the decades in which Japan was also undergoing changes of both revel and devastation.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Helen O’Horan, Verso, November 2024

Strung-out bass, clunky keys, psychedelic vocals. Abundant patterns, colors, and substances. Dancing, libating, popping, fucking. The groovy, knocked-out backdrop to 1960s Japan. In Honmoku, a district in Yokohama known for its American military base, Japanese youth had reveled in the abundance of American-influenced music, rock and roll, and rebellion, fueled by the financial prosperity of the “Golden Sixties” and its reigning youthful, nonconformist spirit. Izumi Suzuki, a prolific science fiction writer in the late 1970s, moved to Tokyo in 1969 with a year remaining to soak in that rhythm, as in the following decade, Japan would face the first hint of its coming economic breakdown as GDP growth slowed significantly during the global oil crisis. The former revelers, strung out and blissed out, were suddenly thrust into a decade of fading glory and no direction.

Izumi Suzuki’s latest work in English, translated by British linguist Helen O’Horan, is a novel titled Set My Heart on Fire—a notable deviation from the original title’s reference to The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Song-inspired titles are a near-constant in Suzuki’s oeuvre, and her first novel in translation is no exception, with each chapter taking its name from a track from the sixties. While the references are upheld throughout much of the translation, O’Horan’s choice to alter the title better reflects the broader, underlying sense of desperation—for a dying age, a lost youth—and self-destruction that runs through the novel. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2024

Discover new work from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan!

In this month’s review of newly released titles, we’re looking at works from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan. From a haunting volume of ecopoetics to the first book in an acclaimed metaphysical septology, from powerful anticolonial verses to a meditation on the art of translating, read on for some of the best work being released now in English!

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On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Review by Rachel Stanyon

After an unremarkable day spent on a business trip in Paris, Tara Selter is enjoying breakfast in her hotel when it strikes her that it is yesterday again. In the first book of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eighteenth of November begins repeating itself.

What possibilities exist upon the dawning of an old day? Are there wrongs to right, missed opportunities to seize, risks to take or temper? Balle’s heroine does not seem to perceive any such problems or desires; she likes her fairly routine job as an antiquarian book dealer, and works alongside her husband, Thomas, whom she loves. She does not seem to want for nor regret anything, and has blind faith in Thomas, who believes her when she tells him about her repeating days (at least the first umpteen times).

So why has her time “fallen apart”, and what can be gleaned from observing this procession of almost identical days—slowly, meticulously, rhythmically—through the diary Tara keeps? (In this version of eternal return, some of Tara’s physical imprints on the world remain indelible.) Book I details a year (the first of many?) spent haunting the all-too familiar patterns of her husband, all the while lost in loneliness and musing on the volume of her existence. Is she an all-consuming “beast, a pest” or a “tiny monster in an immense space”? READ MORE…

Rudderless in the samidare-rain: On Naoko Fujimoto’s Reinterpretation of Heian Period Japanese Woman Poets

. . . Fujimoto has rendered her translations to “restore some of the freedom of form in which these original works were made.”

09/09 Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka Poems, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Fujimoto, Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024 

My parents were criticized for allowing a girl to study advanced language skills and piano lessons–for what–“Why don’t you keep your daughter in Nagoya?” Some teachers looked at me saying, “You are not even the smartest, nor a boy.”

Have you ever wished to be a boy? And have you ever interrogated the root of that wish? Perhaps you have been told by your family members that a woman’s role is not to utter garbage-talk like a hen pooping. Or perhaps your family’s insistence that you get married off has grown more insistent over the years. Maybe it’s shameful to admit that you’ve never been seated at the center of the table, that you’ve internalized a certain misogyny, or that you live in a society that has instated men as the heads of households, as breadwinners and intellectual superiors—not because they are smarter, but because they were given the opportunity to pursue their education.

This was the case for the men and women in my grandparents’ generation, who grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the Confucian teachings that compare the “tiny man” (the scoundrel) with the “women.” I grew up learning about the Nineteenth Amendment and the Declaration of the Rights of Women in a neighborhood that largely continues to unlawfully segregate jobs by gender. The number of times I have been told that my writing is “frivolous” and that I was “not serious” about my literary career is innumerable.

How remarkable it is then to behold 09/09 by Naoko Fujimoto as a testament to the resilience and remarkable artistry of Japanese women writers during the Heian period (794 to 1185), a time of both gender segregation and cultural flourishing. I find myself seeing my obstacles mirrored in the Heian court custom of referring to women by their relationship with their male relative, or in Fujimoto’s lament in being called out as “not even the smartest”—with smart being measured by her ability to repeat what she has memorized verbatim on these make-you-or-break-you high stakes examinations that are characteristic of East Asian countries like Japan, Korean, or Taiwan. The idea that only the “best women” are afforded the same education as the most ordinary man is pernicious and deeply ingrained in East Asian society, even with the ongoing women’s rights movements in those countries. That identity is further complicated in East Asian-American communities overseas, where western values of independence clash with Asian values of Confucian filial piety and female subservience to men, and where leadership positions continue to be wielded by men in all types of professions. READ MORE…

The Sea Will Dream In My Ears: Megumi Moriyama on Recasting Virginia Woolf into Japanese and Spiral Translation

Translation can never be just a flat movement between two points, merely returning to its origins.

Japanese poet, critic, and translator Megumi Moriyama has so far worked on metamorphosing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) into the Japanese and on a ‘back translation’ of Arthur Waley’s poetic rendition of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, in collaboration with her sister, haiku poet and critic Marie Mariya, published by Sayusha. As a poet, Megumi confesses that even her original poems in Japanese are layered with translation across varying texts within and outside her native language. Of her forthcoming poetry collection, she told me, “Perhaps you might say that through translation, I have made a journey into the depths of Japanese language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Megumi, currently in Tokyo, on rendering Virginia Woolf and Waley’s The Tale of Genji into the Japanese; how spiral translation goes beyond back-translations; and the new-age scene of literary translation in Japan.

Author headshot courtesy of Benjamin Parks.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You translated Virginia Woolf’s experimental classic The Waves into the Japanese as Nami (2021), published by Hayakawa. Could you speak about your process in rendering a 1931 polyphonic novel set in England by a prose writer known for her stream of consciousness narrative mode with the modern-day Japanophone readership in mind? I heard there was so much hype about it, especially on Japanese book Twitter, as it was the first translation of this novel in almost 50 years.

Megumi Moriyama (MM): The new translation of The Waves was welcomed much more enthusiastically than I had expected. When I posted the announcement on social media, it went viral. And after the publication, the book was immediately put into reprint.

I studied Virginia Woolf as a student, and The Waves was one of my favorites of hers, but I never thought I would have the opportunity to translate it. It was thanks to social media that I got the chance. I tweeted very casually that I was interested in translating The Waves, an editor took notice of it, and the project became a reality.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2024

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.

From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.

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Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Diary” by Edogawa Ranpo

A sudden thought struck me—could my brother have been in love with Ms. Yukie?

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an intricate puzzle by master mystery-writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from the Japanese by Erin Vastola. An admirer of Edgar Allan Poe (to whom his pen name was an homage), Edogawa is celebrated both in Japan and abroad for incorporating Japanese cultural elements into suspenseful narratives driven by rigorous logic, and “The Diary” is no exception. Following the death of his younger brother, the unnamed narrator of this peculiar short story mourns the fact that his sibling died too young to experience romantic love. But as he inspects his brother’s diary and letters, he begins to doubt his assumptions. What follows is an elaborate psychodrama of code-cracking, thwarted courtship, and the correspondence culture of early twentieth-century Japan. Read on!

It was the evening of my younger brother’s memorial service, exactly seven days after his passing. I entered his study and picked up the writings he had left behind. Alone with my thoughts, I sank into deep contemplation.

Though it was not particularly late, the household—still damp with tears—had fallen into complete silence. From afar came the plaintive echoes of street vendors’ cries, somehow imbuing the scene with the flavor of a modern play. Touched by the gravity of long-forgotten childhood emotions, I unconsciously opened the diary on my brother’s desk.

Gazing at the diary, I mournfully thought of my twenty-year-old brother, who, I feared, had left this world without ever knowing love or romance.

READ MORE…

Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

From the Tale of Crafting a God: Afrizal Malna on the Afrizalian in Indonesian Poetry and Drama

In writing poetry, I experience this body-that-writes as a mutant in language; I feel a different person is present in myself.

In contemporary Indonesian literature, the writer Afrizal Malna has earned his own movement. Coined by Universitas Gadjah Mada professor Faruk HT, the Afrizalian has come to mean “seemingly disjointed images and ideas wrapped inside deceivingly simple phrases,” according to University of Auckland’s Zita Reyninta Sari, who goes on to elaborate the ways that it puts “everyday objects, especially those which in a glance are the most mundane … in the spotlight.” In his foreword to Afrizal’s Anxiety Myths, translator Andy Fuller also contributes to the definition: “An Afrizalian aesthetic is an engagement with the physicality of the city. How the body collides and rubs up against the textures of the city; of the varying intense urban spaces of everyday life.”

A SEA Write award-winning writer and artist sketched as “one of Indonesia’s best contemporary poets,” Afrizal’s works have been translated from their original Indonesian into languages such as Dutch, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and English, and have received accolades from literary award-giving bodies in Indonesia and beyond. To name one, Daniel Owen’s translation of Afrizal’s poems was the winner of Asymptote’s 2019 Close Approximations Prize.

 In this interview, I spoke with Afrizal—currently in Sidoarjo in East Java—with the help of Owen’s translation. Our discussion covers the Afrizalian literary movement within contemporary Indonesian poetry and drama; the terrains of linguistic hierarchies and reader reception; and his latest poetry collection Document Shredding Museum, originally published as Museum Penghancur Dokumen in 2013.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your latest collection, Document Shredding Museum, is now out from World Poetry Books. Could you tell us about the collection’s journey?

Afrizal Malna (AM): This edition of Document Shredding Museum is actually a revised, second edition of the book; the first edition was published by the Australia-based publisher Reading Sideways Press in 2019. In Indonesia, it was published a decade ago. The answer I’m giving you to this question now is probably quite different from how I would have responded back then.

This book was written between 2009 and 2013, over a decade after the fall of the Suharto regime and the 1998 Reformasi. This regime ruled from 1966 to 1998 as a result of the 1965 tragedy—the massacre of members of the Indonesia Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) and those accused of being Communists, alongside the overthrow of the prior president Soekarno—which is still full of question marks even now. 2009 to 2013 was a time when the Indonesian people began questioning: what resulted from the 1998 Reformasi? Has there really been a fundamental change? We wondered if the powerful in Indonesia will always be prone to nepotism and its corollary effects—such as legal, ethical, and human rights violations, as well as corruption.

It was also during this time that I lived in Yogyakarta, in a Javanese cultural environment, occupying the boundary between village and city as a blurred space in Nitiprayan, Bantul (still a part of Yogyakarta). This became the moment for me to start from zero, and to allow my activities to mimic the wind, moving to find empty spaces and lowlands. This blank slate could shift the past—which was filled with hope for political change, as well as hope for literature and art to respond the 1998 Reformasi.

Global society at that time was facing social upheaval and natural disasters. When the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra happened, I was living in a house that I had rented from a family of farmers—an old, fragile Javanese house (rumah limasan) made of wood. The earthquake made the house convulse, and it was as if the house were dancing along to the earthquake’s rhythm in order to avoid collapse. When the earthquake stopped, not a single part was damaged, but many of the houses made of stone or cement had cracked or collapsed. It felt as if the wind had vanished. Leaves were stiff like in a painting, and the feeling of solitude, of quiet, was stifling.

That natural disaster, among many others, reflected the awareness that our bodies and our technology were paralyzed, powerless. Our ancestors, who had a long history of facing disasters, may have known how to read the portents of an upcoming disaster as an ancient form of mitigation, but this knowledge was not passed down to us. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2024

New publications from France and Japan!

Exciting destinations are in your future with these selections from some of the most delightful new publications in world literature. Futaro Yamada takes us back to nineteenth century Japan with a scintillating mystery of imperial intrigue and murderous plots; and Eric Hazan takes us along the streets and districts of a Paris as seen by one of its most vital figures: Honoré de Balzac. Read on to find out more, and bonne journée!

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The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada, translated from the Japanese by Bryan Karetnyk, Pushkin Vertigo, 2024

Review by Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant

A driverless rickshaw, a bizarre sighting through binoculars, a corpse holding its own head—these are a just few of the perplexing scenarios that Chief Inspectors Toshiyoshi Kawaji and Keishirō Kazuki investigate in The Meiji Guillotine Murders by Futaro Yamada (pen name of Seiya Yamada).

The story begins in Japan after the Boshin War, in which the several domains fought against the Tokugawa Shogunate to restore imperial rule. During the Meiji period, strides to modernize the country continued, resulting in tumultuous changes to the economy, politics, and society. As officers of the Imperial Prosecuting Office, Kawaji and Kazuki are concerned with these developments, especially the role of justice within the new government. Both men are dedicated to their convictions, and early in the novel, Kazuki contends:

Corruption is, after all, the muddying of the distinction between the public and the private, between right and wrong. That’s why the public lost faith in the shogunate. Truly, it’s a good thing that it fell. And yet, the newly formed government is already showing signs of corruption. You ought to know this better than anyone. Otherwise, what was the point of our revolution? Or will there be another, and then another? Would it not be absurd to go on repeating it for all eternity? The government doesn’t exist merely to protect the people. Its aim must be the embodiment of justice.

One way Yamada renders this transformation and the accompanying influx of imported ideas and innovations is through the characters. Kawaji is based off of a real-life figure, the eponymous man who traveled as part of the Iwakura Mission to study systems in Western countries, and who is recognized as the founder of the modern police force in Japan. Kazuki, meanwhile, is a fictional character who returns to Japan from France to introduce the guillotine, and as the book’s title suggests, its chilling presence looms over the novel. There is a great deal of curiosity surrounding the new execution device, and when it is demonstrated at the prison, he addresses the doomed inmate:

“You are to be put to death, but in this enlightened age you shall be beheaded in the French fashion,” Kazuki boomed, as he clutched the hanging rope. “At least you shall have the honour of being the first in Japan to be subject to an experiment of this kind.”

In addition to Kawaji and Kazuki, another recurring character is Esmeralda Sanson, a French woman with an interesting family background. She is in the country working on translation projects; nevertheless, local residents are surprised to hear her speaking Japanese or singing ancient kagura songs. Often dressed as a shrine maiden, her features are captivating and give her an aura of mystique.

To Kawaji, her wide blue eyes seemed like a pair of mysterious jewels. Though he had seen them before, he could not help feeling mystified that such a beautiful creature could exist upon this earth.

After the introductory chapters, Kawaji and Kazuki investigate a confounding series of murders which juxtapose the old and the new: “A Strange Incident at the Tsukiji Hotel”; “From America with Love”; “The Hanged Man at the Eitai Bridge”; “Eyes and Legs”; and “The Corpse that Cradled its own Head.” Each begins with an excerpt from their reports filed with the Imperial Prosecuting Office, and finishes with a dramatic appearance by Esmeralda. These five baffling cases drive the narrative forward until they are ultimately connected and resolved in the final chapter. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from North Macedonia and Japan!

This week, Asymptote‘s team brings us up to date on the most recent releases and awards around the literary world! From a meditative poetry chapbook on the broad concept of motherhood from North Macedonia, to a Japanese thriller shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger Awards, read on to learn more!

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

Spring of 2024 marked an exciting new beginning in the Macedonian literary scene: in mid-April, Majkata na Svetot (Mother of the Universe), the debut poetry chapbook of Marija Svetozarevikj, was promoted in the bookshop cafe Bukva in Skopje. Concerned with themes both timely and timeless, the chapbook is centered around a “maternal approach to spirituality and life,” as Svetozarevikj explains, and celebrates the mother figure in a broader sense, which includes planet Earth. 

Svetozarevikj (b. 1998) is a graduate of the Fine Arts faculty at the University of Skopje. Her approach to writing is accordingly visual; Aleksandar Rusjakov, a fellow Macedonian poet, who admitted to having read Majkata na Svetot multiple times, describes its author as someone who “paints with words and sings in images”. This is one of the several dichotomies that Rusjakov believes are resolved within the chapbook: its pensive and loving lyricism reconciles “kindness and cruelty,” finds “peace amidst rebellion and rebellion within peace,” and remains “simple in its complexity”. Poems such as “Waterfalls (A Love Letter to Humanity)” affirm his exegesis. In a lyrical voice that is equally oracular and conciliatory, Svetozarevikj dives into the human tendency to inflict artificial boundaries upon existence as the ultimate cause for suffering. Trapped in a “dire cycle” of “denying facets of our selves”, and struggling to mold our lives into a linear “track” moving single-mindedly towards self-satisfaction, humans lose touch with being, where “there are no mistakes, but everything is part of a unity.” 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

News from Hong Kong, Kenya, and the International Prize for Arab Fiction!

This week, we hear of a moving Palestinian work, written from Israeli prisons and recently awarded the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction; newly translated short stories exploring the psychic and physical disturbances of pre- and post-handover Hong Kong; and events bringing literature to their communities in Kenya.

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

For the first time since its launch in 2007, the announcement of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) winning novel did not bring controversy, but rather warmed the hearts of those who read Palestinian prisoner Basim Khandaqji’s A Mask, the Color of the Sky (قناع بلون السماء).

Since the announcement on April 28, during the annual award ceremony in Abu Dhabi, UAE, I’ve pondered: has Khandaqji, who is serving three consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison, realized the profound impact of his voice? Has he realized that the light he is seeking within the confines of his cell is now illuminating countless hearts? For two decades, Khandaqji has steadfastly honed his literary voice while incarcerated, as a form of resistance and a means to combat isolation. His only solace in the absence of nature’s beauty and freedom is the limitless expanse of his imagination. Khandaqji chose to walk on the fiery coals of writing, engaging in battles of resilience. Stubborn and preserving, he began his journey with literature by writing poetry (a natural start for a prisoner, as poetry is an act of freedom and a potent resistance to captivity), believing that the occupation can imprison his body, but not his free imagination or resistant literature.

Khandaqji’s family recounts the arduous journey he has undertaken, moving from one prison to another because of the arbitrary measures taken by the administration. Yet, despite these difficult and complicated circumstances, Khandaqji and his fellow prisoners managed to smuggle their literary works beyond the towering walls of their confinement, a testament to their unwavering commitment to their craft. The owner of his Lebanon-based publishing house, Dar al-Adab, shared in an interview that the novel was recorded on a pen-like device, and his brother, who accepted the prize on his behalf, was the one who painstakingly transcribed the text. Some might think that Khandaqji’s role as a writer ends only with the act of recording, but his family insists that they are keen on sending all the manuscripts to him so he can ensure that every word is in its proper place, that the events and characters haven’t been altered. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest of literary news from Guatemala, China, and Japan!

In this week of literary updates, we discuss the blend of technology and literature around the globe—from a virtual imagining of the Popul Vuh in Guatemala, to the use of ChatGPT by the winner of a prestigious literary award in Japan, to an interactive exhibition of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry in Shanghai.

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

Despite having famously said, in an interview with Edward Hirsch, that “it isn’t possible to save mankind”, Wisława Szymborska displayed no shortage of compassion towards humanity and its messes, surging always towards a more enriched penetration into people, the layered fabric of their histories, and the immense variegations of their natures. In China, funnily enough, most people likely became aware of the Polish poet through a celebrated graphic novel by the Taiwanese artist Jimmy Liao;《往左走,往右走》(published in English as A Chance of Sunshine) is a story about destiny and its aloneness—depicting two individuals who walk separate paths but are unified by the same experiences. In it, Liao borrows the following lines from Szymborska’s “Love at First Sight”:

They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

That same tension between unity and undeniable difference is consistently offered through Szymborska’s corpus, and is central to a new exhibit in Shanghai centred around her works, held at Qiantan L+Plaza from April 1 to May 15. Composed of interactive installations, performances, and graphic poetic representations,  “我偏爱“ (I prefer) is a valiant effort to iterate the complexity of the poet’s exquisite awareness, and aspires towards both a sense of communion and a defense of individuality. True to its vision of dialogic action, as well as honouring literature’s confessional and communicative capacities, there are surveys to fill out, votes to cast, letters to open, and a telephone to pick up. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

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