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…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

March 17, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas, MK Harb, and Suhasini Patni

Because, as Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away."

Tired of doomscrolling? We think you’d like these staff recommendations—hailing from the UK, India, and Turkey. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like so many of us in this pandemic, my reading has turned to sci-fi and magical realism. When our world is wedged between the hybrid machination of zoom and an increasingly taxing everyday life, fantasy provides an escape into a world of pleasure. Perhaps no one has done this as masterfully as British author, Susanna Clarke, in her recent fantasy novel Piranesi. Set in a disenchanted world of The House, Piranesi, a futuristic scribe of sorts records his everyday life in an infinite universe consisting of severed statues, columns and fringe pockets of water. His universe is awfully lonely, yet he finds a way to narrate it with an uncanny curiosity. He has an endearing voice, which he often uses to enchant the only other member he interacts with, a dapper and sordid gentleman by the name of “The Other.” Together they enter a surreal journey searching for “Great and Secret Knowledge,” encountering the most mundane of objects along the way. Though The Other is not able to value this world in the same way Piranesi does, the latter often lends him his eyes to make him understand. The beauty of Clarke’s writing is not its construction of a highly centralized and systemized future universe, rather its focus on collapse and the journey that lurks between empty halls. I hope you give it a chance and let Piranesi guide your night.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

READ MORE…

To Protect Oneself From Violence: An Interview with Mónica Ojeda

March 16, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I want to know what fear is. Why are we so afraid? What does fear make us do or not do? How does fear change our bodies?

Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. With influences spanning from H.P. Lovecraft, to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called “creepypastas,” Ojeda’s novel Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021), translated expertly by Sarah Booker, explores the darkest aspects of relationships between women, amidst the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador. 

In Jawbone, popular girls and best friends Annelise and Fernanda have created a religion of their own, outside of the classroom. The girls set up camp in an abandoned house, form a secret cult that worships “The White God”, and engage in a series of increasingly dangerous dares that threatens to tear their friendships apart. Meanwhile, their Spanish literature teacher, Ms. Clara, haunted by the ghost of her dead mother, begins to lose her grip on reality. Things take a sinister turn when Ms. Clara takes Fernanda hostage in a deserted cabin, intending to show her pupil the true meaning of fear. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised, and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with Ojeda in person at a coffee shop in Madrid. Over orange juices, we discussed psychoanalysis in language, the implications of Latin American gothic literature, and her favorite horror films.

Rose Bialer (RB): The first book I read of yours was the poetry collection, Historia de la Leche, which investigates the strange violence of family relationships—specifically those between mothers and daughters. What drove you to return to this theme in Jawbone?

Mónica Ojeda (MO): I don’t remember if I first wrote Historia de la Leche or Jawbone. Well, I know that Jawbone was published first, but I don’t remember which book I wrote first. I could have been writing them at the same time. However, I do know that at the time, I was very interested in the violence within passionate relationships between women. I think the relationships between best friends, or sisters, or mothers and daughters are intense, and so of course there are a lot of possibilities for violence to get in. I’m kind of obsessed with how desire and love can be taken to the next level—the next level being sometimes absolute violence.

RB: I think your poetry comes through in your writing, especially in such highly imaginative phrases such as “mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb,” “umbilical-cord love” and “that sleeping-angel-of-history voice.” Tell me about the process of constructing these new terms.

MO: I think invention comes to me because I do see the act of writing as a way of putting language in some kind of crisis. In conflict. So sometimes, you have to develop some new forms to express certain things; that is something which pulls me back to poetry even when I am writing narrative. Because I think that poetry does that. Poetry reverts language, re-births language. Sometimes when words join together, developing new concepts and images, it can sound strange because you have no familiarity with something which has just been born. As such, it develops some kind of extrañamiento (estrangement), which also provides an atmosphere that I like, having to do with the strange and something that Freud called lo siniestro (the uncanny), which is when something unknown reveals itself in the middle of what is ordinary, during your daily routine. That is scary: when you are surrounded by the things that you know and then the strange comes in. I like to do that not only in the story of my narrative or my novels, but also in language. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Identity” by Rolla Barraq

March 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Jeffrey Clapp and Muntather Alsawad

From the clouds piled up in the eyes of mothers

This Translation Tuesday, Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp team up to translate a poem by the Iraqi poet Rolla Barraq. Within the poem’s lilting anaphora and its prayer-like solemnity, the speaker beholds an Iraq marked by alternating scenes of hope and hardship; a mise en scene that structures, one may surmise, a young person’s selfhood. As “the track of tanks on the grass” continue to resonate with ongoing world events today, let Rolla Barraq’s words remind us of how words can be one way we remember and recite for our time. 

Identity

From the smile of a child begging at the traffic lights on the hottest day of July
From the rough hand of a porter tired of dreaming
From a woman’s forehead burned by the oven of absence
From the blood that flowed until it became water for the rebellious
From the lover whose soothing voice did not soften his farewell
From a roof cracked by an orphan
From the tears of the homeless, measuring the distance with insults
From old friends who meet along the roads by chance alone
From the slums of death, sidewalks, homes and people
From the tales of a city filled with drunkards, salt
           and women confiding in bits of overheard conversation
From the windows of narrow alleys and their faint noises at night
From the track of tanks on the grass
From the image of God scattered among the victims
From a palm tree still bowing in the shade of the watchers
From a journey between the reeds of the marshes and the gaps between
           strangers
From the singing of a loyalist, about the boy who saw nothing
From the sadness of the white mountains, and the rock of their dark heart
From the clouds piled up in the eyes of mothers
From a flame that slept in the belly of the whale—
You all came to me in Iraq, and I fell in love with you. 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…

We Stand With Ukraine: “Let Me Cry with Your Eyes My Love Affair with Budapest” by Thanh Tâm Tuyền

March 12, 2022  |  in Translations, We Stand With Ukraine  |  by Thuy Dinh

As the war in Ukraine enters its third week, a new column to show that the world stands with Ukraine.

At Asymptote the very notions of equality and social justice are embedded within our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Past projects like 2014’s ”Say Ayotzinapa,” responding to the kidnapping of 43 Mexican students, and an entire Special Feature, in our Spring 2017 edition, spotlighting authors from countries targeted by Trump’s #MuslimBan, speak fully to this. The current devastating moment surely calls for collective action again, and so, in this new column at the blog, published henceforth every Saturday, we will be gathering new work—poetry, fiction, essays, and translations thereof—responding to the war, now in its third week. May these pieces offer hope and strength in turbulent times even as they express outrage on behalf of and support for Ukrainians. 

For our inaugural column, editor-at-large Thuy Dinh translates into English for the first time an iconic Vietnamese poem, originally written in December of 1956. Through this work, South Vietnamese poet Thanh Tâm Tuyền expresses solidarity with Hungarian revolutionaries who struggled against Soviet forces. Though published decades prior, the visceral imagery of these lines still evoke empathy for those ardently resisting the invasion of their homeland.

Let Me Cry with Your Eyes My Love Affair with Budapest

Let me cry with your eyes
My love affair with Budapest
My heart and yours each of us a heart
They fill the streets with artillery tanks.

Let me harness the anger in your breasts
As they fire steel into lipstick-shaped muzzles
At each crossroad my face becomes a barricade.

Let me howl from your throat
As the bright morning takes wing
They knock us down like bricks
Drunk in their kill-lust
The way we thirst for the future.

Let me seethe with your cheeks
While they seal off border routes
Our joined fingers flutter like breath
My body waits.

Let me trade my sleep for your
Stress-riven, bullet-grazed forehead
It’s never night for night never comes
They attack in the morning it lasts forever.

Let me die in your skin
Threaded into the tanks’ endless tracks
I will live by your breath
O the ones in your stead

Let me cry with your eyes
My love affair with Budapest.

Thanh Tâm Tuyền
December 1956

Translated from the Vietnamese by Thuy Dinh

Interested in submitting your own work to this column? Send it to the “We Stand with Ukraine” section of our Submittable portal here—fees will be waived for this particular category. We look forward to reading your responses. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Erica X Eisen, Julia Sherwood, and Lee Yew Leong

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

READ MORE…

“I want my words and those of the law to meet on the page and touch”: On Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill

March 10, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

In looking at disobedient women, the book dismisses “the lawyer’s red pen” and the “narrow confines” of law.

When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, And Other Stories, 2022

Could such bloody murders really have been committed by women? Did they owe their homicidal violence to advances in feminism?

Alia Trabucco Zerán has been training herself to suspect—as if it were an art form. It is this honed ability for distrust, combined with her background in law, that brings her close to the four women at the center of When Women Kill. In her debut novel, The Remainder (shortlisted for the 2019 Booker International), Trabucco Zerán told the story of Iquela and Felipe, who undertake a road trip to help their family friend Paloma collect and bury her late mother’s body. The lives of the trio are bound with the loss and terror of Pinochet’s rise to power, and as the sky darkens to the color of ash, they too dream of corpses, sinking into hazy memories. The Remainder sealed its author as one of Chile’s most recognized and poignant debut novelists, and central to its story is the same uneasiness of forgetting that pervades When Women Kill; what is true, in a lawful sense, is curled and uncurled in this text, making it one of the more incisive intersectional feminist analyses of myth and murder.

Trabucco Zerán begins her book by explaining why she undertook this study, claiming that a woman who kills is “outside both the codified laws and the cultural laws that define and regulate femininity.” Scavenging through multiple archives, court documents, films, and plays, she reconstructs the history of Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel, and Teresa Alfaro—four high-profile Chilean murderers of the twentieth century. She is unconcerned with learning about the motivations behind the acts; instead, the book serves as an account to remember and discern the women who commit crimes, who have expressed their rage. READ MORE…

Violence, Beauty, Structure, Freedom: An Interview with Translator Urayoán Noel

March 9, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Noa Mendoza

Urayoán is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word.

In the early days of the pandemic I became obsessed with a little book called Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) by Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer. Two years later, I’m still returning to it again and again. Berenguer’s poetry, ranging from a classically lyrical style to experimental concrete work, speaks to a certain gruesome dance that defines the intense moments of closure and euphoric freedom of the pandemic era. The poems—particularly her concrete works—contain wells of meaning; they dip into abstraction and yet are completely literal, hung in the spatial galaxy of the page, intimate and infinite, like vessels unto themselves. The English translations, pasted next to the original Spanish, felt like an impossible feat. How, I wondered, was it possible to translate these vessels in which every letter, fluidly molded in Spanish, was essential to their form?

 When I interned for UDP in the summer of 2021, I seized the opportunity to chat with one of the translators who had worked on the book, and specifically on these visual poems, Urayoán Noel. Noel is a poet, translator, and professor based in the Bronx, originally from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. His poem “ode to coffee/oda al cafe,” named after the iconic Juan Luis Guerra song, deconstructs the relationship between English and Spanish, empire and cash crop, moving in and out of the two languages like a defiant and fluid snake. This is emblematic of the warm and brutal intelligence that Urayoán brings to the act of translation: he is always conscious of, resisting, and emphasizing the neocolonial nature of the translated word, and he has a deep love for language and an understanding of all that it celebrates, erases, amplifies, and reveals.

Noa Mendoza (NM): I thought it might be nice to start out talking about a poem that I’m actually going to get a tattoo of soon.

Urayoán Noel (UN): No way, really?

NM: Yes! This graph one, it’s untitled, but it is a pictorial representation of a beach scene, with a jumble of letters underneath.

I’m wondering what your experience was translating this graph, and, more generally, the incomprehensible. The words in the middle that don’t necessarily hold semantic meaning. And also gibberish more generally, if you ever think about that when it comes to translation.

UN: I think I might make a distinction there. I certainly agree that Berenguer’s language isn’t linear. I’m not sure she’s a poet of gibberish. I think of gibberish as a kind of uncontained language. My sense is there’s always this rigor in her work and a constant struggle between freedom and constraint.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Luz” by Samanta Galán Villa

March 8, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Tricia Viveros

Her tone of voice was like the chirping of a small bird.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, treat yourself to this sparse and beguiling story of a young schoolgirl who escapes from home and encounters a strange little girl, Luz. Written by the Mexican writer Samanta Galán Villa and published in Monolito magazine in May 2021, this story—related through the perspective of an innocent child—appears deceptively simple, but conveys a deeper sense of the way a child’s gaze can defamiliarise her little world into something bizarre and oftentimes beautiful. Tricia Viveros explains, in her translator’s note, how she strives to preserve this duality and makes a case for reading this writer from Guanajuato who represents a counterpoint to the dominant ways Mexican literature is read.

“My English translation of ‘Luz’ aims to maintain Galán Villa’s artful economy of language as much as possible—a task that required some compromise as, for instance, it’s not possible to omit the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in English. Adopting an adequate level of rudimentary wording was also challenging. The Spanish original elicits a sense of irony by juxtaposing its childish diction and syntax with a sophisticated narrative structure. Writing that is too unrefined risks detracting from the text and inhibiting the plot’s development; by frequently using simple sentences and contractions, my translation seeks to convey the near-surrealistic irony of the original without diminishing the prose. Samanta Galán Villa is part of a growing number of emerging contemporary voices across underrepresented regions of Latin America. Hailing from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, her writing evidences a long-established literary tradition beyond that of more cosmopolitan, affluent centers like Mexico City.”

—Tricia Viveros

Mama slapped me. Her lower lip trembled. How could they possibly have punished me, after class was dismissed, she said, together with the disobedient children. I tried to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that someone had smeared my braids with paint and I’d defended myself.

She didn’t want to hear it. She said that she knew me. That I wasn’t going to eat chocolate cereal with the family later, that she’d only give me a glass of juice. Zip it and don’t talk back to me, brat. Go to your room, right now.  READ MORE…

Free Fleas: Self-Publishing and Storytelling in Japan

March 7, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Laurel Taylor

The roots of contemporary dōjinshi are firmly planted in the fertile soil of Japan’s post-revolution literary circles.

Goethe had a famously tumultuous relationship with publishing, expressing that to “exchange [my work] for money seemed hateful to me.” The relationship between creation and distribution is always fraught with the masked workings of industry, further complicated in a world expedited and reconstituted by advancing technologies. Today, a text can go from the mind to the press in a matter of hours, via the mechanics of a profligate self-publishing industry; how does this implicate and transform our urge—and instinct—for storytelling? In this following essay, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor looks into the culture of dōjinshi, the creation and dissemination of self-published works in Japan, examining our relationship to our creative endeavors, the promises and pitfalls of profit, and the paths our words take as they make their way into the world.

I think there are very few shared universalities across human histories and societies, but those that exist are tied up, I would argue, in the act of creation. The earliest remnants we have of our ancestors include inventions of the practical variety—tools for hunting, gathering, and protecting—but they also include artistic creations, the purposes of which are far more abstract. The traces of our past include cave paintings and sculptures, bone flutes and drums, but also less tangible things: Ainu yukar, Homeric epics, Indigenous Australian storytelling traditions, tales and chronicles performed orally long before they were written down. The far-ranging history of our urge to communicate, to express, and to entertain seems to ultimately serve the same desire: all of us want to tell stories.

In the modern age, storytelling has, for the layperson, taken on narrower and narrower definitions. Despite the oral legacy of narrative, the stories commanding large audiences are usually associated with the written word; even when such texts are transferred into drama, film, television, or song, it first begins on the page. This, of course, narrows the notion of who gets to tell stories. What once was the work of humanity has become the work of the writer, and the road to claiming “writer” as profession is a daunting one, which few people are ultimately able to take. Though we all still share an impulse toward creation, those impulses are restricted by educational demands, job demands, relationship demands, publisher demands, market demands. We live in a world of exigencies, where storytelling is overwhelmed by societal pressures. As such, the act of writing was, for many centuries, dominated by the wealthy, educated, and idle—and our literary canons demonstrate as much.

However, with the advent of mass production and the internet age, writing has been bolstered by more universalized education, increased access to tools, and growing networks of supportive writing communities. The gap between layperson and writer has been further shortened by bustling self-publishing economies, most evident in Japan through the culture of dōjinshi. Those familiar with Japanese popular culture may already be aware of this term in relation to comics and graphic novels, but it has a much broader definition. Written 同人誌, dōjinshi are broadly defined as “document[s] by like-minded people.” They can be made by anyone for any purpose: cooking, gardening, stamp-collecting, train-watching, and yes, storytelling. The closest kindred term in English might be “zine,” but in the Japanese context, dōjinshi lack that same underground punk aesthetic; it’s not uncommon for students to participate in after-school dōjinshi clubs or for retirees to print dōjinshi about their hobbies. Many of these publications are intended to apprise communities of municipal matters or to attract new members, but narratively inspired dōjinshi reproduce the stories of our day-to-day: those told around the dinner table, fanfiction, original children’s tales. They echo the narrative traditions of long ago, told in amphitheaters or sung around campfires or chanted to the churning of the plow, producing local community-based connections rather than mass market commodities. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Eva Wissting

Literary awards, bookstore revivals, and political upheavals from Sweden, Bulgaria, and Gaza!

This week, our editors bring news of a major literature prize in Sweden, disturbing governmental policies repressing freedom of speech in Bulgaria, and the rebirth of a central bookstore in Gaza. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

The Nordic Council has announced the nominees of its annual Literature Prize, which has awarded a work of fiction in a Nordic language­­­ since 1962. The languages include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greenlandic, Faroese, and Sámi. The literary works considered may be novels, plays, essays, short stories, or poetry of artistic and literary quality. The purpose of the award is to create interest in the literatures and languages within the cultural community of the Nordic region. This year, eleven nominated writers represent all the countries and languages of the region, and four of the works are novels written in Swedish.

Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers, with a long list of publications since her debut in 1959. In 1994, she was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Blackwater, available in English translation by Joan Tate. This year, she is nominated for The Wolf Run, a novel about a man in his seventies and his relationship to nature as he comes to terms with his life. The other Swedish nominee is Jesper Larsson, for Den dagen den sorgen (literally translated as That Day That Sorrow, or also as “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”), about a single father and his relationship to his teenage daughter. Finnish writer Kaj Korkea-aho, nominated for Röda rummet, also writes in Swedish, and so does Ålandic writer Karin Erlandsson, who is nominated for the novel Hem. The winner will be announced on November 1, during the Nordic Council’s Session in Helsinki. Previous winners include the internationally renowned Sofi Oksanen (Dog Park, Purge, When the Doves Disappeared), Jon Fosse (The Other Name, Trilogy, Morning and Evening), and Nobel Prize laureate Tomas Tranströmer.

More financial support to Swedish writers is on the way in the form of a crisis package. Because of the consequences of the pandemic faced by many writers during the past two years, the Swedish Authors’s Fund has received thirty million SEK from the government. The organization has now decided that around 1,500 writers and literary creators who were previously granted scholarships will each receive an additional amount of approximately twenty thousand SEK.

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Yes, and It Sometimes Is Like That, You Embrace Your Existence

March 3, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Ivana Hostová

A computer-generated collection of poetry in Slovak wins a national prize for poetry.

In 2020, the Slovak poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the Slovak sound artist and software developer collaborated with Liza Gennart, a neural network they programmed, to write the poetry collection, Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). To the surprise of many, the work won a major Slovak national award for poetry. In this essay, the second part of our coverage on Liza Gennart, the critic and scholar Ivana Hostová contextualizes the project within the rapidly developing field of electronic poetry, examines Liza Gennart’s subversive, unsettling poems, and explores their implications for our relationships with humanized machines. The following excerpts from Gennart’s collection were translated by Hostová.

Miscellanea 4.

Do you enter this world?
There is nothing to do. Not even in the bedroom, such misfortune, you leave it soak
in the brain and perhaps you also do it for my sake. But for my sake.

* late afternoon

* because it doesn’t sound like a reproach

* but you agree: it resembles a colourless key

* because wet words float out the window

Liza Gennart: Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, 2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd), created by Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák, excerpt translated by Ivana Hostová.

In a recent ambitious attempt to comprehensively account for the lyric experience and practice in Western culture, Jonathan Culler in his Theory of the Lyric (2015) names the ritualistic as one of the defining features of what a poem has been over the centuries. Although Culler mostly excludes experimental writing including electronic poetry from his discussions and therefore restricts the scope of his analysis, the feeling of a ritual is surely present upon a readerly encounter with a book of poetry generated by one of our current Others—computers, neural networks, and machines. These, to our horror and admiration, have now absorbed the entire textual world produced during the whole history of humankind. We cannot help but wonder how much of what remains hidden from us they know and to what use they might put it. Instructing a neural network to write poetry provides an uncanny glimpse of such depths and shallow waters, reflecting the surfaces and masks of humanity.

Poetry generated by artificial intelligence, as research into readers’s responses shows, tends to be most interesting when it involves cooperation between human and non-human actors. One such project, Es Devlin’s Poem Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, creates poems—in English and Arabic—using words submitted by visitors which are then processed by an advanced machine learning algorithm. The creative possibilities of recent developments in natural language processing have inspired artists and poets all over the world and have given rise to poems, novels, and plays in languages with limited diffusion—including Slovak. The creative duo composed of poet and intermedia artist Zuzana Husárová and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák collaborated with a neural network Liza Gennart to create the collection Outcomes of Origin (2020, VLNA / Drewo a srd). The book—to the great shock of many—won the national prize for poetry, “Golden Wave,” in 2021.

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“Liza seems to want a bright future, not just a virtual imagination”: An Interview with Slovak poet Zuzana Husárová

March 2, 2022  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Ivana Hostová

I try to speak in a completely different language, one that sounds rather than articulates sentences fighting to invoke sense.

The poetry and artistic projects of the Slovak poet and researcher of electronic literature Zuzana Husárová explore various media, technologies, environments, and creative methods. In 2020, she and the sound artist and software developer Ľubomír Panák created a collection of poetry generated by a neural network they named Liza Gennart. To everyone’s surprise, their Outcomes of Origin (Výsledky vzniku, VLNA/Drewo a srd) won a Slovak national poetry prize. In this conversation, the first of our two-part coverage on Liza Gennart, the poet explains the creative process behind the project and addresses the frames within which it aims to be conceptualized.

Ivana Hostová (IH): Let me start with a hypothetical question. Would Liza like to have a body in Metaverse? If so, would she be more interested in fashion or in spreading political messages? Or would she perhaps boycott such an existence at all?

Zuzana Husárová (ZH): I believe she would boycott it. In the fictional world of Stephenson´s Snow Crash, people need metaverse (this use of the term inspired Facebook), since it provides an escape from a devastating, unbearable presence. As I understand Liza, she seems to want a bright future, not just a virtual imagination.

IH: So, who or what is Liza Gennart?

ZH: She is a Slovak poetry-writing neural network, based on a GPT-2 language model, fine-tuned on a literary corpus of over two thousand predominantly contemporary Slovak titles of mostly poetry.

IH: In the epilogue you wrote for Liza, you state that if humans acquaint the programmes with our literary heritage, neural networks might understand us better in the future. You also said that striving for a better mutual comprehension between humans and machines might have the potential to deepen humanity’s understanding of itself on the one hand and to humanize new technologies on the other. Can you elaborate on this idea?

ZH: On the technological level, the first step seems to be focusing on a relevant conceptualisation and building of a proper database for training. By that we mean a database one can trust in an ethical sense and whose results can bring defamiliarization. In that passage, I meant this acquainting more in the sense of literary thinking rather than poetry itself that could be humanising for new technologies. We are striving for a thorough rethinking of all steps one is taking in the process of working with new technologies, including the use of relevant language rather than pompous news devices and employment of ethics in all stages of working with, presenting, and promoting new technologies.

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