Place: China

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 4, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Mary Noorlander, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest in literary news from China, Mexico, and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to literary fairs, readings, and walks around the world, featuring Malaysia as the country of honor at Beijing’s annual book fair, an “in-progress” translation reading in New York, and a thought-provoking reflection on a traipse around sites made famous by the works of Carlos Monsiváis in CDMX. Read on to learn more!

Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large, reporting from China

Between June 18–22, the 31st Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) welcomed over 1,700 exhibitors from 80 countries, with Bangladesh, Belarus, Chile, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kenya, and Oman joining for the first time. Over 300 thousand visitors of all ages and backgrounds participated in the fair’s multi-sensory literary walk, from family-friendly activities to down-to-business panel discussions.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 6, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Linnea Gradin, Sofija Popovska, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from China, North Macedonia, and Sweden!

In this week’s round-up, our editors discuss the continual relevance and essentiality of literary criticism, new projects to promote literature in translation, and a memoir that reneges on skepticism to embrace interconnectivity. 

Xiao Yue Shan, reporting for China

Last week, the ceremony of the fourteenth Tang Tao Youth Literary Research Awards took place in Shanghai, honouring five young scholars and their articles in the field of criticism, with subjects ranging from the re-interpretation of classics to the analysis of contemporary intersections between textual practice and artificial intelligence. The list of awardees included Li Jing on academic systems and knowledge transformation in the digital age; Wang Xuesong on visual forms and the construction of new poetic genres; Han Songgong on the works of novelist Bi Feiyu and their analysis of human nature; Wang Bingzhong on Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q and the procession of character development through spiritual awakening; and Li Zhuang on Cai Chongda’s “Hometown Trilogy” and the potentiality of literature being a point of stability amidst a fractured era.

The award, established by the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature and given annually to scholars under the age of forty-five, has done much to nurture emerging critics and academics since its inauguration. Named after the great twentieth-century essayist, historian, and Lu Xun expert Tang Tao, the prize aims to promote innovation and passionate diligence in the field of literary studies—qualities that awardee Wang Xuesong saw as emblematic of youth itself, commenting that scholars should continually aim for the same persistence, enthusiasm, and warmth with which they began their careers (presumably before they’re crushed by the relentless pressures and depressions of academic bureaucracy).

Literary criticism can seem elitist at best and masturbatory at worst, but anyone who’s a fan will likely understand that the hermeneutics and analysis of texts are in fact interpretations and inquisitions into our most basic interests: life, reality, and the human desire for creation. To see how we continually re-engage with classical works and their sociohistorical context with the illumination of contemporary understanding, or to gauge how our faculties of intelligence and critical thinking may be altered or recalibrated with technological developments—these are pivotal questions that move beyond the page to address themes of social conflict, societal evolution, and the ever-changing modes and methodologies of expression. In substantiating the importance of these practices, judge and professor Chen Sihe noted: ‘AI has created a greater expectation for the humanities, and only when our studies prove themselves to be irreplaceable, can they have an independent and individual existence.’ It calls into question what would qualify literary criticism to be seen as irreplaceable in the greater scope of things; anyone reading this, or anyone present for Chen’s speech that evening, would certainly agree that these studies already are irreplaceable—after all, what’s more worth studying that our most integral art of communication?—but as the underfunding of the humanities continues the legacy of scholars working in uncertainty and abject poverty, and the monstrous figure of AI continues to encroach, the growing smallness of our minority cannot be denied. READ MORE…

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

May 5, 2025  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Daniel Yadin, Hilary Ilkay, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, Sauvryn Linn, and Sayani Sarkar

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

READ MORE…

Blog Editor Highlights: Spring 2025

April 21, 2025  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper dive into Rosario Castellanos, Liu Ligan, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in our latest issue.

There’s plenty to discover in our Spring 2025 issue, with work from twenty-four countries and eighteen languages, including a new Korean literature feature; icons like Chekhov and Pushkin; and the additions of Guyana Creolese and Sesotho into our language archives. Here, our blog editors highlight their favourites from this teeming array, including an immersive, linguistically deft tale of adolescent awakening, and an epistolary insight into one of literary history’s great love stories.

A few weeks ago, I watched The Eternal Feminine, a film on the life of the great Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos. The narrative itself was tepid, overly reliant on the tired trope of the overworked woman genius and her jealous partner, carrying on the tradition of the biopic’s privileging of unidimensional emotion—but still a numinous glimmer came from actress Karina Gidi’s forceful, steady delivery of Castellanos’s words, through which we are granted the strange tension of a mind that is both deeply interconnected and stoically isolated: “I love you, dear Ricardo, as far as the eye can see—and keep in mind that I stand facing the sea.”

As always with the public exhibition of letters, there is the pleasant shiver of the eavesdrop, and the thrill of the temporal override. Through Nancy Ross Jean’s flowing, intuitive translation of Castellano’s Letters to Ricardo, there is a sense of what makes the traditional biography so ill-suited for intimacy. In the display of a supposedly whole story, the audience is never given the dynamics and mysteries of possibility—but of someone else’s love, we should only ever admit to having a glimpse. The facts of context and consequence enable us to proffer our own judgments on the rights and wrongs of a romance, but has that ever mattered to those enraptured within the feeling? Despite knowing that the love story will come to a devastating end, the letter—a souvenir, a relic—transports us momentarily to a state of oblivion, a moment of urgency wherein reality is constituted from desire: the absolution of living in a body that desires. “I love you, and this lends a specific meaning to my desire, a desire only you can satisfy. I don’t want anybody or anything to come between us and this new reality that for me is so rich and important.” There’s something extraordinarily powerful in that line, which reaches out to our voyeurism and dismisses our retrospect; this reality belongs to her. READ MORE…

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

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

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

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

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

READ MORE…

I wake to face the candle’s red bloom: A Conversation with Wendy Chen about Translating The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao

March 12, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

Translating taught me to interrogate my positionality to the languages I know and write in.

The Magpie at Night takes its title from one of Li Qingzhao’s surviving poetic fragments: “The feelings I make into poems / are like the magpie at night, / circling three times, unable to settle.” A woman poet from the Song dynasty, Li (1084-1151 CE) was recognized for her mastery of the classic ci form, and is described in this newly published, wide-ranging collection as an “indomitable voice . . . [that] still sings to us across the centuries” by translator Wendy Chen. In this complete series of poems commonly accepted to be written by Li, Chen brings about this singing in Li’s wondrous sense of listlessness, in recurring motifs of dreams, and in the clarity of awareness: “I wake to face / the candle’s red bloom.”

Here, I speak with Chen about her translation of The Magpie at Night, a process involving familial recitations, happenstance, and wounds towards encounters with true selves.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Wendy Chen (WC): It is inventive, playful, and an homage to the writer and the original work. The process of translation itself is like figuring out how to unlock a puzzle of language, while exploring its possibilities.

TT: For readers unfamiliar with the work of Li Qingzhao, can you describe what it was like to hear her work recited for the first time?

WC: In my family, recitations of classical Chinese poems were a part of the everyday fabric of conversation. The older generations would recite these poems as commentary on contemporary issues or events in our daily lives. In this way, I was raised to see these poems in dialogue with whatever might be happening, and Li’s work was no different. Hearing her recited in this way allowed me to see the continued relevance of her work, and how it could speak to a modern audience of readers who might also be grappling with desire, grief, longing, homesickness, resentment, and love. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Wen Yiduo

January 21, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by A. Z. Foreman

Just hear the gunfire! Death is roaring, reaving. / Silent night, how could you keep my heart from heaving?

If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Wen Yiduo, the renowned Chinese poet of the 1920s, these three poems demonstrate why he became a household name in his native country. The first, “Deadwater”, describes a backwater ditch, where the filth seamlessly transforms into images of ethereal beauty (“let the grease weave a layer of silk brocade / where germs brew a mist like twilit clouds at dusk”). In the second, “Silent Night”, the speaker’s comfortable domestic life can’t obscure the knowledge of suffering outside, piquing a deep indignation at the unfairness of the world. Finally, “End of Days” imagines the dull wait for death, consumed by loneliness and dread. All three are suffused with Wen’s trademark kaleidoscope of devout aestheticism, deeply intellectualized formalism, and raw patriotism.

While this selection of poems have been translated into English before, translator A. Z. Foreman‘s innovative adherence to a strict rhyme scheme draws out the poet’s original intention. Wen, a key figure in the “formalist school” of Republican China’s poets, didn’t care for much free verse and long rejected the idea that Chinese poetry should be in free verse at all. The basis of his poetic vision is not freedom but beauty, a beauty inspired by the English romantics and the formalist concept of “dancing in chains.”

Deadwater

This is a dead ditch rank with despair’s backwater.
A brisk wind can’t raise a ripple from its skin.
Why not junk some more scrap tin and copper here,
or dump your rotten dinner leftovers in.

Maybe the copper will turn to an emerald green,
and peach blossoms bloom out of the tin pots’ rust.
Then let the grease weave a layer of silk brocade
where germs brew a mist like twilit clouds at dusk.

Let the dead ditchwater ferment to green liquor
bubbling up floating pearls out of its white foam,
little pearls growing to bigger pearls in chuckles
that burst when liquor-raiding mosquitos come.

And so a dead ditch rank with despair’s backwater
can claim something lively, bright and all its own.
If the frogs here can’t handle the solitude
this stagnant muck can gurgle them up a tune!

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Katherine” by Ling Shuhua

January 14, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Nicky Harman

She didn’t understand why her mother was so against her playing with Silver. She was fascinated by this little country girl.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a short story by Ling Shuhua, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman. The Wu family has escaped to the mountains for their holiday, but their tranquil lifestyle belies the turmoil brewing around them—they’re in 1920s-1930s China. For Katherine, the youngest daughter, every day is a battle with her status-conscious mother, who is intent on shaping her children according to trendy Western sensibilities. Katherine finds solace in the company of Silver, her nanny’s daughter, whose practical countryside wisdom provides a counterpoint to her mother’s imported values. Their innocent antics set off a chain of events that exposes the fragile facade of propriety so carefully maintained by the Wus, and, more generally, the affluent class to which they belong. 

The rain stopped at dawn, and a mist descended over the trees in the valley. Amid the white-out, all that could be heard was the waves breaking on the beach, their steady rhythm seeming to promise a beautiful morning. 

A long-drawn-out hoot broke the silence. The jade-green foothills lay in a dreamlike haze, the mountain peaks facing out to sea floated clear of the mist as if from behind clouds at sunset, and the coastline emerged in perfect chiaroscuro, like a Chinese ink wash painting.

The surface of the water began to glow with brilliant dawn colours and the sand on the beach caught flickers of light; in the eastern sky, the sun spewed bright golden rays of light through the layers of crimson clouds. 

Then the mist vanished and on the hills, buildings painted red and green, as neat as little doll’s houses, could be seen amongst the greenery. 

Set back at some distance from them was an impressive-looking villa painted a vivid red and flanked on one side by a broad veranda in pale green. This, the summer home of company director Wu, could be seen from miles away.

On the veranda, the aroma of coffee and buns filled the air; Mr. Wu was having breakfast with his wife and two of his children—a boy and a girl of twelve or thirteen, smartly dressed in Western-style clothes.

Below them, on the lawn, a big empty space dotted with bright flowering trees and shrubs, the youngest daughter, Katherine, was sitting on a rock playing at cockfighting with Nanny Wang’s daughter, Silver. They were jabbing at each other with big handfuls of pine needles. Suddenly, Katherine stopped and gazed out at the sea.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2025

January 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Christopher Higgs, Henry Gifford, Jordan Silversmith, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Italy, China, Sweden, Germany, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo!

In the first month of 2025, the offerings of world literature are as rich as ever. To help you on your year of reading, here are ten titles we’re most excited about—a new translation of a stargazing Greek classic; the latest from China’s most lauded avant-gardist; a rediscovered Chilean novel of queer love and revolution; a soaring, urgent compilation of Palestinian voices; surrealism and absurdism from an Italian short story master—and many more.

arabic between love and war

Arabic, Between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, Trace Press, 2025

Review by Alex Tan

 Addressing itself to the subtle but immense interstice between the Arabic words for ‘love’ and ‘war’, which differ by only one letter, Trace Press’s community-centric poetry anthology is as much a testament to beauty and survival under the conditions of catastrophe as it is a refusal to perform or fetishize suffering for a white gaze. The bilingual collection is, further, an intergenerational gathering of voices: canonical luminaries like Fadwa Tuqan are assembled alongside contemporary lodestars like George Abraham.

Throughout the volume, language gives in to its fecundity, at times carried by a voice that “condenses history to the depths of silence”, at others seeded within a word that “alone was enough to wither a tree”. The whispered syllable, across utterance and inscription, temporarily suspends the cruelties of the real: “I love calling you habibi / because then I feel as though they haven’t destroyed our cities.” In shared intimacy, an interregnum emerges, fragile as the stroke of an ر.   

But how far can one measure the ruin and the specter of love in sentences? “I write rose and mean nothing,” the poet Qasim Saudi ventures, as if refuting the possibility of romanticism. The surveying ego can also be a trap—“my I wounding me”. Many of the writers here disclose a longing for dissolution, for blunting the edges of the self so that a liquid, collective consciousness might emerge in its stead. In Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s idiom, “you never saw it coming, this cleansing, / how we have become this ocean”. Nour Balousha’s plangent question echoes, “Who told the wind that we were leaves?”  READ MORE…

A Long and Winding Way to Go: Luka Lei Zhang on Working-Class Writings from Asia

January 2, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I want to use the framework of ‘working-class literature’ to explore the transformations and tensions in literary texts.

Through the lens of comparative literature, the ancestry of working-class writings and the literature of labour trails from Russian novelist Maxim Gorky’s Maть (Mother, 1906) to South Africa’s Black migrant theatre, from the oeuvre of Argentine poet Elías Castelnuovo to the biographies of working-class Irish writers, and includes the many proletarian writers collectives springing up in response to the social moment: France’s Socialisme ou Barbarie, Japan’s Puroretaria bunka undō and Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei, Sri Lanka’s Dabindu, and United Kingdom’s ‘The Fed’ or the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.

As Macau-based Chinese scholar-translator Dr. Luka Lei Zhang writes in The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (2024), the literary production of contemporary Asian workers ‘are often subjected to intricate social forces and power dynamics’, and it ‘would be a mistake to reduce these contradictions to simple good/bad, political/apolitical, and individual/collective oppositions’. It is this simplistic dichotomy that is contested by Asian Workers Stories, an anthology of fiction and nonfiction prose produced outside the fortresses of the canon, the middle-class literati, and the academe. Dr. Zhang, the anthology’s editor, brings her expertise as a scholar (and at-times translator) of working-class writers Chong Han, Tan Kok Seng, and Md Sharif Uddin of Singapore, as well as Mengyu, Wan Huashan, and Shengzi of China. In a 2023 interview, she confessed: ‘Personally and politically, working-class literature holds a special place in my heart’, going on to name Gorky, Annie Ernaux, Xu Lizhi, Takiji Kobayashi, and Filipino migrant worker-poet Rolinda Onates Española as her favourites.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Zhang on migrant workers writing from East Asia, Southeast and South Asia, and the Middle East, as well as the expansion of working-class writings within the larger body of the Asian literary canon.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Cheers to the anthology Asian Workers Stories! Apart from wanting to contribute a new dimension to Asian working-class literature (considering most existing books are either scholarly or poetry collections originally written in English), what are other motivations that impelled the creation of this anthology? 

Luka Lei Zhang (LLZ): I’ve worked on workers’ writings for several years and have encountered many great storytellers. Although several anthologies of workers’ poetry exist, short stories are translated and collected on a lesser basis. My main goal was to organise the writers in this region and, in this way, show that their work is valued and that they do not write alone. I am fortunate to know many Asian worker writers personally, which had allowed me to approach them and discuss the project, and their interest and encouragement motivated me to pursue the work further. I met Hard Ball Press’s publisher, Tim Sheard, at the Working-Class Studies Conference in 2019. He invited me to publish working-class writings with him—and that’s how it happened. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 6, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary news from Southeast Asia, Bulgaria, and Chile!

In this week of world literature, our editors cover the influence of censorship and propaganda on literature, and look back on Southeast Asian literature released this year.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Southeast Asia

What a year in Southeast Asian literature! The Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand took center stage in Penguin Random House Southeast Asia (SEA)’s catalogues, with a range of texts published throughout the year. First off in March was Bleeding Sun by playwright-novelist Rogelio R. Sicat, translated by one of Sicat’s children, the translator and editor Ma. Aurora L. Sicat, from the original Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, which was serialised beginning 1965. Sicat, who came of age in the aftermath of the American Occupation, wrote novels which further revealed his belief in land reform and love for Tagalog as a literary language, veering away from his contemporaries who were influenced by Euro-American conventions.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains” by Yiran Li

November 19, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by James Appleby and Yiran Li

Legs are easy to read. There’s only two: / those that have laboured, those that haven't.

I first heard the story of Yongfen Zhang from the cleaning lady at the community library, Yongfen’s roommate. She told me that Yongfen lost her father when she was a baby, that her mother remarried, that she never attended a day of school. To support her children, Yongfen left her hometown for Shanghai. Unable to read a single character, she could only clean streets. She was confined to her room and the streets she cleaned. 

Although I never met Yongfen I feel a kinship with her: we speak the same dialect and come from the same region in central China, with its overpopulation, agricultural tradition, history of famines, conservative thinking, lack of trade and emerging industries. Our region has become the primary source of migrant workers for Shanghai. I meet them in libraries, in barber shops, on streets, and I recognize them immediately once I hear how they speak Mandarin.  

—Yiran Li

Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains

Yongfen Zhang, 1982, Xihua, Central Plains,
street cleaner, Central Plains Road, Shanghai.
Illiterate and tracing the graffiti
of her name from ID to labour contract
Not even in dreams: no mountain, no sea.
Central Plains to Central Plains Road,
map of half her life.

Reading is the refuge of the people
and she reads too, warnings from heaven,
from the landfill take the third right
and read your way back home,
reading her husband’s face (a good man
schooled three years, pinching her tits
so much more gently than her stepfather).
After meals she sits in the dirt
and reads the moving legs.
Legs are easy to read. There’s only two:
those that have laboured, those that haven’t.
Just as she sat, ten years old, on the ground,
concrete-mixer, digging wild vegetables,
hop-skipping to the field with brother
strapped to her back, arms muscled as hammers.
Never thought she’d grow into a sin called
ignorance.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 15, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, José García Escobar, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from Central America, China, and North Macedonia!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on award-winning literature from Nicaragua and Guatemala; the blend of art and letters in recent events centering Chinese literature in translation; and a dedication to one of the most influential literary figures in Macedonia, the late Olivera Nikolova. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Central America

Last month, Mexico’s FIL (Guadalajara International Book Fair) announced that the Guatemalan editor Raúl Figueroa Sarti will receive the inaugural Federico García Lorca Prize. The Premio Federico García Lorca a la Libertad de Expresión y Publicación is awarded to people or organizations that have promoted and protected freedom of speech across Latin America and Spain. Raúl Figueroa Sarti is the founder and director of F&G Editores, one of Guatemala’s and Central America’s most renowned publishing houses, and in 2021, he also won APP’s Freedom to Publish Award.

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