Place: Guatemala

“Literature is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción

The trick is knowing what not to say, then being able to honor the decision to leave it unsaid.

By 2004, Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon had published three books: one about the life and death of Guatemalan painter Carlos Valenti; one about Miguel de Cervantes; one about how writers become writers. Four years later, he released a book of short stories called El boxeador polaco (The Polish Boxer, Editorial Pre-Textos), which inaugurated a new era for him as a writer. The book became an earthquake, and its ripples can still be felt today—nearly ten books later. Its stories went on to expand into novels, their themes and ideas forming a continual thread through the author’s prolific oeuvre, acknowledging the truth that stories, just like life, must be built on what came before. Canción, his latest book to be translated into English (Bellevue Press), borrows characters, plot lines, and entire sections from Signor Hoffman and Mañana nunca lo hablamos, books he published seven and eleven years ago respectively.

Because of this continuity and rehashing of stories, Eduardo’s body of work has often been referred to as a novela en marcha—an ongoing novel. It’s important to note that all of these stories share the same narrator: a Guatemalan author, former engineer, and chain-smoker named Eduardo Halfon, who shares many of the same experiences of real-life Eduardo. It seems all part of an intricate plan—though it’s everything but. Doubt, silence, contradiction, el no sé—not knowing— improvisation, and uncertainty: those are the many hands that pile one on top of another “to dominate” Eduardo’s writing.

In Canción, out last month and masterfully translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, Eduardo tells the story of his Lebanese grandfather, also named Eduardo Halfon, and the time the Guatemalan guerrillas kidnapped him in 1967. In this impactful and luminous novel, we read about the Guatemalan Civil War—its violence, fear, and, again, the uncertainty. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the actual kidnapping. We get glimpses, and nothing else, of the time Eduardo’s grandfather was in captivity. Because that’s also part of Halfon’s remarkable style: silence, mystery, darkness.

Recently I spoke with Eduardo about all of that. About Canción, about his novela en marcha, about some of his most memorable characters. We talked about writing in the dark. About the engineering behind a story. We talked about what’s real and the truth. About memory, childhood, silences, and, again—and as always—about not knowing and how important it’s for him to blur the lines between himself and his narrator. We talked, we exchanged emails, voice notes, and messages, and he replied from Guatemala City, Mexico City, Spain, and Germany. As anticipated, after reading Canción and yet again talking to Eduardo about his book, I have more questions than answers.

José García Escobar (JGE): With Canción, it’s the first time I’ve seen you address Guatemalan history so thoroughly in a book. Naturally, you had to mention some events and people because they were relevant to your grandfather’s kidnapping; others, however, seem to be part of the story’s background (Jacobo Árbenz, the 1954 CIA-backed coup, the rise of the guerrilla movement in the 1960s, Julio Ramírez Arteaga). How did that weaving come to be—between foregrounding or backgrounding history?

Eduardo Halfon (EH): When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account, that history has to be believable. In the case of Canción, that means its historical background, the Guatemalan Civil War, and the country’s recent history. I needed to investigate all of that, and I felt like I had to include it more for the feeling than for the facts. Some details are in the background—they’re props, so to speak—and some details are part of the story. That weaving is very organic, though. There’s no premeditation. It’s just a feeling of what should be where on the stage. What should be in the foreground. What should be in the background. It’s a very natural process of selection and placing. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2022

We review new releases from Romania, Guatemala, and Turkey!

In these brilliant feats of literature, three writers drive the vehicle of language through time and space to learn profound, painful, and complex truths about history and our inheritance of it. From Romania, Zsolt Láng braids imagination and reality to paint multitudinous portraits of the individual and society. From Turkey, Defne Suman tracks a family through present hauntings into the dark, deceptive recesses of the national past. From Guatemala, Eduardo Halfon opens up the question of a name as it is passed down through generations, delving into the chasm between who we are and what we are called. Read on to find out more. Also, for the first time since the magazine’s inception, we have included affiliate links to books under review. Please take note that we may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links, which will go toward supporting our mission of advocating for greater inclusiveness in world literature. Other ways include joining our Book Club or becoming a sustaining member

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The Birth of Emma K. by Zsolt Láng, translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good and Ottilie Mulzet, Seagull Books, 2022 

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Senior Copy Editor

What a swirling, kaleidoscopic reading experience. Zsolt Láng’s The Birth of Emma K. is a cracker of a book—albeit one that forces readers to commit to intricate twists and turns, before arriving at meaning within its refracted reflections on modern life.

Láng—a Hungarian writer from Transylvania, Romania—presents a plethora of perspectives in these twelve short stories, but unites them through a shared narrative style that constantly questions and blurs one’s sense of reality, while never quite descending into fantasy. The stories themselves are often equivocal, with endings that invite conjecture or remain opaque, and the plotlines that lead to these often ambiguous conclusions are full of hypotheticals, the language replete with conditionals and revisions, making every situation feel provisional and emphasising the contingent nature of the world.

The characters, meanwhile, are often driven by love, lust, hatred, or other forces of reproduction, but often also seem adrift, questioning their existence. This is evident from the very opening of the collection, which sees God observing and vacillating over the degree to which he should—and is able to—intervene in the lives of his creations. This version of God is not only not omnipotent, he has a heightened, anxiety-inducing awareness of the potentially negative consequences of his actions, and prays to another higher being that gave him his “not-quite-absolute power.” In the collection’s arch postmodernist style, which seems to use this initial framing by a semi-powerful God to parallel the figure of the author, scenarios are constantly retracted and resketched, and we are often told what is not happening, rather than what is:

That our Lord was sitting or standing about on the side of Gellért hill, at the top of Számadó street near the Sióvölgyi family’s villa, would be an exaggeration. Our Lord doesn’t tend to sit or stand about, he floats. But just so we aren’t constantly searching for words and forever refining what we come up with, let’s postulate that we’re not talking about the Father or the Holy Ghost, we’re talking about the Son, and then we can confidently say that there stood the Son of God…

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

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

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

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

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

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Argentina, Central America, and Bulgaria!

The latest in literary news from around the world, brought to you by our team on the ground. Read on to find out what fellow lovers of letters are up across the globe, from festivals to new publications.

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

In just under a decade since its inception, Argentina’s annual Feria de Editores has become a literary staple. Last weekend, defying the country’s dire economic situation, a record-breaking 18,000 readers packed the halls of Chacarita’s Art Media Complex to purchase titles from over 250 local indie presses, as well as a few dozen others from all corners of the Spanish-speaking world. This year, works in translation featured heavily among the fair’s bestsellers; they included Alejandra Pizarnik’s rendition of Marguerite Duras’s La vie tranquille for Mardulce, Canadian-American Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Todo el mundo sabe que tu madre es una bruja) for Fiordo, American Kelly Link’s fiction in Tomás Downey’s translation for Evaristo, and Italian Davide Sisto’s Posteridades digitales for Katz. Local writers in attendance featured Claudia Piñero, Martín Kohan, Marina Yuszczuk, Hernán Ronsino, and Yamila Bêgné, among many others. Meanwhile, author Margo Glantz traveled all the way from her native Mexico to chat with journalist Demian Paredes on Sunday night, thus wrapping up one of the fair’s most successful editions yet.

Right as one literary feast came to an end, another one kicked off: now in its second edition, the Festival Borges has been hosting talks by major “Georgie geeks” throughout the week. On Monday, writer and physicist Alberto Rojo discussed the relationship between some of Borges’s fictions and quantum theory. Yesterday, academic Lucas Adur tackled Borges’s proximity to pop culture, challenging the perception that he was a solemn writer; Federico Favelli posited some bold parallelisms between the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and some musical pieces from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Later today, renowned critic Beatriz Sarlo will discuss Borges’s hybrid nature as a worldly and peripheral figure —one steeped in the Western canon while also writing from (and about) marginal South America. One thing is clear: despite decades of avid exploration, the Borgesian cosmos remains as vast as ever.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria, Reporting from Bulgaria

The recent heat wave that distorted daily life for many people around the globe didn’t fail to reach Bulgaria as well. The lucky ones, however, had already traveled to the seaside, where the locals usually prefer to spend the scorching summers. For them, the past two weeks at the shores of the Black Sea turned out to be not only a relief but also an opportunity to catch up on some reading, as the city of Varna hosted the much anticipated thirteenth edition of The Book Alley festival, organized by the Bulgarian Book Association. The event welcomed more than sixty publishers who, in addition to offering a wide selection of titles, engaged the public in a few charming initiatives. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Argentina, Armenia, and Guatemala!

In this week’s round-up of global literary goings-on, our editors report on efforts to highlight queer Armenian literature, plurilingual Argentine writing, and a Guatemalan festival that seeks to redress fragmented memories through art and literature. Read on to find out more!

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

Last Thursday, New York-based writer and critic Sylvia Molloy passed away at the age of eighty-three. She was, among other things, a pioneer—the first woman to gain tenure at Princeton University back in the seventies, the first person to found a U.S. writing program in Spanish, and, perhaps most notably, the first Argentine author to really tackle LGBTTIQ+ culture in her work; her debut novel “En breve cárcel” (1981), an icon of queer literature, was written during the Argentine dictatorship and first published in Spain to avoid persecution.

Molloy established a fruitful link between queer themes and translation: “queer means twisted, weird, out of place, and if people think my texts deviate from the norm, so much the better,” she once said. “I’m interested in texts that take unusual turns, including those that go from one language to another. I’ve always had that sort of linguistic conflict, because I write in Spanish but will often explore phrases in other languages.”

Translation at large was central to Molloy, who grew up speaking Spanish, English, and French. Her short essay collection Vivir entre lenguas (Living Between Languages) is an attempt to portray this plurilingual experience. While her own English version of the work hasn’t been published in full, an excerpt did run in Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue; meanwhile, her brilliant Desarticulaciones will be released by Charco Press in both Spanish and English.

As we bid adieu to one of our greats, we also welcome a newcomer—the latest press to sprout up in Argentina’s bustling indie ecosystem. Sergio Criscolo’s Híbrida has just published its first four titles, all by South American authors: Aspas by Belén Zavallo, El placer de abandonar by Schoë Blintsjia, El corazón adelante by press co-editor Humphrey Inzillo (all three of them, Argentines), and Elis Regina, una biografía musical by the Brazilian Arthur de Faria. The first is a book of poetry; the second, a debut novel; the third, a collection of journalistic columns; the fourth, a translation into rioplatense (rather than neutral) Spanish. READ MORE…

Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

We report from Guatemala and Vietnam in this week’s literary round-up!

In this week’s dispatches of literary news from around the world, the struggle of Vietnamese refugees is commemorated in text and art, a new documentary celebrates Thích Nhất Hạnh, and a new Guatemalan award honours the country’s female writers. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Besides T.S. Eliot, April also seems problematic for refugees of the former Republic of South Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Communist forces captured Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—ending the Vietnam War, yet triggering a mass exodus of South Vietnamese who fled their fallen nation for political asylum in the West. In recent years, descendants of these refugees have pursued creative efforts to redefine/translate “Black April” as a time of remembrance and rebirth. For example, the traveling exhibit Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora, curated by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), and currently shown at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, in Oakland, California, introduces a spectrum of “textured” responses to April 30 via visual media, poetry, and prose, to construct an intimate yet diverse composite of the diasporic experience that has been collected, recollected, and reimagined since 1975.

The theme of remembrance and rebirth also manifests in a new Vietnamese translation of The Song of Quan Âm (Quan Âm Tế Độ Diễn Nghĩa Ca), about the life of Avalokiteshvara—the bodhisattva of compassion—known commonly as Quan Âm, who is endowed with the ability to see (quan) and hear (âm) all human sufferings. Translated and annotated by scholar Nguyễn văn Sâm, this anonymous 7,228-line poem—the longest poem originally written in Nôm or the Southern script—vividly illustrates Buddhist concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and filial piety. The book’s magisterial scope, only the second translation since 1925, also reflects the translator’s fervent wish to preserve Nôm—a writing tradition adapted from Chinese ideographs and containing a wealth of premodern Vietnamese thought—yet is mostly neglected today due to the adoption of the Romanized script.

Compassion, inextricably linked to remembrance and rebirth, is eloquently evoked in A Cloud Never Dies, a twenty-seven-minute documentary on the life and teachings of the late Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. Released on April 2 by the International Plum Village Community in response to the war in Ukraine, the film highlights Thích Nhất Hạnh’s philosophy of engaged Buddhism­ that combines meditation with antiwar activism. Articulated in his 1967 book Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hoa Sen Trong Biển Lửa), Thích Nhất Hạnh’s practice lent moral support to Vietnamese during the war who refused to take sides and simply wanted the bombing to end. This perspective, however, resulted in his thirty-nine-year exile in the West. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Translation competitions, new publications, and poetry readings from Japan, Guatemala, and El Salvador!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on a translation competition and an event to support Ukraine in Japan, the publication of a harrowing new memoir from Guatemala, and a celebration of women poets in El Salvador. Read on to find out more!

Mary Hillis, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from Japan

Give Artists a Voice was held on March 15 at the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo and live-streamed on social media. Organized by EUNIC Japan and E.U. member cultural institutions and cultural departments in Japan, artists expressed their support of Ukraine through music, film, poetry, dance, and talks. Joining from Kharkiv, contemporary artist Olia Fedorova read text in Ukrainian documenting life during the war. Poet Marie Iljašenko read “Five poems from collection St. Outdoor” in Czech and Yoko Tawada read “Auszeit von Menschheit” (“Timeout from Humanity”) in German. Michal Hvorecký, author of the novel Troll (published in Slovak in 2017), delivered a message on disinformation and literary translation as a vehicle for deeper understanding.

Earlier in the month, at Bungaku Days Spring 2022, the award winners of the JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) sixth International Translation Competition were recognized: English grand prize winner Grant Lloyd and Spanish grand prize winner Eduardo López Herrero. Contestants translated two texts, “Namiuchigiwa made” by Maki Kashimada in the fiction category and “Ojigi” by Kuniko Mukōda in the criticism and essay category. The original texts and winning translations can be read on the JLPP website.

Designed to both recognize and provide support for emerging translators of contemporary Japanese literature, the event began with a prerecorded video showcasing comments from the judges and messages from the top three awardees in English and Spanish respectively. Former contest winners Polly Barton and Sam Bett joined this year’s winner, Grant Lloyd, for a symposium on the topic of becoming a translator, moderated by Yoshio Hitomi of Waseda University. They discussed Lloyd’s prize-winning translations and also analyzed the challenges of working with stories, novels, and essays from Japanese, while revisiting steps on their journeys to becoming literary translators. The publishing panel was moderated by Allison Markin Powell and included Anne Meadows (Granta Books), Yuka Igarashi (Graywolf Press), and Tynan Kogane (New Directions), who discussed their points of view on pitching, the acquisition process, and barriers to publishing literature in English translation. The seventh edition of the competition is now in progress and entries are being accepted in English and French.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

New translations and upheavals in publishing from India, Central America, and Palestine!

Around the globe, February has seen upheavals in Indian publishing, the release of new translations of Central American literature, and the loss of a giant in Palestinian letters. Read on to find out more! 

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

The Indian publishing industry was taken by storm on February 1, when Amazon India announced that it was shutting down Westland Books, home to some of the fiercest writing from the country. The details of how it will affect the backlog of books, whether they will remain available or be taken out of circulation, are still unclear. Westland is one of the largest English-language trade publishers in India, with an imprint called Context that publishes literary fiction and another called Eka that publishes translations. They have consistently released daring titles, such as The Price of the Modi Years by Aaker Patel and Modi’s India by Christophe Jaffrelot.

The Mint Lounge, one of the first publications to break the news, wrote: “The editors of Westland were informed about the impending closure only earlier today, a member of the staff at the publishing house said, requesting anonymity.” After hearing the devastating news, many have posted on social media to appeal to readers to buy books before they run out. The Bookshop, an independent bookstore in New Delhi, wrote: “For a company to acquire an independent, local publisher of books that will in future certainly prove to be foundational texts of Indian literature, and then to arbitrarily shut it with no forewarning is a highly reprehensible act that the entire community of booksellers condemns.”

Westland recently published best-selling Malayalam author KR Meera’s latest novel Qabar, translated by Nisha Susan. A short novella of magical realism, the book is a riff on the Babri Masjid case. It explores increased communalism in India and ultimately magnifies the tensions that lead to lynching, mob-making, and dehumanization.

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Rosa Chávez: “Poetry is my spine.”

"Poetry has always moved me, but I’ve also been moved by history, by my people’s history."

Rosa Chávez is La Poeta here, but she defies definition. The Mayan artist and writer has walked a variegation of paths and left her indelible mark on scores of people and places, ensuring that her legacy will be a monument to curiosity, surprise, and multiplicity. In the following profile, Editor-at-Large José García Escobar speaks to the Guatemalan La Poeta and her ever-widening world of poetics, which trespass the page—and language—to take on other numinous forms.

La Poeta walks towards a small table. She lays a sonaja, a tiny drum, some colorful ronrones, and a few whistles made of clay upon it, as the electric sounds of a turntable fill the room. Soon, from the speakers, the voice of Berta Cáceres comes: “We are fighting to protect the rights of indigenous people,” and her speech echoes across the small room of a school in rural El Salvador. “We have struggled for more than five hundred years,” Berta goes on. “We have always lived as a community,” steps in the voice of the indigenous leader Lolita Chávez, “and our community includes mankind, but also plants, birds, fish too, and all the animals.” Wearing a shirt and a pair of small glasses, the DJ turns the knobs to move the musical landscape, which carries the activists’ voices.

“I remember that children had decorated the classroom using bits of paper, mimicking the lush fields outside, the green mountains,” says Rosa Chávez, La Poeta.

La Poeta takes then the microphone.

“Pick it up. Take what’s yours,” she says, she recites, she conjures. “Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let them take it from you. Pick it up. Leave it under the sun. Let it dry. Pick the weevils off it,” La Poeta says, and a tiny whistle and a pair of soft cymbals hiss across the room. “One by one, remove the kernels. Look how it shines: red, yellow, white, black. Undo its body. Grind its body. Cook its body. Don’t toss it aside, though. Don’t give it a bad look. Never forget to grow more.”

That’s how one of Selva y Cerror’s first shows occurred—August of 2017, during the Festival Mundial de Poesía Cien Voces, in El Salvador; the song I’m describing is called La Abuela y el Maíz. Selva y Cerro is a Guatemalan musical duo consisting of DJ and producer Teko (Andrés Azmitia)—best known as Sonido Quilete—and Rosa Chávez. It is also the latest project of Chávez, out of her wide-ranging roles as poet, mother, performer, actress, teacher, artisan, cultural manager, screenwriter, filmmaker, bisexual, Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel.

Rosa contains multitudes. She insists, however, that she’s a poet—an interesting fact considering that she never sought publication. She says that even today when she writes, she’s not thinking of “putting together a book,” despite having published five. Urges move her, motivate her. The multitudes inside Rosa talk to each other. Poetry took her to performance. Performance to the theatre. Theatre to community work and human rights. Poetry is the thread that weaved, and still today weaves, the urges of Rosa’s career. For Rosa Chávez, poetry has no end.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Thailand and Central America!

This week, our editors around the world report on the exciting developments in publishing and journalism. From expressions of the free press to Nobel laureates, read on for the latest from the ground  in world literature!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Launching this week, the web publication series Justice in Translation brings together urgent works from Southeast Asian languages; its first releases include an incendiary poem about children’s rights translated from Malay, a short story about how to write about dispossession translated from Filipino, and essays on legal reform and educational equity translated from Indonesian. Part of a five-year initiative on Social Justice in Southeast Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the series brings the institutional capacity of the academy in sustaining the practice of translation as advocacy in the region, giving both international exposure and small honorariums.

What “international exposure” looks like is being reconfigured through digital academy-fueled efforts like this one. As the anti-dictatorship three-finger salute drawn from The Hunger Games has spilled over Thai borders to Myanmar and other countries, so has the “broad” English-speaking audience for domestic issues, which increasingly includes people in one’s neighboring countries.

And as the “Milk Tea Alliance” spreads beyond East Asia, a sense of transregional solidarity has also pervaded public works of scholarship. Last week, the Southeast Asia-focused academic blog New Mandala, hosted by the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, announced a partnership with the Indo-Pacific-focused independent platform 9DashLine. One can hope to see more transregional essays such as this recent one by Show Ying Xin about literary translation in plurilingual Malaysia and Singapore, which troubles the distinction between translating “within” and translating “out.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in global literary news from Ukraine, Guatemala, and Belgium!

The naming of Abdulrazak Gurnah as our latest Nobel laureate in Literature is what’s topping headlines around the world this week, but there’s plenty more happening outside of the Swedish Academy. Our editors on the ground is bringing news of multi-media literary festivals, architecturally transformative contemporary art, Ukrainian translation forums, and the passing of a beloved Guatemalan writer. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brussels

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest was hardly over when another literature festival was announced in Europe’s capital: Les Voix en Ville (Voices in the City), organized by Lettres en Voix. This year’s edition featured mostly collaborative projects involving writers, musicians, and filmmakers presenting concerts, readings, workshops, and “cinematic poems.” The venues were as diverse as cathedrals, museums, theaters, pubs, and public squares, while the works presented were more often than not site-specific. Maud Vanhauwaert, for instance, after recently receiving ovations at Planetarium Poetry Fest, participated by reading an “Ode to the Socio-cultural Worker” at the legendary literary cafe La Fleur en Papier Doré. The poem culminated in a work that went beyond the text per se, resulting in a video of the reading which featured images of the venue and a music soundtrack—an illustration in and of itself of the many “workers” who had contributed from behind the scenes.

In the meantime, Brussels’ literary and arts scene is frantically resurfacing from the lockdown. Among the 300 exhibiting artists, 150 workshops, 100 animations, and “concerts, live, dance, street art, performance, and literature” events inundating Ixelles (the arts quarter of Brussels), there was also a “coup de coeur” (heartthrob, sudden crush) exhibition at the animated Demeuldre art gallery. Among the highlights was Bert Mertens, a senior artist with a fresh eye for estranging details and collaged panoramas who mesmerized the visitors from the moment they entered with the hyperrealist light radiating from his paintings. The diversity of forms and approaches of other artists—ranging from graphic art to photography to sculpture to installations to comic strips—also succeeding captivating one’s attention. Still, what really overwhelmed the audience and kept visitors wandering the upper floors and attic of the 19th-century china shop for hours on end was the Talk C.E.C. exhibition, which reunited dozens of artists from France, Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere in a joint project converting the place—its architecture, its interior and exterior walls, the literal holes in the walls, the cafe, kitchen, and even the bathrooms—into a powerful collective manifesto revisiting and fusing sacred traditions, unorthodox spiritualism, and transgressive eroticism from an urgently environmentalist and culturally inclusive perspective.

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

As summer ended festively with the thirtieth annual Independence day in Ukraine, a succession of literary events showcased new national literatures and opened up conversations about the changing trends in translation. Not long ago, the Ukrainian Book Institute established Translate Ukraine, the first translation initiative of its kind to be sponsored by the government, and which has helped literary festivals turn their focus towards an international audience. As a result, a record number of Ukrainian titles were translated into English in the past five years. M any Ukrainian publishers have noted that international literary festivals are not the only places to showcase the wealth of contemporary literature available in the country, stressing the importance of supporting local literary forums to better promote Ukrainian letters globally. Earlier this year, the famous literary festival Kyiv Book Arsenal hosted publisher B2B meetings to facilitate international translation deals and pitch the best of Ukrainian literature to publishers. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France!

This week our writers bring you news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France. In Central America, renowned Guatemalan writer Eduardo Haldon has released his latest novel, Cancón, and Savladoran writer Claudia Hernández’s book Slash and Burn has been released in English translation by & Other Stories. In Hong Kong, literary journal the Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine has pertinently published a special feature about “Distance,” while in France, Italian writer Sandro Veronesi has won the Foreign Book Prize for Le Colibri, to be published in English translation in spring. Read on to find out more! 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Guatemalan poet Carmen Lucía Alvarado was recently nominated for the Rhysling Award for her poem El vacío se conjuga entre tus manos (The void blends in your hands), translated by Toshiya Kamei. Read the poem in English and Spanish here. Famed Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon released his new novel called Canción (Song). Published by Libros del Asteroide, his latest book tells a new chapter of the history of Halfon’s family, centering on his maternal grandfather and his kidnap during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). You can read an excerpt of Canción in English at The New York Review of Books site.

Also in Guatemala, the veteran poet and journalist Ana María Rodas released a new collection of short stories entitled Antigua para principiantes (Antigua for beginners). This new book includes several of Ana María’s most renowned short stories, plus other unpublished stories. This marks Ediciones del Pensativo’s first book of the year.

Additionally, in early January, & Other Stories published Slash and Burn, by the Salvadoran short story writer Claudia Hernández. The book was translated into English by Julia Sanches, who has translated the work of writers such as Daniel Galera (Brazil) and Noemi Jaffe (Brazil). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Central America, Sweden, and Argentina. A poetry festival featuring Latin American heavy hitters has just wrapped up in Guatemala, where, in addition, a new YA title draws from a military coup and a reprint tackles guerrilla warfare; Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize has been awarded in the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s book categories, and the Swedish Arts Council is trying to keep the literary sector afloat; a series of sundry voices gathered at a non-fiction festival in Argentina, where they spoke about how hard it is to narrate the pandemic—and how easy it is to honor another viral phenomenon. Read on to find out more!

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Guatemala just finished the sixteenth edition of the celebrated Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango (FIPQ). As a virtual festival, it included readings and presentations of notorious poets including Cesar Augusto Carvalho (Brasil), Isabel Guerrero (Chile), Yousif Alhabob (Sudan), Rosa Chavez (Guatemala), and Raúl Zurita (Chile). Relive FIPQ’s closing ceremony with a performance of the Guatemalan indie-pop band, Glass Collective, here.

Guatemalan novelist and translator David Unger just put out a new YA book. Called Sleeping with the Light On, it is based on how the author and his family experienced the 1954 US-backed military coup, which overthrew the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz. Sleeping with the Light On (Groundwood Books) is illustrated by Carlos Aguilera.

Finally, before the end of the year Catafixia Editorial will reissue two essential books of Guatemalan history and literature, Yolanda Colom’s Mujeres en la alborada and Eugenia Gallardo’s No te apresures en llegar a la Torre de Londres porque la Torre de Londres no es el Big Ben. READ MORE…