Place: Malaysia

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.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2024

September 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Higgs, Fani Avramopoulou, and Henry Gifford

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

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

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

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

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

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

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An Ocean of Myth and Lotus: Robert Wood on Portside Review and Writings from the Indian Ocean

January 17, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The journal is a simply a simple example of peace in our time for people who wish to see it, in all their diversity, opinion, reflection.

Since 2021, Portside Review has published contemporary writings from the Indian Ocean that transcend beyond J.M.G. Le Clézio, Amitav Ghosh, Lindsey Collen, Monique Agénor, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert. Celebrating the coastlines, hinterlands, sea routes and port cities from Cape Town to Bangkok, from Bombay to Northbridge, this quarterly digital literary journal is funded by the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Creative Australia, and the Centre for Stories. “[W]e are not a journal of critique and review, nor of scholarship and journalism, nor of doctrinaire reference,” wrote managing editor Robert Wood in the journal’s latest issue.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Wood on the impetus behind Portside Review, new writings from the Indian Ocean, and running a digital literary journal.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): What’s the story behind Portside Review? Why is there a need, now more than ever, for an online literary journal on writings from the Indian Ocean?

Robert Wood (RW): Founded in February 2021, Portside Review is a quarterly online literary journal that publishes short stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and activism in written, audio and visual form. Based in Perth in Western Australia, we have had editors in Melbourne, Singapore, Bali, Penang, Mumbai, Cape Town, Myanmar, and elsewhere. We started it as a project through our parent organisation, the Centre for Stories, which teaches the craft of storytelling for social impact.

There is a need, as always, for the proliferation for artistic excellence that supports an ongoing peace, all with a sense of ecological attention, material place and geographic location. Our vision has been to see the Indian Ocean as a home of many languages, many interests, many sovereignties, and to reflect that through a journal focused on the English language without centering it. It is a project that allows us to connect laterally rather than vertically, that re-routes where and when we have come to be in the ports we call our own. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 21, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Kwan Ann Tan, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest news from China, the USA, and Malaysia!

In China, the literary establishment celebrated “China’s Thoreau” on the twenty-second anniversary of his death. In the USA, virtual events raised issues in the field and craft of literary translation, and in Malaysia, an upcoming poetry contest promises to shed light on the country’s multilingual literary landscape. Dive in!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting from China

“One day, mankind shall look back on the origins of his failure to survive on earth. He will find that, in 1712, an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen—a predecessor of James Watt—tried to create for this world the very first steam engine.”

The above words, taken from the Chinese writer 伟岸 Wei An’s essay, “大地上的事情” (The Earth’s Happenings), indicate towards how the late essayist, thinker, and diarist came to be known as “China’s Thoreau.” In characteristically attentive, ruminative, and exacting prose, Wei An’s moralist sensitivity to humanity’s presence and existence on earth sought to honor and preserve the organic nature of life, leading his contemporaries to believe, as writer Lin Xianzhi said: “The life of Wei An has given Chinese literature a direct and elucidating fact: that the writer must first and foremost be a person of excellent virtue.” On May 19, the twenty-second anniversary of his death, an event entitled “The Philosophy of Earth” was held in Wei An’s honor, with discussions revolving around the posthumous collection of the author’s diaries from 1986 to 1999, entitled 泥土就在我身旁 (The Dirt Is Beside Me), as well as the revised edition of his total collected works, edited by Feng Qiuzi and published last year.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 16, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Hong Kong, Sweden, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Hong Kong, Sweden, and Malaysia. In Hong Kong, a commemoration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine talks are some of the live events that have started taking place again; in Sweden, Axel Lindén was awarded the Aftonbladet annual literary award; and in Malaysia, Catherine Menon’s debut novel, Fragile Monsters, has been released in English translation, while the Malaysian Poetry Writing Fortnight (MPWF) has been launched. Read on to find out more! 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

As the fourth wave of the COVID-19 outbreak slows in Hong Kong, cultural and literary activities have begun to return to live venues. Local bilingual poetry magazine Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine organised a poetry talk on the theme of wine, titled “If Our Poetry is Wine” on April 10 in Lai Chi Kok. Poet Chan Li-choi and translator Ko Chung-man were invited to share their views on poetry and wine. Participants could enjoy wine together with the guests to celebrate the inspirations endowed by Dionysus.

Hong Kong’s Dante Alighieri Society hosted three sessions of “Dante Alighieri Flash Readings” to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet. Italian actress Nicole Garbellini and local actor Marc Ngan were invited to give lectures on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, covering the three cantiche: Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno. The events took place at landmarks of the Central and Western District, and Causeway Bay to engage the public in the appreciation of the famous medieval poet.

From March 2 to April 14 artist Michael Leung’s exhibition “Publishing (To Find Each Other)” was open to the public at the Floating Projects in Wong Chuk Hang. The interdisciplinary exhibition explores the themes of publication and storytelling. Throughout March, Michael Leung also hosted sessions to discuss his experience of hybrid publishing with the audience. Workshops were held by the artist to produce zines with participants.

As well as face-to-face events, going online is still a popular way to stay connected with the public however. Local arts centre MILL6 Foundation is organising an online discussion forum, “Poetic Emergences: Organisation through Textile and Code,” to explore cross-boundary aspects of textile and weaving, including technology, art-making, and social mediation.

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

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has announced that its annual literary award will go to Axel Lindén this year. Lindén’s first book, Fårdagboken, was published in 2017 and translated into English by Frank Perry as Counting Sheep: Reflections and Observations of a Swedish Shepherd in 2018 (Atria Books). It was followed up in 2020 by Tillstånd, with the English title Every Other Pine, Every Other Fir. The jury’s motivation is that Lindén’s authorship “takes on the largest questions of our time by turning away from the center and all literary salons, towards the rural areas, the animals, the forest, and the self-doubt.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 26, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Jacqueline Leung, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. In Palestine, the world has been remembering the renowned writer Mourid Barghouti, who passed away this month; in Hong Kong, Dorothy Tse’s first novel to appear in English, Owlish, will be released by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Graywolf Press; and in Malaysia, two new anthologies celebrate Malaysian writing. Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

If it weren’t for COVID-19, the narrow streets of Deir Ghassana would have been jammed with mourners on Valentine’s day. Just like many other villages around the world, Deir Ghassana—the small serene village to the north of Ramallah in the central hills of Palestine— usually celebrates Valentine’s day, but not this year: for Mourid Barghouti passed away.

Born on a hot day in July 1944 in one of the village’s old houses, Barghouti grew to become a beloved Palestinian poet, performer, public speaker, and memoirist, albeit living most of his life in exile. He wrote the popular memoir I Saw Ramallah, which chronicled his return to the West Bank in 1996 and was translated by novelist Ahdaf Soueif. He also wrote a follow-up memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, which tells his story from 1998 to 2010, translated by Humphrey Davies. He published more than a dozen collections of poems, and a collection of his work, Midnight and Other Poems, was translated by his life partner, the great Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (1946–2014).

In his foreword to the English version of I Saw Ramallah, Edward Said wrote of Barghouti’s treatment of loss experienced in exile that, “it is Barghouti’s extended rebuttal and resistance against the reasons for that loss that endows his poetry with substance and gives this narrative its positive valence.” The loss of such a writer is great, but Barghouti will always be remembered. His legacy is extremely rich, not only because he was one of the most articulate defenders of the Palestinian cause, but because his writing has encapsulated the collective agony and sumoud (steadfastness) of the Palestinian people everywhere.

In his memoir, Mourid writes about the loss of his private days—his birthday and his anniversary—as author Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated on the date of the first, and cartoonist Naji al-Ali on the second. It seems life is only determined to keep the legacy alive. Sadly for Mourid and Radwa’s only son, the poet Tamim Barghouti (b. 1977), February 14 will be a different celebration from now on.

To get a taste of his writings, a collection of his translated works is published on ArabLit and a wide-ranging interview by Maya Jaggi, published in The Guardian (2008). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 29, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kwan Ann Tan and Shawn Hoo

The latest news from Singapore and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you news from Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore, the literary community has been remembering the achievements of eminent Chinese-language writer Yeng Pway Ngon after he passed away. While in Malaysia, a new anthology has been published, which has collected writing about the lockdown. Read on to find out more! 

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore

On January 10, the literary community in Singapore and abroad mourned the passing of eminent Chinese-language writer 英培安 Yeng Pway Ngon. Winner of the Cultural Medallion, SEA Write Award, and four Singapore Literature Prizes, Yeng’s writing spans poetry (his latest collection is 石头 Stone), novels (including award-winning 骚动 Unrest and 画室 Art Studio), radio plays, and essays in the manner of Lu Xun. To fully appreciate Yeng’s contribution to Singapore’s cultural landscape, one must also look to his role as a bookseller, having founded two iconic Chinese-language bookstores, Vanguard Books and Grassroots Book Room, that have indelibly shaped the reading culture. In an online literary memorial service on January 15, organised by Grassroots that was attended by more than 170 participants, former students, friends, writers, and cultural workers recited some of Yeng’s verses and looked back at his public and private life. The singularity of Yeng’s influence on Singapore literature has led the Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao to pose the question of finding the next Yeng Pway Ngon. As we remember this acclaimed cultural figure, read a play by Yeng (translated by Jeremy Tiang) from the January 2014 issue of Asymptote.

In other news, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2021 announced its winners on January 16 in a virtual ceremony. For the first time in the prize’s five-year history, the prize has been awarded to not one but two novels. The winning manuscripts are Sebastian Sim’s And the Award Goes to Sally Bang! and Meihan Boey’s The Formidable Miss Cassidy. They each receive SGD$15,000 in prize money as well as publication. This comes as Epigram Books announced just days before that they will stop publishing in the United Kingdom and focus on their Singapore business. Setting up its London arm in 2016, founder Edmund Wee had initially hoped that the move would allow a Singapore title to get onto the longlist of the coveted Man Booker Prize. After more than thirty titles and four years of work, the effort has proved—at least for the time being—futile. The good news, on the other hand, is that the cost savings from discontinuing the UK endeavour will be redirected to prize money for expanding the Fiction Prize shortlist from four to six novels. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 30, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kwan Ann Tan, Sarah Moore, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from the Vietnamese diaspora, Malaysia, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese diaspora, Malaysia, and France. This month celebrates children’s literature in the Vietnamese diaspora, with a host of events and literary magazine Da Màu publishing a special issue. Malaysia also anticipates an exciting month with two Malaysian-born women recently making the longlist for Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the shortlist for the Malaysian Migrant Poetry Competition due to be announced today. A second lockdown in France has instigated an appeal by publishing and bookselling unions to keep bookshops open—and the prestigious Goncourt prize has postponed announcing its 2020 winner until this happens. Read on to find out more! 

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

October 2020 is Children’s Literature Month for the Vietnamese diaspora. The Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA) is currently hosting its first online, month-long Viet Book Fest, which features readings by authors, followed by interactive Q&A sessions, and culminating in a Halloween celebration and book auction on October 31. About thirty families have attended each session, and Facebook live engagement has reached close to 1,000 people.

Vietnamese diasporic literature, representing “the losing side,” suffers from double marginalization since it belongs neither to the Vietnamese literary tradition inside Vietnam nor its host country’s mainstream tradition. To resist this condition, Viet Book Fest titles share an endeavor analogous to translation: how to preserve the diasporic community’s collective memory and make it resonate in a transplanted, multivalent milieu.

Tran Thi Minh Phuoc’s Vietnamese Children’s Favorite Stories teaches foundational stories—many of which are epistemological—such as how the Vietnamese came to eat bánh chưng (“offering earth cake”) during the lunar new year, and how the monsoon season originated from an ancient rivalry between the Mountain Lord and the Sea Lord. Minh Le’s Green Lantern: Legacy reconciles conflicting cultural values, where a Western-based superhero myth centering on innovation and technological prowess is rewritten to include a Vietnamese viewpoint that incorporates community legacy and compassion. The idea of non-conforming identity as a magical construction is reflected in Bao Phi’s My Footprints, where a Vietnamese-American girl learns to take pride in her two moms and her heritage, as symbolized by her embrace of the fenghuang (phoenix) from East Asian mythology and the Sharabha from Hindu mythology. Lastly, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ellison Nguyen’s Chicken of the Sea extols peace, where the victorious King of the Dog Knights grants amnesty to the defeated chicken pirates and welcomes them with a big party. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 28, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, Kwan Ann, and Shawn Hoo

This week’s literary news from Singapore, Argentina, Sweden, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Argentina, Sweden, and Malaysia. In Singapore, the shortlist for the Singapore Literature Prize was announced; in Argentina, the Asociación Argentina de Traductores e Intérpretes has been celebrating National Translation month with a series of talks; in Sweden, the annual crime fiction festival Crimetime has begun; and in Malaysia, Erica Eng became the first Malaysian winner of the Eisner Award. Read on to find out more!

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore

Singapore’s premier literary award, the biennial Singapore Literature Prize, held a virtual awards ceremony for the first time last night, and handed out prizes across the nation’s four official languages (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, and English). Notably, Marylyn Tan made history with her queer and transgressive poetry collection, GAZE BACK, when she became the first woman (and lesbian) writer to win the top prize for Poetry in English. Other big winners include Wong Koi Tet (published by City Book Room) and Sithuraj Ponraj, who walked away with two prizes each. Evidently, the arts have continued to feel the negative repercussions of the pandemic, as the top prize money was slashed from SGD$10,000 to SGD$3,000 this year due to a lack of funding.

Prior to the ceremony, Unggun Creative’s Jamal Ismail—who won the Merit Award for his novel Tunjuk Langit (Pointing the Sky)—had bemoaned the lesser prize money, but wondered if winners could alternatively be awarded the “translation of their works into other languages.” Literary translations across languages in Singapore remain an under-tapped potential.

Hearty congratulations to previous Asymptote contributors who made the shortlist: Hamid Roslan, for his inventive and cacophonous bilingual collection of poetry, parsetreeforestfire; and Amanda Lee Koe, for Delayed Rays of a Star, a novel that unfolds an ambitiously transnational history through the lives of cinema icons Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich, and Leni Riefenstahl.

In other prize-related news, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize—formerly reserved for Singaporean writers—was for the first time this year open to submissions from Southeast Asia. This year’s winning novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, is written by Kuala Lumpur-born Joshua Kam and has just been released. Pre-orders are underway for the books by the other finalists who hail from across the region. With the emphasis on regional submissions continued for next year, the Singapore-based prize looks set to become an important institution shaping the regional English-language publication scene.

Finally, an online symposium held on August 12 explored the role of the anthology in Singapore’s literary ecosystem, and put the nation’s feast of anthologies into focus. In fact, the latest anthology to arrive just this month, Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (eds. Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, and Tse Hao Guang), describes itself as a literal feast: “a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijsttafel.”

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A Blazoned Book of Language: Poems from the Edge of Extinction in Review

December 11, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

The poets in this collection are intensely alert to their struggle, focusing on their work on the language's vulnerability and change.

I am beginning to write in our language,
but it is difficult.

Only the elders speak our words,
and they are forgetting.

So begins “C’etsesen” (“The Poet”), written in Ahtna, an indigenous language of Alaska, by John Elvis Smercer. In 1980, there were about one hundred and twenty speakers of Ahtna. At the time of this poem’s publication in 2011, there were about twenty. Today only about a dozen fluent speakers remain. Smercer’s lines reveal his urgent concern with the disappearance of his language and the weight of his task in preventing the language from slipping away. It is a race against time, between generations, for the young to learn the language before the old leave, taking the words with them.

Chris McCabe, editor of the anthology Poems From the Edge of Extinction, has equally set out on such a task: to collect, record, and preserve poems from multiple endangered languages. The anthology grew out of the Endangered Poetry Project, launched at the National Library, at London’s Southbank Centre, in 2017. The project seeks submissions from the public of any poem in an endangered language in order to build an archive and record of these poems for future generations. Of the world’s seven thousand spoken languages, over half are endangered. By the end of this century, experts estimate that these will have disappeared, with no living speakers remaining. Language activism has been growing since the early 2000s, and the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL 2019) to raise global awareness of the consequences of the endangerment of indigenous languages. McCabe’s anthology, published to coincide with IYIL 2019, contains fifty poems, each in a different endangered language (as identified by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger), presented in the original alongside an English translation; the result is an urgent and illuminating collection encompassing linguistics, sociology, politics, criticism, and philosophy that, in its totality, represents a manifesto of resistance.

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Summer 2012: A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To Editing a Journal of World Literature

September 7, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Lee Yew Leong

I had no interest in replacing a perfectly serviceable translation with a bad one.

“World literature” often gets a lot of attention in the months leading up to each year’s Nobel Prize announcement, but what do we really mean by it? Is it simply all the literatures of the world? Is it a status that applies to texts that circulate in a certain way? As the editor-in-chief of an international journal, I see “world literature” as a shifting aggregate of the literatures that have been translated into any given language. It’s clear to me, writing from Taipei, that an English “world literature” is vastly different from a Chinese one. Upon his passing in June 2012, for example, I discovered that Ray Bradbury had never been translated into Chinese — an omission made more perverse by the fact that translations make up an impressive 50% of all books published in Taiwan, compared to the woeful 3% in the United States. And if Taiwanese readers had been denied the genius of so well-loved an author, one can only imagine what American readers are missing out on.

This asymmetry was what motivated me in May 2012 to initiate a translation project that would introduce to Anglophone readers the newest crop of Chinese writers—a “20 Under 40,” if you will, of the Chinese-speaking world. Such a feature, modeled after Granta’s “Best British Novelists,” consisting of 20 medium-length essays introducing 20 of the most promising authors not only from China — but also from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia — had just been published that month by the leading Taiwanese journal Unitas and I thought Asymptote would be uniquely positioned to showcase it in English. Leveraging a connection, I made a few enquiries; the response from Unitas was positive. Tapping volunteer translators from the And Other Stories Chinese Reading Group and, crucially, proceeding with Unitas’ assurance that we would have free rein in editing the texts, my team and I decided to commit to turning the translation project around in five months: the first ten essays would appear in our Summer 2012 issue, followed by the other ten in the Fall 2012 issue. READ MORE…

A “People’s Literature” of Southeast Asia? 

November 30, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Theophilus Kwek

Attending to this tradition might remind us that the present is not unique, and that the task of imagining other futures is one for the long haul.

Two Singaporean writers have recently provoked state opprobrium with their attempts to present and preserve alternative histories of the city-state. Familiar to many is graphic novelist Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, which has swept prizes at home and abroad, including three Eisner’s Awards this year. Liew’s fictional biography of “Singapore’s greatest comics artist,” the eponymous Charlie Chan, is notable not only for its “thrilling postmodern style” but also how it retraces the hopes (and ultimately, the disappointments) of progressive activism in Singapore, from the heady days of post-war collective action to betrayal and repression under a new political establishment. By weaving the stories of real-life activists into Chan’s recollections, Liew leaves us with a tantalizing “what if”: what if something of this history still lives and breathes under the surface of the modern city?

Jeremy Tiang’s novel, State of Emergency (released earlier this year by Epigram Books) takes a different tack. It incorporates fastidiously-researched vignettes from several turning-points in the political history of Singapore and Malaysia–from the Batang Kali massacre of 1948 to the “Marxist conspiracy” of 1987–into the multi-generational narrative of a single Singaporean family. Tiang, also an award-winning translator (and five-time Asymptote contributor), is remarkably successful at re-animating these forgotten episodes. Moreover, by allowing a different acquaintance or relative to narrate each event, he explores how entire communities must live with the echoes of arbitrary detention, harassment and censorship. And just as in The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, what comes to light is an unbroken genealogy of those who have dared to hope against these circumstances.

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Translators’ Tools: Objects from Asymptote’s Virtual Translation Museum

June 23, 2014  |  in Essays, Interviews  |  by Nicole Idar

The Jawi Typewriter

Arabic Typewriter

Manufactured: c. 1966

Height: 5.9 inches, width: 15 inches

On display at the Malay Heritage Centre, Singapore

Jawi, an Arabic alphabet, was the dominant form of written Malay in Malaysia and Singapore for more than 600 years, but these days it’s in danger of becoming as obsolete as the typewriter.

Though the Malaysian ministry of education attempted to revive Jawi learning in the past—in 1970, elementary schools began teaching Jawi, and soon after high schools followed suit—by 1981, when I started Standard One (Malaysian first grade), Jawi was no longer part of the national curriculum. By 2006, Malaysia’s only remaining Jawi newspaper, the Utusan Melayu, which first appeared in Singapore in 1939, had ceased publishing.

As a translator of Malay into English, I’ve long been interested in Jawi, and when I spotted what I thought was a Jawi typewriter at the Malay Heritage Centre (MHC) in Singapore, I was immediately curious. I wanted to know where it came from, how old it was, who had owned it, how it was used. What follows is the conversation I had with the MHC concerning its typewriter, carried out over email. Noorashikin Zulkifli, Head of Curation and Programs at the MHC, helped trace the typewriter’s origins and explained its features. Encik Syed Ali Semait, Managing Director of Singapore-based Pustaka Nasional Pte. Ltd, the publishing and typesetting company that donated the typewriter to the MHC in 2012, helped identify the typewriter’s original owner. READ MORE…

Micro-fiction by Sufian Abas

February 18, 2014  |  in Translations  |  by Nicole Idar

Down-to-earth magical realism from Malaysia

Anxiety over rapid urbanization takes a distinctly Malaysian turn in these stories by Sufian Abas.  READ MORE…