Place: Mexico

What’s New in Translation: August 2020

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

bezoar

Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's literary news from the United States, Sweden, and Mexico!

This week our editors bring you the latest news from Sweden, where a new edition of Nobel Prize-winner Nelly Sachs’s Swedish translations has been published; Mexico, where cultural centre Casa Tomada has continued its remarkable response to the coronavirus situation with a series of author events; and from Boston in the United States, which has lined up exciting programming this summer. Read on to find out more! 

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

This summer, Swedish publishing company Faethon released a new collection with the poetry of German-Swedish Nelly Sachs. For the first time, all of the most prominent Swedish translations of her poetry are presented together in one book. The collection includes classical translations by poets such as Gunnar Ekelöf and Erik Lindegren, as well as new interpretations by Margaretha Holmqvist, who also was a friend of Sachs. The book also presents thorough commentaries by Daniel Pedersen, professor in comparative literature, and an afterword by poet and translator Eva Ström.

The Jewish poet and playwright Nelly Sachs was born in 1891 in Berlin and fled together with her mother to Sweden in 1940 where she lived until her death in 1970. Sachs had a long friendship with Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf, who used her contacts with the Swedish royal family to enable Sachs and her mother to escape Nazi Germany. In Sweden, Sachs lived with her mother in Stockholm and it was at this time that she became a poet of note. She remained active as a writer and a translator for the most part of her life. In 1966, Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength.”

READ MORE…

Contemporary Indigenous Poetry: Xun Betan on Tsotsil, Turkeys, and Aguardiente

. . . when he writes, it is often with an audience in mind, namely, the future generations of Tsotsil speakers.

Tsotsil is a Mayan language spoken by the indigenous Tsotsil Maya people in the Mexican state of Chiapas and it is in danger of extinction. When writer and translator Shyal Bhandari went to the state for several months to investigate contemporary indigenous poetry, he quickly discovered the poet Xun Betan, who has been fighting hard to keep the language alive in literature. In this essay, Bhandari recounts his meeting with Xun Betan and introduces the pivotal work he has been doing through his writing, publishing, and workshops.

Over the few months that I was in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Mexico, I heard the name Xun Betan brought up plenty of times whenever I asked about contemporary indigenous poetry. “Tienes que hablar con él”—they told me I had to talk with him and that he is involved in many interesting projects, including a poetry workshop for young Tsotsil Maya writers that he runs at his house in the city. They informed me that he is a “unique individual” (in the best sense of the term), almost always to be found wearing traditionally embroidered shirts and his trademark sombrero.

So, when I saw a man dressed exactly like that, smiling and nodding along at the launch event for an indigenous poetry anthology, I thought, “Could that be Xun?” The spokesperson from the editorial Espejo Somos gave him a shout-out, confirming my hunch. At the end of the event, I swiftly approached him about the possibility of sitting down to talk and, to my delight, he suggested coffee the following morning. Anxious to make a good first impression, I arrived punctually, against my nature. I found a well-lit table in the centre of the café and ordered a cappuccino made with pinole (ground-up corn). By the time I had finished my coffee, it was 11:20 a.m. and Xun was yet to show. I was hardly surprised. So, it had to be that at the exact moment I resigned myself to the sobering thought that he had completely forgotten about our meeting, he walked through the door. Naturally, I told him I had only just arrived, hoping he wouldn’t pay much attention to the empty coffee cup beside me. It turned out that we have friends in common. I don’t care if it’s a cliché—the world is a very small place indeed. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's latest news roundup from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico!

This week our writer’s bring you the latest news from the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico. In the UK, Oxford Translation Day welcomed past Asymptote contributor Sophie Hughes to talk about her Booker-shortlisted translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurrican Season. In Argentina, the rising cases of COVID-19 have prompted the Fundación Filba to organize virtual classes with well-known Latin American writers. In Mexico, booksellers are finding innovative solutions to reach readers as the stores remain closed. Read on to find out more! 

Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor, reporting from the United Kingdom

Every year, research center Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation hosts Oxford Translation Day, consisting of workshops, readings, and talks, as a prelude of sorts to the award of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize on the June 13, at its home base of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Given this year’s unusual global situation, Oxford Translation Day is taking place online over the span of several weeks. We are particularly looking forward to Asymptote contributor Sophie Hughes’s talk on her Booker-shortlisted translation of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (Fitzcarraldo Editions), which we’ve featured here and here, on June 13. Another event that seems particularly intriguing is poet and translator A.E. Stallings’s discussion of two contemporary Greek female poets, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke and Kiki Dimoula, also on June 13. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas

They stroll through their empire, lords of the dead.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we reorient “vermin” to the top of the food chain in “The Rats” by Guadalupe Dueñas. Our narrator embodies a voice of classism and privilege, a haughty position that is quickly undermined by an untouchable shoeshiner’s jovial memories of the rodents inhabiting a local cemetery. Conveyed in gruesome detail, the rats’ feast is a spectacle of awe to some (the shoeshiner) and terror for others (our narrator). One part memento mori, one part class criticism, Dueñas’s story serves as a graphic parable for nature’s indifference towards social conventions.

“Have you done this for long?” I absentmindedly ask the guy who’s giving my shoes a vertiginous shine.

The voice of an empty vessel responds:

“Oh, no! Only for about two years. For twenty I was a watchman at Dolores Cemetery. It was I who copied the death certificates. Yes, even I, in my circumstance, went to middle school and I have excellent penmanship.”

Twenty years! I look at the little man of indefinable age. At first glance, he was a young boy.

Skinny, hairless, and indistinct. With a shrunken blue-ringed eye that blinks on its own accord and a stranded pupil that despairs in a bloody broth filled to the brim of his eyelid. The left eye, though, one would think it had a different owner. His upper lip sags like the ruffle of an old blouse. His skull, divided by a dark vein that curves down around his face, resembles a sack hung by a cord.

He emits the stench of horse piss and a lasting, murky reek that disturbs even the trees. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (May 2020)

From hypermedia performances to publications, Asymptote staff have been keeping busy—even under lockdown!

Communications Manager Alexander Dickow’s co-translation, with Sean T. Reynolds, of Gustave Roud’s “Air of Solitude” followed by “Requiem” is now out with Seagull Books.

Executive Assistant Austyn Wohlers, who has just been admitted into Notre Dame’s MFA program in Fiction, recently published a story, “Lila,” in Short Fiction.

Editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova Chris Tanasescu (aka MARGENTO) will be presenting in late May a Twitter-based (@GraphPoem) hypermedia performance preview of a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology he is editing in French and in English translation and in early June an interactive coding computational poetry performance at Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2020.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of Robert Perišić’s novel No-Signal Area, out recently with Seven Stories Press, was reviewed by Ken Kalfus in The New York Times.  

Editor-at-large for Guatemala José García recently published the final instalment of a four-parter about the migrant caravan at The Evergreen Review. Click here, here, here, and here for the full series.

Editor-at-large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood recently translated an essay by Czech journalist Apolena Rychlíková for the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe published by Comma Press in March 2020.

READ MORE…

Beauty and Violence: Sophie Hughes on Translating Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

I belong to the school of whatever produces a text that doesn't sound like it has been squeezed through a mangle to get to where it is.

A few months back, I read Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes in its original Spanish in only two short sittings. The Mexican author’s breathless prose almost demands this; putting the book down feels like walking away from a friend who is ripping you, between gasps, through one of the most harrowing stories you’ve ever heard. Among the myriad feelings I had on finishing the book was a combination of pity and excitement for the poor but lucky soul that would translate it. Perhaps you’ve already heard the list of Melchor’s stylistic choices: endlessly winding sentences, paragraphs that last chapters, and a slew of slang that even some Mexicans might need to ask their filthiest-mouthed friend to translate from Spanish into Spanish. Happily, in the end, it was Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions who brought this torrential narrative downpour to English readers, giving it the carefully considered translation it deserves.

The following interview with Hughes is as much about the practical element and the psychological toll of translating such a dense work (both in technique and in content) as it is about the field of translation and the modern relationship between the Spanish and English languages. For this reason, my questions are a bit scattered, but fortunately, Hughes’s answers are not!

—Andrew Adair

Andrew Adair (AA): Were you met with claims of “untranslatability” when people heard you were translating this work? Did you have this doubt yourself?

Sophie Hughes (SH): Not untranslatability in so many words. There is a tweet floating around somewhere—written in Spanish and sent to Fernanda and methat I think sums up the general response to the book’s translation:

“How do you translate Hurricane Season? Incredible job by the translator if she managed to even remotely reproduce the feeling of reading the original, especially when she isn’t jarocha [from Veracruz] or Mexican and doesn’t understand half of it.”

Hurricane Season has been something of a literary sensation in Mexico and Latin America, striking cords and hitting nerves with many readers, so it makes sense that some of them should respond emotionally to its translation, even feel protective over it. It’s a difficult book, but I knew what I was getting myself into, and actually, the way the prose is structured, without paragraph breaks and with very long, circumambulatory sentences, made the translation quite a compulsive activity, even when the content was grueling or the slang particularly thick. It is meticulously written in the original, which usually makes a text supremely translatable.

AA: On the subject of doubt, do you ever question whether you’re the right person for the job? Not as a question of skill but rather, sensibility?

SH: I regularly suffer from crises of confidence. In this case, though, I did and still do feel I had the right sensibility for the job: I finished reading Temporada de huracanes with a head full of beautiful images, not just violent ones. I could not shake, for example, the passage describing a group of young men being admired by a lustful onlooker as they worked the sugar cane fields; an image that seems to slip the bonds of the nightmarish reality of the book’s world (pages 18-19 of the New Directions edition). I also found acute moments of catharsis dotted throughout the book, which add light and shade to its otherwise stubbornly miserable action—something like Mrs. Ramsey’s “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” Fernanda’s characters moved as much as they shocked me—I felt tenderly towards her monsters. Maybe subliminally I understood these as signs that I had the right sensibility for the job, so at that point I said to my husband: I’ll translate a sample and be honest with myself about whether I have the skill to pull this off. And I could hear Temporada de huracanes in that sample. I knew I could do it. One day I hope someone retranslates it so that I can read it afresh. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2020

New work from Hye-Young Pyun, Keiichiro Hirano, Andrés Neuman, and Jazmina Barrera!

The best that literature has to offer us is not resolution, but that Barthian sentiment of recognition—the nakedly exact internal sentiment rescued from wordlessness and placed in a social reality. In this month’s selections of translated works, the authors confront a myriad of trials and ideas—despair, rage, guilt, purpose, obsolescence—with stories that attest equally to the universality of human feelings and the precise specificities of localities. Read reviews of four spectacular texts from Japan, Korea, Spain, and Mexico now:

law of lines

The Law of Lines by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell, Arcade Publishing, 2020

Review by Marina Dora Martino, Assistant Editor

How does the world change us? Is it life and its unpredictable events that bend us; or is it something more fundamental, something that has always been hatching inside ourselves, ready to ripen at the right occasion? These questions act as the fundamental hinges of The Law of Lines, a novel written by South Korean author Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Although ambitious and abstract, these existential questions acquire here a concrete form—they are investigated—not by philosophical or religious means—through the stories of two young women, Se-oh and Ki-jeong. Set in the vast South Korean suburban world, The Law of Lines travels through injustice, poverty, and grief, and exposes the thin threads that run between people who didn’t even know they were connected.

Ki-jeong is a teacher. She doesn’t like teaching—actually, she hates it. To get through her day, Ki-jeong transforms her life into a performance, and herself into a mere act of herself. Only in this way she manages, with varying degrees of success, to hide her frustration, her disengagement, and her lack of empathy for the people around her. Se-oh is a young woman who lives as a semi-recluse at her father’s house. She doesn’t go out because she fears the world, that churning machine that ruins and distorts everything. Ki-jeong and Se-oh don’t have dreams of a better life, or not exactly. They are dormant and static. But their stillness is not only a desire for tranquillity—it’s a method for concealment.

Soon, the world presents them with irreversible and unpredictable events, and their apparently quiet lives break irrevocably. In the middle of a stressful day at school, Ki-jeong receives a mysterious phone call that throws her on a desperate search for the truth. Her half-sister, the one Ki-jeong and her mother had never managed to really love, becomes her only thought and anchor to reality. Se-oh is almost home after one of her rare trips to the stores when she is startled by the view of her house enveloped by fire. She sees the paramedics carrying away a man on a barrel, and from then on, her life turns into a quest—to track down and plan the destruction of the man she blames for everything that went wrong. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's literary news from Mexico, Argentina, and China!

With much of the world now weeks into lockdown, our writers bring you news of its continued impact upon both the publishing and bookselling industries, as well as on writers’ own responses. In Mexico, authors such as Olivia Teroba and Jazmina Barrera have continued to engage with audiences; in Argentina, bookshops have been embracing solidarity to overcome the current challenges; and in China, the lifting of the lockdown in Wuhan has brought fresh poetry broadcasts and publications along with it. Read on to find out more! 

Andrew Adair, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

Here in Mexico City, the lockdown has been largely optional, with much frustration over President López Obrador’s casual, relaxed approach before a global pandemic. Until a few weeks ago, there was no lockdown whatsoever, which left people to follow their own moral code when it came to deciding what to stop doing and when. Now, restrictions are in place and movement in the city has calmed down, though with such lackadaisical direction, many still continue to gather. Of course, many more have no choice but to work, as Mexico is the second-most impoverished country in Latin America (Brazil being the first) and many live, not week-to-week, but day-to-day.

And so, with that, we’ve moved online with the rest of the world, shifting many literary conversations to all manner of digital platforms: Zoom, Instagram, YouTube Live—surely you know the drill by now.

One particularly busy author is Olivia Teroba, a newcomer whose first publication of feminist-edged essays, Un lugar seguro (A Safe Place) arrived last year from Paraíso Perdido. Teroba has given workshops and talks through various institutions and bookstores, most notably her Zoom videoconference “New Genealogies” with Casa Tomada, an independent cultural space which has done an impressive job of moving online.

On April 24, la UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) celebrated International Book Day with a series of rousing talks from a wide range of authors as part of their new program #CulturaUNAMenCasa. Topics included, appropriately, “Reading poetry in digital environments,” “Books that save our lives,” and “Feminine Verse in Latin America”—a talk between Claudia Masin and Mexico City-based poet/translator Robin Myers. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Spring 2020 issue!

Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue is here, featuring new work from thirty countries and twenty-four languages, as well as a Galician Poetry Special Feature. Not sure where to begin? Our blog editors can help, as they reveal their top picks from the new issue below:

It’s difficult to write, these days. In this state of global precarity, wrenching us from our patterns into stasis, the days stretch towards their completion; daily urgencies take on a more sinister tone, heightened by circuity. There is indeed time, heavier in our stock, yet the dilemma remains: the heaviness, the disintegration of form, the failure of words to justify their surroundings. After a while I realized that it is because in order to write, and to write forcefully, the writer must be able to imagine a world in which their text survives, and contributes. Yet the time has arrived, much sooner than anticipated, of a future in pieces. I’ve never been one to envision literature as a portal for escape—it seems to me that the most sublime of texts enforce us into the deep centre of the world we live in. So from Asymptote’s Spring 2020 issue—a wondrous collection of work that arrives, across boundaries, to strike a new presence—I selected certain poems that bring a special dignity to our capacity for visioning.

Natalia Toledo’s poems, translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Clare Sullivan and Irma Pineda, stir vibrant tremors across the senses. Precise in intimate reference and conditioned with everyday magic, her language is of the sacred nature we infuse into the ordinary in order to contextualize the world to our definitions. Take “Prayer”:

For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from I Am Not That Body by Verónica González Arredondo

here no one/ is watching, not even God

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, poet Verónica González Arredondo bears witness to the plague of gender violence in Mexico in this excerpt from her forthcoming chapbook, I Am Not That Body. Our narrator speaks from a place beyond the remains of her body, recounting with chilling forensic detail the horrors she has witnessed and endured. From this ghostly viewpoint, the speaker refuses the anonymity, objectification, and cultural silence mandated by Mexican officials and the popular media, leading us to the horrifying and heart-breaking final stanzas where our speaker informs her family—and the reader—the she is not a statistic, or a faded memory, or a voiceless body. This excerpt, sublime in its masterful use of religious imagery, metaphor, and concise, almost staccatoed lines, is a necessary and timely read for understanding the recent wave of protests against femicide in Mexico. 

I Am Not That Body

When the night yawns
there are rows of teeth in its mouth
that pierce every bone in the earth

 

 

violence of a white handkerchief covers my mouth
I don’t scream
I don’t breathe
all my memories
will lose their tongue
I will become another,
identical to the voice I never recognized
I scream in order to wake up in another dream
but the dream has gone missing READ MORE…

Printed Matter: On Enriqueta Lunez’s New Moon

Ambiguity across the trilingual text is a way of asserting the sovereignty of Indigenous languages in dialogue with English and Spanish.

New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik by Enriqueta Lunez, translated from the Tsotsil by Clare Sullivan, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019

Although there is an increasingly large corpus of Latin American Indigenous literature in translation, these translations seldom make it into print. While the digital medium offers advantages—global circulation, the ability to include audio and video of spoken word performances, the capacity to cheaply reproduce multilingual volumes—print remains a vital avenue for the publication of these works as in many circles it still possesses a prestige that digital lacks. Within Indigenous literary movements themselves, authors tend to set print publication of their works as an important goal, even as they clearly value digital publication as an important and effective tool that facilitates their ability to reach a global audience. Most Indigenous literatures that do make it into printed translations do so in anthologies such as Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris’s In the Language of Kings (2002), Allison Hedge Coke’s Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, or Nicolás Huet Bautista and Sean Sell’s Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories (2017).

Published in December 2019, Clare Sullivan’s translation of Tsotsil Enriqueta Lunez’s work in New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik, is perhaps only the third single-author volume of an Indigenous writer from Latin American to be published in English translation, the other two being Sullivan’s translation of Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (2015), and Nathan C. Henne’s rendering of the Kaqchikel writer Luis de Lión’s Time Commences in Xibalbá (2012). Although the publication of these works over the last decade demonstrates how little Indigenous literature has been translated and how much more work there is to be done in the area, it also shows that interest in reading these authors in translation is slowly gathering steam, as Wendy Call’s translation of selected poems by the Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, In the Belly of the Night and other Poems, is due out later this year from Pluralia. In other words, New Moon speaks to the increasing prominence of these voices in the global literary market.

READ MORE…

The 2020 Booker International Longlist

This year the specter of violence, visceral brutality, and even hauntings loom large.

Every year, the prestigious Booker International Prize is always announced to a crowd of critics, writers, and readers around the world with much aplomb, resulting in great celebration, some dissatisfaction, and occasional puzzlement. Here at Asymptote, we’re presenting a take by our in-house Booker-specialist Barbara Halla, who tackles the longlist with the expert curiosity and knowledge of a reader with voracious taste, in place of the usual blurbs and bylines, and additionally questioning what the Booker International means. If you too are perusing the longlist in hunt for your next read, let this be your (atypical) guide.

I tend to dread reading the Booker wrap-ups that sprout immediately after the longlist has been announced. The thing is, most critics and bloggers have not read the majority of the list, which means that the articles are at best summaries of pre-existing blurbs or reviews. Plus, this is my third year covering the Booker International, and I was equally apprehensive about finding a new way to spin the following main acts that now compose the usual post-Booker script: 1) the list is very Eurocentric (which says more about the state of the publishing world than the judges’ tastes); 2) someone, usually The Guardian, will mention that the longlist is dominated by female writers, although the split is around seven to six, which reminds me of that untraceable paper arguing that when a particular setting achieves nominal equality, that is often seen as supremacy; and 3) indie presses are killing it, which they absolutely are because since 2016, they have deservedly taken over the Booker, from longlist to winner.

I don’t mean to trivialize the concerns listed above, especially in regards to the list’s Eurocentrism. Truth is, we talk a lot about the unbearable whiteness of the publishing world, but in writings that discuss the Booker, at least, we rarely dig deeper than issues of linguistic homogeneity and the dominance of literatures from certain regions. For instance: yes, three of the four winners of the International have been women, including all four translators, but how many of them have been translators of color? To my understanding, that number is exactly zero. How many translators of color have even been longlisted? The Booker does not publish the list of titles submitted for consideration, but if it did, I am sure we would notice the same predominance of white voices and white translators. I know it is easier said than done, considering how hard it is to sell translated fiction to the public in the first place, but if we actually want to tilt the axis away from the western literary canon, the most important thing we can do is support and highlight the work of translators of color who most likely have a deeper understanding of the literatures that so far continue to elude not just prizes, but the market in its entirety. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, Mexico, and Argentina!

This week our writers report on literary prizes and new releases in Poland, a collaboration between two renowned Swedish authors, the 41st International Book Fair in Mexico City, and commemorative events for María Elena Walsh in Argentina. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

It’s never too late to #bemoreOlga—to quote Helen Vassallo (translatingwomen)—and report that Olga Tokarczuk is using some of her Nobel prize money to start a foundation to support writers and translators. To acknowledge the role translators played in her worldwide success, the Polish Association of Literary Translators has pulled together some stats: as of October 2019, 193 translations had appeared of Tokarczuk’s books into thirty-seven languages, with twelve more in the pipeline, by a total of ninety translators (names all listed here).

On January 20 the weekly Polityka awarded Olga Tokarczuk the Creator of Culture prize “for books that are ahead of their time, her style and for looking into the future of literature and our entire planet.” The prize was one of Polityka’s annual arts awards, with this year’s “Passport” for literature going to Dominika Słowik for her novel Zimowla (roughly, Huddling Together) a “thriller with horror elements, set in the small village of Cukrówka, a fascinating depiction of recent history.” In her acceptance speech, Słowik cheered the fact that, for the first time, all three shortlisted authors were women. READ MORE…