Place: Taiwan

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 27, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Xiao Yue Shan

Catch up on literary news from our editors on the ground!

This week, our editors report on literary gatherings, from a Chinese organization that seeks to bridge the cultural divide between the mainland and Taiwan, and Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

The Taiwan Strait measures only 130 km at its narrowest point, but it is the other distance—the unphysical distance, imposed by human prescriptions—that defines it. Recently, with the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taiwan’s own future was placed into question, with many remarking that the island was due to become “the next Afghanistan,” and criticizing American foreign policy as a hasty manifestation of 始乱终弃—to play with and abandon as if with a toy. Whether or not the US will continue its disengagement of military intervention, the geopolitical tension has deepened the chasm between the island and the mainland—in history if not in nature—with the continual wear of weariness, suspicion, and speculation.

Yet in Pingtan, Fujian, from where Taiwan is vivid and impossibly near on the other side of the waters, there persists certain attempts of breaching the cultural distance, most recently by the Pingtan Cross-Strait Sinology Center, established in 2018. Regularly hosting forums and lectures on Chinese and Taiwanese scholarship and texts, the Center, on August 18, held a talk on Taiwanese women writers, and how they write about love.

As Taiwanese writer 余光中 Yu Guangzhong once remarked, it is the work of women writers that have contributed most significantly to the nation’s exceptional range of contemporary essays. The traditional memoirist 林海音 Lin Haiyin, the nomadic and impassioned diarist Sanmao 三毛, the erudite humanist 琦君 Chi Chun—the works of such women essayists both expanded and challenged the imagination and logics of Taiwanese letters, intervening in the traditional discourse with intelligent intimations of selfhood, voyage, and being. While delivering the lecture, professor Yuan Yonglin remarked on how writers such as 张晓风 Zhang Xiaofeng and 简媜 Jian Zheng impressed deeply in their works by giving personal insight as to how they defined their relationships with the men in their lives—the former with the letters written to her husband, and the latter with writings on her father. In the depiction of men as subjects of love, these texts identified passions, affections, and aestheticizations specific to the female experience, addressing their complexity and bringing them into public language. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (Aug 2021)

August 12, 2021  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff are publishing books and winning awards!

After organizing a #GraphPoem computational poetry event that attracted hundreds of participants and thousands of viewers at DHSI 2021, Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is in the process of collaboratively starting a Digital Literature Lab at the Royal Library of Belgium on a FED-tWIN grant involving Université catholique de Louvain.

Chinese Social Media Manager Jiaoyang Li has received a China-Scotland Digital Collaboration Grant from the British Council and the City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts to work on a series of community based literary events and workshops.

Assistant Director of Outreach Ka Man Chung’s English translation of Over the Left Bank of the River by Chung Wenyin has been awarded a translation and publication grant by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture. The work is expected to be released by Serenity International in 2022.

Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s new book Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature has just been published this month by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new short craft essay on the retrospective narration in J.D. Salinger’s “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” up at Fiction Writers Review.

Assistant Editor (Poetry) M.L. Martin’s collection of ekphrastic prose poems, Theater of No Mistakes, won the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award, and will be published later this year with Anhinga Press (USA). In addition, her anti-translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem by the anonymous, pre-10th c. proto-feminist, Wulf & Eadwacer, was named a finalist for CSU’s 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series (USA). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 30, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Nestor Gomez, and Thirangie Jayatilake

The latest literary news from Taiwan, El Salvador, and Sri Lanka.

This week, Asymptote team members report on a Taiwanese science-fiction novel that’s caught the attention of Japan’s literary establishment, a poetic commemoration of a 1975 tragedy in El Salvador, and a Sri Lankan press that promises to be the first of its kind. Discover the latest from around the world, then catch up on this week’s blog entries, including a review of Asymptote‘s July book club pick.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan

In July, Taiwanese novelist Li Kotomi (Li Qinfeng) was awarded one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Akutagawa Prize, for her novel “Higanbana ga Saku Shima” (An Island Where Red Spider Lily Blooms). The novel, which incorporates elements of science fiction, concerns a girl narrator, Umi, who drifts to an imagined island between Taiwan and Japan. The island is governed by women who lead the religious ceremonies and political affairs, while men are excluded from government. The islanders speak a language called “nihon” and another called “female language,” which can only be learned by women over a certain age and is used to pass on the history of the island. Qinfeng has remarked that for thousands of years, patriarchal societies have written official history through the perspectives of men. In this novel, she reflects on the imbalance of history-making by imagining a community where women control the writing and inheritance of history. Qinfeng’s win is unique as she is the second writer whose native tongue is not Japanese to be awarded the prize. Her accomplishment was also well received in Taiwan, where she is considered one of the first Taiwanese writers to be recognized by the Japanese literary establishment. Previous winners of the award include Mieko Kawakami for Breasts and Eggs and Hiroko Oyamada for The Hole.

Despite the recent escalation of the pandemic in Taiwan, the cultural minister Lee Yung-te emphasized that the Taiwanese arts, especially in literature, illustration, and film, continue to flourish. Literature and art museums have continued their exhibitions with COVID precautions. Notably, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature is celebrating a century of progressive literature and thinking through its exhibition, “A Century of Heartfelt Sentiment,” which started on May 8. The show is organized into a series of love letters, or writings and works from authors, painters, and other artists, focusing on six essential intellectuals of the last century. The exhibition includes the manuscripts of the poet Lai Ho, the diary of the social activist Tsai Pei-huo, the artworks of the painter Tan Ting-pho, and works of music from the era of Japanese occupation.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 18, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang and Suhasini Patni

Hear about some of the most recent literary news from Taiwan and India!

This week, find out from our editors-at-large what has been happening around the literary world. Taiwanese literature appears in French translation, introducing a diverse swathe of writers across Taiwan’s linguistic backgrounds to French readers. India continues to reel from the impact of the pandemic, as the literary community remembers the writers they’ve lost, and many organizations stepping up to advocate for pandemic relief work. Read on to learn more.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan 

In February, the French publishing company L’Asiatheque released Formosana: Stories of Democracy in Taiwan, a collection of nine short stories by contemporary Taiwanese writers. L’Asisatheque is focused on making available books in translation from Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South America, and Africa to French readers. In 2015, the company launched a “Taiwan Fiction” series, led by editor Gwennaël Gaffric, who is also a Chinese translator and professor in China Studies at the University of Lyon. The series seeks to amplify Taiwanese literature with themes of environmentalism, cultural identity, Taiwanese dialects, gender, postcolonialism, and the impacts of globalization. The series has published a number of modern classics of Taiwanese literature in French including A City of Sadness by Chu Tien-wen and Wu Nien-jen, The Membranes by past contributor Chi Ta-wei (recently reviewed in our blog), and multiple works by Wu Ming-yi, including The Man With the Compound Eyes and his novella, The Magician on the Catwalk.

In Formosana, the writers grapple with turbulent periods in Taiwanese history, including that of Japanese colonialism, the White Terror, martial law, and democratization. The stories also contend with social issues, such as nativist movements, LGBT rights, and environmentalism. In a recent interview, Gaffric discussed his choice of centering the collection on the theme of Taiwanese democracy. He believes that though there is increasing coverage of Taiwan in the French press, most French people do not understand its historical and cultural intricacies. He states: “We attempt to allow people to understand the fate of Taiwan from the past to the future, through various types of literary works which provide different channels and voices.” For his next book, Gaffric plans to publish the works of indigenous writer, Syaman Rapongan, to introduce indigenous writing to French readers.

On May 29, Taiwanese literature was also highlighted in France when Chi Ta-wei was invited to join the ninth annual “Nuit de la literature,” organized by the Forum of Foreign Cultural Institutes in Paris (FICEP). A reading of Chi’s “Pearls,” one of the stories from his eponymous science-fiction collection, was conducted in both English and Chinese at the virtual event with the author and Gaffric. READ MORE…

Selfhood is a Queer Fiction: On The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

June 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Writing the self into being from a hodgepodge of cultural texts—that is what’s elemental to queer life

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, Columbia University Press, 2021

Dwelling on a female classmate’s romantic advances in her youth, and belatedly cognisant of her learned aversion towards all forms of intimacy, the thirty-year-old Momo realises the incongruence of the one self-guided decision she had made in her life—to become a dermal care technician: “She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist. Why did she have to choose a job reliant on intimacy?” It is the year 2100 and humanity, terrified of the ultraviolet rays seeping through the depleted ozone layer, has evacuated from land en masse to settle on the seabed. Amidst the residual trauma of the sun’s lethal rays, the dermal care trade booms and Momo climbs the profession steadily, eventually becoming the owner of Salon Canary and something of a celebrity in T City. As Momo spends her days massaging her wealthy clients with M skin—a technology that gives her access to their private lives—what she cannot shake off is the feeling that “there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world.”

In The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist (and past Asymptote contributor), tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan. Read together with works such as Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man or Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, English readers can now appreciate a fuller scope of the queer efflorescence unleashed in the experimental fiction of Taiwan’s nineties and the internal heterogeneity of its cultural moment. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation of Chi’s award-winning work comes a quarter of a century after its Chinese publication, but contemporary readers will relish going back to the future in a work that ventriloquises our present, its conjectures at once anachronistic and prophetic. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 4, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by David Boyd, MK Harb, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest from Japan, Taiwan, and Lebanon!

As certain places are heating up with a flurry of events, others are remaining cautious and mindful. Still, the good thing about the page is that it remains steadfast, and our work remains something that we can always turn to, celebrate, and share in. This week, our editors are once again bringing you the latest in world literature news, with a new Japanese literary translation workshop centering on heritage speakers and people of colour, a newly virtual Taipei Literature Festival, and a new winner of the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award. 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Poet and academic Iman Mersal has won the prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award! Her creative non-fiction work, In the Footsteps of Enayat Al-Zayyat, is part journalistic excellence, part poetic elegy, all while maintaining the sensibility of writing in the life of a complex character. It traces chronicles the late Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayat, her struggles with mental illness, and her tragic death in the 1960s.

What’s new in Arabic literature? Banipal Magazine’s Spring issue is out, and it’s dedicated to Jerusalem and the acclaimed Palestinian auteur, Mahmoud Shukair, who has penned over forty-five books and six television series. This comes at a time when the Arab literary scene has overwhelmingly expressed its solidarity with the Palestinian people. Also on the subject of Palestine—this spring, I interviewed Palestinian-French writer and researcher, Karim Kattan, over here at Asymptote where we discussed belonging, the craft of writing, and other curious things. Also, Palestinian-Chilean writer Lina Meruane has a new novel out; Nervous System, translated into English by Megan McDowell, deals with the daunting specter of writer’s block. Read a review of the acclaimed work right here on the Asymptote blog!

How about some Arab cabaret? Well-read academic and translator Raphael Cormack’s Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring 20’s is an engrossing retelling of vagabonds, feminists, and performers as they defied gender norms, transgressed class lines, and created iconic productions. Another beautiful and timely publication by Saqi Books is We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers. Edited by British-Palestinian writer, Selma Dabbagh, the anthology celebrates and examines the tradition of erotic writing in Arabic literature and its many women pioneers. Lastly, yours truly has a short story out with The Bombay Review, dealing with censorship and artificial intelligence. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 14, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

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

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden. In Hong Kong, theatres are returning with performances of work by Martial Courcier and Harold Pinter; in Taiwan, novelist Gan Yao-ming talks about their latest work; and in Sweden, a new exhibition is opening at Junibacken, based on books by Tove Jansson. Read on to find out more!

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

Inter-disciplinary connections between literature and art are often a kind of inspiration that fascinates artists and engenders unique artworks. In late April, Jockey Club New Arts Power presented to the audience the exhibition, “Before a Passage,” which comprised “visual arts, interactive installations, soundscape, movement performance, site-specific writing and reading,” based on Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan’s eponymous poem, “Before a Passage.” The exhibition took place at the North Point Pier, which was also the setting for Leung’s poem. In the exhibition, the audience could experience interactive installations that concerned themes such as awaiting, travelling, leaving, and the anxiety and struggle that come along with these to reflect on their own life experience of passage.

Theatrical performances are also returning to the theatre while the pandemic in Hong Kong eases down. As May comes, the annual French cultural and art festival, The French May, returns with a series of programmes, including a Cantonese performance of French writer Martial Courcier’s play, Larger Than Life. It will be staged from 13-15 May in Hong Kong City Hall. Theatre du Pif will perform Harold Pinter’s Old Times in early June in Cantonese as well. A play-reading and interactive commentary session was already organised in early April. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 30, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Julia Sherwood, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic!

This week’s dispatches feature an extended report from the Vietnamese Diaspora in homage to the late Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, who passed away in Vietnam aged seventy. In addition, we bring you news of the publication of Nishikawa Mitsuru’s diary in Taiwan and a plethora of current online events celebrating literature from the Czech Republic. Read on to find out more! 

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

Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, who catapulted into international fame during Vietnam’s Đổi Mới (Renovation) period, died on 20 March in Thanh Xuân District, Hanoi, Vietnam. He was seventy.

Born on April 29, 1950, Thiệp graduated from Hanoi University of Education with a history degree in 1970 and was sent to Sơn La—Vietnam’s northwestern mountains—to teach communist cadres. While there, he absorbed local Hmong folklore, Vietnamese poetry, translated selections from modern and classical Chinese literature, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Camus, Goethe, Tagore, Neruda, and the Bible.

From 1986 to 1991, Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s short stories were widely read and debated both in Vietnam and abroad for their startling break from social realism. His most controversial—which can be read as nesting narratives—were “Vàng Lửa” (Fired Gold), “Kiếm Sắc” (“Sharp Sword”), and “Phẩm Tiết” (“Chastity”). These stories employ decentralized, conflicting points-of-view, vernacular language, and spare dialogues to render complex portraits of established historical figures such as the poet Nguyễn Du, and Emperors Quang Trung and Gia Long. The works embody Thiệp’s signature themes: the relationship between the artist and the state, the porous border between trust and betrayal, and the concept of chastity as it relates to sexual power, ideological orthodoxy, and political expediency.

The era of open expression was short-lived. Thiệp’s ambiguous, scatological tales were considered too destabilizing to the Communist view of Vietnamese history. Accused of heresy, overnight Thiệp became a de-facto dissident. The editor Nguyên Ngọc, his literary mentor, was also fired from Văn Nghệ (Literature and Art) Magazine—where his works first received a nurturing reception. To sustain his livelihood, Thiệp made ceramic art and managed a restaurant serving wild game.

He kept a low profile but continued to write and publish short stories. His oeuvres at this juncture—a hybrid form of literary homage and Dadaist musings—were considered too insular to merit attention. “As The Crane Ascends It Gives a Startled Cry” (“Hạc Vừa Bay Vừa Kêu Thảng Thốt”) is an allegory about mortality, missed opportunity, and “the pale glimmer” of poetic fame. The protagonist in “A Vietnamese Lesson” (“Bài Học Tiếng Việt”) posits that the compound word tâm hồn (soul) in Vietnamese, coming from an impoverished lexicon, is sadly deprived of affiliations to sexual organs (forthrightness) and yellow traffic signal (moderation/doubt).

Thiệp was awarded the Chevalier Insignia of France’s “Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” in 2007, and the Premio Nonino Prize by the Italian government in 2008. At his death, his legacy consists of some fifty short stories, a novel, seven plays, and a collection of essays called A Net to Catch The Birds (Giăng Lưới Bắt Chim). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 26, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, MK Harb, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Taiwan!

This week, our writers bring you news from Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Taiwan. In Hong Kong, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is publishing a special section on Myanmar writing; in Lebanon, poet Zeina Hashem Beck’s second poetry collection will be published by Penguin; and in Taiwan, the 2021 Taipei Literary Festival has kicked off. Read on to find out more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

In a show of solidarity to the resistance efforts in Myanmar, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine is publishing an English-language section on Myanmar, to be edited by poet, writer, and academic Tammy Lai-Ming Ho. The magazine will accept submissions until March 30 and has already announced that it will include some works in translation. So far, Thiri Zune’s translation of Nay Thit’s “With the Teeth of a Mad Flower” and Ko Ko Thett’s translation of Aung Khin Myint’s poem “Spring” will be in the upcoming issue. Both are timely responses to the military coup which has killed well over 200 people, including poets Myint Myint Zin and K Za Win, and has caused countrywide Internet blackout and crackdowns on the media. While international condemnation of Myanmar’s military leaders is escalating, many in Hong Kong identify with the resistance from the onset, especially with the fresh memory of the city’s own protests.

In addition to its efforts for Myanmar, Voice & Verse held an event discussing the American poet Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, on World Poetry Day (March 21, 2021). Hosted by writer, poet, and critic Ian Pang in Cantonese, the event discussed Glück’s oeuvre, from her first poetry collection Firstborn (1968) to more recent works.

Works in translation also feature prominently in the forty-fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, set to take place between April 1 and 12. With over 190 titles from fifty-eight countries and regions, the festival is proceeding in a hybrid format with in-theatre and online screenings as well as director discussions. This year’s showcase includes Wife of a Spy directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades!, which recently won Best Director and the Special Jury Prize respectively at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival; Golden Globes Best Foreign Language Film winner, Minari, by Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung; and Japanese masterpieces in the event of Shokichu Cinema’s 100th anniversary. These already rich offerings are accompanied by a selection of newly restored classics from world and Chinese-language cinemas, recalling Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s Golden Globe statement, that once one overcomes the one-inch barrier of subtitles, one gains access to many more amazing films and works of art.

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

2022. Since the start of the pandemic and the global vaccine roll out, a number of hopes, projects, and “return to normal” discourse have been thrown onto that year. However, here at Asymptote, we are excited to hear that acclaimed Lebanese Poet Zeina Hashem Beck will debut a poetry collection with Penguin Books in the summer of 2022! Titled O, the collection will be a meditative reflection on the letter O and its numerous meanings. Hashem Beck previously won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her book Louder than Hearts.

March is usually a generous month to us and we will share this generosity through some exciting Arab literature reading lists! The Arab lit Quarterly Spring issue is out with exciting writings and translations on the theme of “Song.” Guest edited by investigative journalist Karim Zidan, this issue has a far-reaching range from tenth-century poetry by the polymath Kushajim (in translation by Salma Harland) to a journey through Palestinian resistance folk music with Shaimaa Abulebda. Another reading list we are excited about is the Sheikh Zayed Book Award shortlist! Dominated by women authors from the Arab world, the list includes authors from Egyptian Iman Mersal to Lebanese Alawiya Sobh. Happy reading!

In translation highlights, acclaimed Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s novel, which won the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is out now with an English translation and a controversial title! Translated by another acclaimed translator, Marilyn Booth, the title of “Voices of the Lost” is seen by some as reductive to the devastating stories of migrants in the novel. Another work we are enamored with is the collection of short stories A Bed for the King’s Daughter written by Syrian author, Shahla Ujayli, whose past work was long listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The collection, translated by Sawad Hussain, with an important forward on biases in the literary market, uses surrealism and humor to address many of modernity’s malaises from alienation to the patriarchal gaze. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 5, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

The latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from the Vietnamese Diaspora, Taiwan, and the United States. The diasporic Vietnamese community has been mourning renowned poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ; in Taiwan, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Esther Yuk-ying have released their highly acclaimed co-authored memoir; and in the United States, PEN America has announced the Longlist for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. Read on to find out more! 

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

The diasporic Vietnamese community is mourning poet Nguyễn Lương Vỵ, who recently died of COVID-19 at aged sixty-eight. Tributes and essays devoted to his fruitful legacy have appeared online, with mentions of his March 3, 2021 funeral in Midway City, California.

Born in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam—a hardscrabble terrain famous for its revolutionaries and poets—Nguyễn Lương Vỵ used onomatopoeic speech to create multivalent “compressions” of sound, image, and sense. Instructed in Chinese and Nôm scripts by his grandfather, Nguyễn Lương Vỵ gravitated toward Tang poetry, haiku, and Zen philosophy. These influences shaped his lifelong exploration of Âm, a Vietnamese homonymic concept that represents the motherlode of sound, voice, language, female, and night, overlapping with the Buddhist, Hinduist, and Jainist Om. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 12, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MK Harb, Sarah Moore, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and France. In Lebanon, translator Dr. Mona Kareem has won the National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Barjeel Poetry Prize winners have been announced; in Taiwan, the February issue of INK literary magazine presents work by sixteen Taiwanese authors on “A Memo for Literature of the Next Decade”; and in France, Vanessa Springora’s bestselling memoir about sexual abuse will be released in English translation. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

In Lebanon, the cultural world and the literary sphere has been rocked by the news of the assassination of Lokman Slim. Slim was a prolific writer and intellectual, and was an influential member of the cultural and political community, opening his research and documentation practice UMAM in southern Beirut. A celebration of his life and work was held on February 11.

In translation news, Dr. Mona Kareem, translator of Octavia Butler’s Kindred into Arabic, won the National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her award supports the translation from the Arabic of the poetry collection Falcon with Sun Overheard by Ra’ad Abdulqadir, a pioneer of Iraqi poetry. Here is Dr. Kareem’s haunting translation of his poem “A Song for the Lightning Bird.” Interested in learning more about the Arabic prose poem? Then listen to author Huda J. Fakhreddine’s online talk about it at Dartmouth College!

In more thrilling translation news, Sawad Hussain’s translation from the Arabic of A Bed for the King’s Daughter is being published by University of Texas Press. Written by Syrian author Shahla Ujayli, whose past work was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this collection of short stories is experimental, witty, and loaded with uncanny images dealing with modernity, alienation, and patriarchy.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 8, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Clémence Lucchini, and Darren Huang

2021's first roundup brings you news from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States!

Asymptote‘s Weekly Roundup is back for 2021 and this week our editors bring you news of major prize events in Taiwan, an event honouring the renowned writer Xi Xi in Hong Kong, and a refreshing online poetry series in the United States. Read on to find out more! 

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan   

On December 15, the winners of the 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) Book Prizes and the 17th Golden Butterfly Awards for book design were announced by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation. Both awards are major events at the annual TiBE, which starts on January 26. The winners featured a variety of forms and themes by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, whose works reflect the prize’s investment in the “freedom of expression and freedom of publication as well as the tolerance and openness of this land.” Fiction prize winners include Huang Chun-ming, whose fiction has been featured in Asymptote, Kuo Chiang-sheng, and Pam Pam Liu’s graphic novel, “A Trip to Asylum.” Kuo’s novel concerns a piano tuner who bonds with the widower of a dead pianist, while Liu’s work, the first graphic novel to win in the fiction category, describes the experiences of a man who is admitted and finally released from a psychiatric hospital. In the nonfiction category, Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu won for her essay collection, “Darkness Under the Sun,” in which the author reflects on Hong Kong’s 2019 democracy protests.

In late November 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen awarded a posthumous citation to the nativist poet Chao Tien-yi for his contributions to contemporary Taiwanese poetry and children’s literature. Chao was one of the founders of the Li Poetry Society, a collective of Taiwanese nativist poets. Chao worked in a realist mode, through which he lyrically portrayed Taiwan’s landscape and the everyday lives of the working-class in such poems as “Cape Eluanbi,” an ode to the Pacific Ocean, and “Song of the Light-Vented Bulbul,” a nostalgic portrait of his hometown of Taichung. In 1973, the poet suffered a disappointing setback in his career when he lost his position as acting director of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Philosophy due to false accusations of Communist sympathies. Chao transformed his despair into the poems, “Daddy Lost His Work” and “Don’t Cry, Child.” The Ministry of Culture cited Chao’s works as “both mirror and window for reflecting upon a particular era in Taiwan for generations to come.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 20, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang, Eva Wissting, and MK Harb

This week's latest news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and Sweden!

This week, our writers bring you news from Lebanon, Taiwan, and Sweden. In Lebanon, the three-day festival Electronic Literature Day will feature writers including Rabih Alameddine and Raafat Majzoub; in Taiwan, the writer Liu Wu-hsiung, known by his pen name, Qi Deng-sheng, is being mourned after passing away and a recent exhibition has featured the works of the late Taiwanese poets Yang Mu and Lo Fu; and in Sweden, writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri was in line for the National Book Award’s Translated Literature prize. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

Fernweh! Or “a longing for far-off places, especially those not yet visited.” I recently learned the meaning of this German word on our newly developed “Untranslatable Words” column on Instagram (yes, that’s right we are on Instagram now!). To remedy this longing, which many of us are grappling with, check out this stellar lineup of writers on Electronic Literature Day, a three-day online literary festival featuring writers, thinkers, and practitioners in dynamic formats (November 24-26). The festival is co-organized by Barakunan, an independent publisher and art collective based in Beirut and Berlin. It will feature some of Lebanon’s finest, from acclaimed author Rabih Alameddine, writer and artist Raafat Majzoub, and cultural and social activist Dayna Ash.

This month, the translation news across the Arab region is abundant! Yasmine Seale won the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry. We’ve previously highlighted Seale’s poetic and engrossing translation of Aladdin that came out with W. W. Norton in 2018. Sawad Hussain sat down with the Anglo-Omani society to discuss translating Arabic literature and the emotional mechanisms involved in bringing the texts “to life” in English. Hussain is the winner of two English PEN Translates awards and in the podcast, she discusses and contextualizes transgender narratives in Oman through the prism of translating The Shadow of Hermaphroditus by Badriyya al-Badri. Here at Asymptote, we are excited about Arabic children’s literature in translation! The English translation of Sonia Nimr’s Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands from Interlink Books will debut on November 24! It is a feminist folktale unfolding through the journeys of a young Palestinian woman by the name of Qamar. Marcia Lynx Qualey, founder of Arablit Quarterly, worked on the translation. She previously gave an interview to Asymptote in 2017. Finally, on November 24 the shortlist for the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be announced. This year’s prize saw fourteen entries in fiction and poetry, with excellent nominees such as Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance translated by Iraqi novelist and scholar, Sinan Antoon. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 13, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Sarah Moore, Shawn Hoo, and Vivian Szu-Chin Chih

The latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In Singapore, the Singapore Writers’ Festival hosted international writers, such as Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds, whilst the Cordite Poetry Review published a special feature on Singapore poetry; in Taiwan, Kishu An Forest of Literature centre has held a discussion about a new translation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and in the UK, Carcanet Press has launched Eavan Boland’s final collection, The Historians, whilst new books about renowned poets Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have been released. Read on to find out more! 

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

The beginning of November sees a deluge of new writing coming from a host of literary journals. Joshua Ip and Alvin Pang have guest edited a special feature on Singapore poetry in Cordite Poetry Review that gives us the rare pleasure of rethinking Singapore poetry through the art of transcreation. The editors commissioned thirty young poets (who write primarily in English) for the challenge of transcreating verse, not just from the official languages of Malay, Tamil, and Chinese, but also ‘minor’ languages such as Kristang, Bengali, and Tagalog that make up Singapore’s linguistic soundscape. Additionally, Mahogany Journal, a new online periodical on the scene for anglophone South Asian writers in Singapore, has just released their second issue, which is themed ‘Retellings.’ Finally, one of our longest-running online journals, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, has launched its October issue. Lovers of Singapore literature have a huge array of choice.

Meanwhile, this year’s virtual Singapore Writers’ Festival (mentioned in my October dispatch) concluded last weekend. While festivalgoers did not experience the familiar ritual of queuing and squeezing into a room packed with fellow writers and readers, the online format delivered its own peculiarities. Liu Cixin, Teju Cole, and Sharon Olds were some of the international stars joining us from different time zones across our devices. Margaret Atwood, whose message to novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal was a hopeful “we will get through,” had many viewers sending questions through a live chat box asking the author of The Handmaid’s Tale what it means to write in these dystopian times. Instead of browsing the festival bookstore in between panels, I scrolled through the webstore run by Closetful of Books. Nifty videos were added to lure me to new book releases, booksellers curated a list of recommended reads, while readers craving connection left love notes to nobody in particular. The copy of Intimations I ordered arrived with a sweet touch: it came with a bookplate signed by Zadie Smith. With access to video on demand, rather than rushing from room to room, I found myself toggling between panels on Southeast Asian historical fiction and Korean horror without so much as lifting a finger. If I find myself unable to concentrate (as Zadie Smith said of our social media age: “I feel very bullied at the speed I am told to think daily”), I tune in to Poetry Bites to hear Marc Nair engage in ten-minute intimate chats with ten poets. Kudos to festival director Pooja Nansi and her team for this massively successful event. We are all already looking forward to what the next year’s edition of the festival brings. READ MORE…