Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 17, 2024 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Bella Creel

The latest in world literature from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and the United States!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us around the world for updates on literary workshops, readings, and conferences! From a workshop dedicated to Kapampangan literature in the Philippines, to the thriving Mahala Bookstore in Bulgaria, to ALTA’s online Write the World panels, read on to learn more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from the Philippines

Tomorrow, May 18, marks the deadline of the call for workshop participants for Pamiyabe, the regional creative writing workshop for young writers who hail from the northern Philippine region of Central Luzon. Across Central Luzon and Metro Manila, the Kapampangan language (also alternatively named Pampangan, Pampango, and Pampagueno) is the native tongue to over 3.2 million Filipinos.

Now in its 21st year, the Pamiyabe writing workshop is aimed at contributing towards the flourishing of Kapampangan literature and organised by The Angelite, the official student publication of Holy Angel University in Angeles City, Pampanga. This year’s theme is “Pamaglugug queng regalu ning milabasan, pamagkaul queng progreso ning kasalungsungan” (Nurturing the gift of the past, embracing the progress of the present).

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 5, 2024 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Bella Creel, Rubén López, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest of literary news from Guatemala, China, and Japan!

In this week of literary updates, we discuss the blend of technology and literature around the globe—from a virtual imagining of the Popul Vuh in Guatemala, to the use of ChatGPT by the winner of a prestigious literary award in Japan, to an interactive exhibition of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry in Shanghai.

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

Despite having famously said, in an interview with Edward Hirsch, that “it isn’t possible to save mankind”, Wisława Szymborska displayed no shortage of compassion towards humanity and its messes, surging always towards a more enriched penetration into people, the layered fabric of their histories, and the immense variegations of their natures. In China, funnily enough, most people likely became aware of the Polish poet through a celebrated graphic novel by the Taiwanese artist Jimmy Liao;《往左走，往右走》(published in English as A Chance of Sunshine) is a story about destiny and its aloneness—depicting two individuals who walk separate paths but are unified by the same experiences. In it, Liao borrows the following lines from Szymborska’s “Love at First Sight”:

They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

That same tension between unity and undeniable difference is consistently offered through Szymborska’s corpus, and is central to a new exhibit in Shanghai centred around her works, held at Qiantan L+Plaza from April 1 to May 15. Composed of interactive installations, performances, and graphic poetic representations, “我偏爱“ (I prefer) is a valiant effort to iterate the complexity of the poet’s exquisite awareness, and aspires towards both a sense of communion and a defense of individuality. True to its vision of dialogic action, as well as honouring literature’s confessional and communicative capacities, there are surveys to fill out, votes to cast, letters to open, and a telephone to pick up. READ MORE…

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What’s New in Translation: July 2023

July 10, 2023 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Catherine Xin Xin Yu and Heloisa Selles

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.