Posts filed under 'Southeast Asian literature'

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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Lover as Intimate Other: Chinatown by Thuận

July 13, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

Chinatown by Thuận, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, New Directions, 2022

In an interview with Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre in 1989, Marguerite Duras revealed she had chosen the rather nondescript title of The Lover (L’Amant), her celebrated novel about a love affair between a fifteen-year-old French girl and a Chinese man in French Indochina, as “a reaction against all the books with that same title, [for] it isn’t a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named.”

In employing Chinatown as an equally unassuming yet versatile title for her 2005 novel, Thuận responds incisively to the Duras’s work from which she took inspiration by showcasing her pair of star-crossed lovers—an unnamed Vietnamese protagonist and Thụy, her ex-husband who is born in Vietnam but has Chinese ancestry. A Hanoi-born writer and literary translator living in France but choosing to write her novels—ten at last count—in Vietnamese, Thuận (full name Đoàn Ánh Thuận) deftly balances her complex content with a wryly confiding style. Making its English debut via Nguyễn An Lý’s incantatory translation, Chinatown’s generic title is deceptive, its compact length trapping layers of tensions to illustrate how political struggles in the public realm mirror emotional struggles in personal relationships. Subversive yet casually framed like a run-on conversation between friends, Thuận’s novel explores various iterations of Chinatown to convey exile, alienation, oppression, and artistic freedom.

Consisting of one vertiginous 184-page paragraph, the novel is compressed within a two-hour timeline during which the protagonist and her young son are trapped in a Paris metro tunnel while local authorities investigate a bomb threat. With nowhere to go, the protagonist soon launches into reminiscences spanning two eventful decades—from the last years of the Cold War to the period following Vietnam’s implementation of free-market reforms. As such, the novel is simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic, its experimental form disrupted only by two fragments from I’m Yellow, a novel-in-progress by Chinatown’s protagonist. This novel-within-a-novel structure embodies the ambiguous push-pull between oppression and freedom: Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

January 14, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MK Harb, and Peera Songkünnatham

From Scheherazade to Avicii, the literary news of the week spans new looks at pivotal figures.

From book fairs to bestsellers, the world of international letters knows no rest. In Qatar, the 31st Doha International Book Fair has launched with an in-person schedule. In Japan, a new project aiming to promote Southeast Asian and Indian literature has published an impressive roster of short fiction, and in Sweden, two beloved figures are immortalized in text. Read on to find out more!

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

Happy New Year from the world of Arabic literature! With Omicron, media frenzies, and restrictions around the world, we could all use some escape. Travel might be limited, but how about an escape to the fantasy world of Arabian Nights? The iconic collection that has inspired countless others around the world, from the Brothers Grimm to Naguib Mafhouz, has received a fresh new translation by Yasmine Seale—known for her riveting new translation of Aladdin. Enter the world of ghouls, mystics, and enchantresses, and enjoy your COVID-free time travel (it has some brilliant images!).

The theme of time travel continues with the launch of the Winter issue of Arab Lit Quarterly! Responding to the theme of folk and featuring great writers such as Palestinian author Sonia Nimr, this issue promises to “cover stories, songs, and poetry from the last millennium, from Andalusia to Yemen, with stops across the cities in between!” You can get your copy here.

That being said, the world is not entirely being relegated to the virtual, as Qatar launches the 31st Doha International Book Fair for the year of 2022, under the theme of “light is knowledge.” Finally, we will visit our first in-person book fair in years, which will host renowned Arabic book distributors such as Samarkand Books from Qatar and Antoine Cachet from Lebanon! READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 19, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Peera Songkünnatham

The latest news from Thailand and Central America!

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

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

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

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

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