Posts filed under 'Thai literature'

A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom

June 22, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.

In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.

The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.

BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?

MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal. 

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Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Venom by Saneh Sangsuk

May 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

For every moment of beauty, there is the shadow of cruelty hanging in the background.

A story about the dissolving borders between human and animal, life and death, love and cruelty, Venom by Saneh Sangsuk is a kind of philosophical fairy tale, with both danger and beauty always lurking at its edges. Told through shifting perspectives in poetic prose, this slim novel is densly packed with ideas and energy, providing a thrilling introduction to Sangsuk’s work for English-language readers.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Venom by Saneh Sangsuk, translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, Peirene Press, 2023

The world is full of poetry; the world is full of cruelty—this is not a contradiction. As I read Saneh Sangsuk’s deceptively slim novel Venom, I was reminded of Laura Gilpin’s “Two-Headed Calf.” At barely nine lines, Gilpin’s poem also has depth that reaches far beyond its brevity. The first stanza begins with a warning (that the idyllic pastoral will soon be disrupted), while the final stanza establishes a heart-wrenching and melancholic portrait of a recently-born, two-headed calf revelling in the light of the moon, “the wind on the grass,” and the warmth of its mother. The beauty of Gilpin’s poem lies in the way it holds two worlds in its lines, but also in how it makes possible for a cruel tomorrow to never arrive. In a sense, by returning to this poem, we are returning to a moment in another world where a two-headed calf—this “freak of nature”—is frozen in an eternal evening of joy and love.

I found in Venom the same sensations, the same negotiation between poetic beauty and cruelty. The former comes quickly and easily, as the book opens with a little boy contemplating a mesmerizing sunset in the Thai countryside: “Over the horizon to the west, the clouds of summer, met from behind by sunlight, glowed strange and lustrous and beautiful.” Additionally, the first thing we learn about this boy is that he was granted the privilege of naming his family’s eight oxen, and he had been eager to fulfil this task with care and artistic flare. He calls the animals by names like “Field, Bank, Jungle and Mountain—Toong, Tah, Pah and Khao,” and “Ngeun and Tong, Silver and Gold,” or “Pet, Ploy, Ngeun and Tong.” These group of names speak to him with prosodic logic: some rhyme, and others provide a chance for alliteration. All in all, they belong to a group of words that “sounded like [they] could be poetry,” a phrase that Sangsuk repeats twice. This act of naming, the author suggests, is an act of writerly creation. While the world is not inherently poetic, some people are more prone to make poetry from its elements. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 22, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood and Peera Songkünnatham

The latest news from Poland and Thailand !

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Poland and Thailand! In Poland, Julia Sherwood takes us through the Conrad Festival, the 2021 winner of the prestigious NIKE Prize, and the launch of the first ecopoetics course in the country. In Thailand, Peera Songkünnatham explains how an innovative series of illustrated children’s books have risked censorship for their depiction of government protests. Read on to find out more! 

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

Tomorrow, 24 October, is the closing day of the 13th edition of the Conrad Festival that started in Kraków on 18 October headlined “The Nature of the Future”, which has sought to “imagine the shape of our near and distant future, all while thinking about the changes that we are going to witness in the natural environment”, as well as highlighting themes of feminism. International literary heavyweights—Han Kang, Rebecca Solnit, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Valeria Luiselli, Helena Janeczek, Elias Khoury, Lisa Appignanesi, Behrouz Boochani, Brandon Hobson, George Saunders and Petra Hůlová—as well as acclaimed Polish writers such as Julia Fiedorczuk, Mikołaj Grynberg and Dorota Masłowska have been taking part in discussions and presentations, held mostly online (the recordings can be watched on the festival’s YouTube channel.)

2021 NIKE Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award went to Kajś, Opowieść o Górnym Śląsku (Somewhere,  A Tale of Upper Silesia), in which its author, Zbigniew Rokita, searches for his Silesian roots and grapples with his own ambivalent feelings about his native region. The decision to shortlist only one work of fiction while all the other books, including the winning title, represented nonfiction, caused some controversy. However, this is hardly surprising given the strong position of literary reportage in contemporary Polish literature. The genre even has its own award, the Kapuściński Prize (this year it went to Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland , translated into Polish by Martyna Tomczak) and its own teaching institution, the Warsaw Institute of Reportage whose founders and teachers include the most celebrated reportage authors Mariusz Szczygieł, Paweł Goźliński, and Wojciech Tochman. 

Last year Filip Springer, one of the Institute’s teachers launched a new course, The School of Ecopoetics, the first of its kind in Poland. Feeling the need  to explore what individuals and writers can do to prevent an ecological disaster, Springer, a writer and photographer (and past Asymptote contributor), approached the poet, translator, and literary critic Julia Fiedorczuk who is a leading exponent of ecopoetics in Poland (and also a past Asymptote contributor) to design the programme. Although the course was aimed at writers, poets, journalists, and critics, the organizers stressed that the School of Ecopoetics “is not a school of writing”. Instead, “its goal is to help the students develop ecocritical reflection, to change their way of thinking by drawing attention to the relations between human beings and non-human nature.”  Judging by the enthusiastic responses shared by some of the first twenty graduates on the School’s Facebook page, the mix of traditional lectures and fieldwork (hiking through forests, sleeping in tents and discussions around the campfire) held from June 2020 to October 2021, was a resounding success. Recruitment for next year’s course starts in November.   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 1, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng and Peera Songkünnatham

The latest news from Hong Kong and Thailand!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news of international book prizes and cultural events. In Thailand, Peera Songkünnatham sheds light on the highest-nominated titles in the “Books You Should Read” festival, while in Hong Kong, Charlie Ng introduces us to a recent article celebrating Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang. Read on to find out more! 

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

For three years now, the annual book recommendation festival ความน่าจะอ่าน (Books You Should Read) has pooled Top 3 nominations from a cross-section of editors and readers in the Thai publishing industry. With fifty to sixty participants each year, this “mass” nomination system organized by the media website the101.world has helped spotlight a wide range of noteworthy books that would otherwise not be in the running for awards that only consider works not in translation or that judge in narrow categories (Thailand’s S.E.A. Write Award, for example, rotates between novel, short story, and poetry in three-year cycles).

The highest-nominated book has consistently been a creative account of political oppression in the country. A book that, in other words, combines urgency with craft. This year’s number one “Top Highlight,” with eight nominations, is ในแดนวิปลาส (In the Land of Madness), the book I also blogged about earlier last month. 2020’s top title was ตาสว่าง (Il Re di Bangkok), an Italian graphic novel grounded in ethnographic research whose English translation is forthcoming this December. And 2018-2019’s winner was มันทำร้ายเราได้แค่นี้แหละ (All They Could Do to Us), a lèse-majesté prison memoir hailed by many readers as Thailand’s Orange is the New Black—this rather clichéd comparison may now have more substance after the book gained praise from a high-profile showbiz executive. All these come from very, very small publishers who did not expect the widespread critical and commercial success. That this kind of dark-horse candidate appears to be obvious “winning material” now is a testament to how “Books You Should Read” has influenced public perception of literary noteworthiness. READ MORE…

Bangkok, City of Mirrors: Reading Veeraporn Nitiprabha’s Lake of Tears

October 28, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Noh Anothai

In addition to warning against societal amnesia, the novel is, at its heart, about empowering young people to trust their potential.

Earlier this month, thousands of demonstrators flocked to Bangkok’s iconic Ratchaprasong intersection to demand dictator Prayut Chanocha’s resignation. Thailand is no stranger to such uprisings, but this one’s a little different: it is part of a recent movement led almost exclusively by the young. In this brief but deliciously meaty essay, translator Noh Anothai draws thoughtful parallels between the current political scene and Lake of Tears, Thai powerhouse Veeraporn Nitiprabha’s first YA novel. Set in a dystopian city with near-blind, oblivious adults, it stars two courageous children who set out to face the past—which is, of course, the only way to change the future.

Whenever Yiwa watched the news on TV, murderers who harmed even small children, terrorists, and generals who slew people by the droves—none of these looked different from other people in their savagery. But if there was one thing that set them apart from everyone else—it was their indifference, their cool disinterest in the face of either good or evil . . .

The publication of Lake of Tears (ทะเลสาบน้ำตา), Thai author Veeraporn Nitiprabha’s third novel (and the first intended for a YA audience), comes at a strangely apt moment in Thai history. For at least the past year, a new political movement has been fomenting against the current junta led by Prayudh Chanocha, who seized power in a 2014 coup. What sets this movement apart, in a country that is no stranger to mass civilian uprisings, is age: it has been largely portrayed as a youth, or even a children’s, movement. While the pro-democracy demonstrations of the 1960s were embodied in the figure of the university student (“naive in spotless white school uniform,” to quote a poem from the time), and those of the early 2000s conjure up competing stages in yellow and red, today’s movement is characterized by millennials and Generation Zers coming of age in a political climate they deem no longer tenable to democratic ideas and freedom of expression. There have even been discussions within primary schools regarding what—if anything—should be done about children refusing to honor the national anthem, showing instead the three-fingered salute that has become today’s call to action. Indeed, one popular meme shows a secondary school student, his face blurred out, studying a geometry worksheet laid out on the asphalt at one of the many outdoor sit-ins taking place around Bangkok. The caption reads: “When you have homework but still gotta drive out the dictator.” READ MORE…

In Conversation: Mui Poopoksakul

October 15, 2018  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Thailand has become politically divided...so many young Thai writers are now turning back toward the themes of politics and history.

September’s Asymptote Book Club selection, Moving Parts, is a dazzlingly original collection of short stories by Prabda Yoon, “the writer who popularized postmodern narrative techniques in contemporary Thai literature.”

Translating from Thai to English can be daunting, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though “you can never do the right thing.” Continuing our monthly series of Book Club interviews, Mui Poopoksakul tells Lindsay Semel about the challenges of translating a language with “a multitude of pronouns that are extremely nuanced,” as well as an affinity for elaborate rhyme and alliteration.

Lindsay Semel (LS): I was immediately struck by the aurality of Moving Parts. It’s full of rhyming prose and onomatopoeia. When you interviewed Prabda Yoon for The Quarterly Conversation, you said, “I feel like the alliteration can be recreated sometimes, but rhyming is more of a problem because the Thai ear is far more used to it. Translating Thai, you face the problem of translating poetry. You can never do the right thing. Someone will always say you did the wrong thing because you kept the sound or you kept it straight. It’s a real problem.” His answer didn’t offer much of a solution. Can you talk about some of the more challenging or intriguing examples in Moving Parts of translating what in English might be considered poetic language in prose?  

Mui Poopoksakul (MP): In Thai, people like to say two or three or four synonyms in a row if they rhyme or if they’re alliterative. The sound play isn’t intended to create extra meaning. The Thai ear is used to that sing-song quality, so it doesn’t feel like someone is suddenly breaking into a nursery rhyme. Rhyme was more of an issue in this collection, whereas in The Sad Part Was, the first Prabda Yoon collection I translated, alliteration was more present. In Moving Parts, there were a couple of big moments where Prabda really played up the rhyming—in “Evil Tongue” and in “Eye Spy”—I think as a nod to that element of the Thai language, so I felt that I needed to carry those mini poems over to represent the sound. So there are sentences in those stories where every clause rhymes. With him, these moments aren’t always intended to be particularly lyrical—some are just playful. “Eye Spy” includes a rhyme about theater seats. There are also smaller instances of rhyming: in “Mock Tail,” for example, there’s “flip or slip.” I try to pepper them in, but I also have to watch out that there is not too much of a sing-song quality in the translation.

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Translation Tuesday: “The Awaiter” by Duanwad Pimwana

June 2, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Mui Poopoksakul

We coexisted in close proximity on this planet. Even so, we led a solitary existence... What right did a person have to demand something of others?

I never had any luck, perhaps because I never thought of it, and it probably didn’t think of me. Yet something now lay at my feet. That it had to show up there was no mere contingency. I could have easily stepped over it or veered to the side. Somebody whisking about in the vicinity would have picked it up; he probably would have grinned and chalked it up to his lucky day. But I hadn’t moved aside, and as long as I stood in place and glanced calmly at it down by my feet, others could only steal a wistful glimpse. Some might have regretted walking a tad too fast; if they had been slower, they could have become its possessor. Some might have reasoned, siding with themselves, that they spotted it even before I did, but they were a step too slow. Regardless, I picked up the money, without concluding as of yet whether it was my luck or not.

That evening at the tail end of the monsoon season, I happened to walk by a crowded bus stop even though it was not on my way home and I had no purpose for taking that route. The money lay fallen behind a bus. When I bent down to pick it up, the hot air from the exhaust pipe spurted onto my face as I unfurled myself back to standing. A pair of eyes darted at me. Its owner walked toward me with a face painted with an uncertain smile. I knew his intentions immediately. While I myself was unsure of my status in relation to the money at that instant, one thing of which I was absolutely certain was: the man approaching was not the owner of the money—but he wanted to be.

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