Posts featuring J.M.G. Le Clézio

An Ocean of Myth and Lotus: Robert Wood on Portside Review and Writings from the Indian Ocean

January 17, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The journal is a simply a simple example of peace in our time for people who wish to see it, in all their diversity, opinion, reflection.

Since 2021, Portside Review has published contemporary writings from the Indian Ocean that transcend beyond J.M.G. Le Clézio, Amitav Ghosh, Lindsey Collen, Monique Agénor, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert. Celebrating the coastlines, hinterlands, sea routes and port cities from Cape Town to Bangkok, from Bombay to Northbridge, this quarterly digital literary journal is funded by the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Creative Australia, and the Centre for Stories. “[W]e are not a journal of critique and review, nor of scholarship and journalism, nor of doctrinaire reference,” wrote managing editor Robert Wood in the journal’s latest issue.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Wood on the impetus behind Portside Review, new writings from the Indian Ocean, and running a digital literary journal.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): What’s the story behind Portside Review? Why is there a need, now more than ever, for an online literary journal on writings from the Indian Ocean?

Robert Wood (RW): Founded in February 2021, Portside Review is a quarterly online literary journal that publishes short stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and activism in written, audio and visual form. Based in Perth in Western Australia, we have had editors in Melbourne, Singapore, Bali, Penang, Mumbai, Cape Town, Myanmar, and elsewhere. We started it as a project through our parent organisation, the Centre for Stories, which teaches the craft of storytelling for social impact.

There is a need, as always, for the proliferation for artistic excellence that supports an ongoing peace, all with a sense of ecological attention, material place and geographic location. Our vision has been to see the Indian Ocean as a home of many languages, many interests, many sovereignties, and to reflect that through a journal focused on the English language without centering it. It is a project that allows us to connect laterally rather than vertically, that re-routes where and when we have come to be in the ports we call our own. READ MORE…

How Do We Remember Translators? The Many Lives of Barbara Bray

June 11, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Nathan H. Dize

There must be a way of acknowledging the care that Bray brought to her translations while simultaneously reckoning with their faults.

Barbara Bray was a British translator and recipient of the PEN Translation Prize in 1986. In addition to having translated leading French authors of her time, including Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and the correspondence of George Sand, she also translated works by two renowned female Guadeloupian writers: Simone Schwarz-Bart and Maryse Condé. Though her work has undergone criticism—notably by Condé’s husband and translator, Richard Philcox in an recent interview with us at Asymptote—the importance of her legacy and contributions to global literature, as Nathan H. Dize proposes in the following essay, should not be undermined. 

In late December, I decided to go browsing at a used bookstore outside of Nashville to take a much-needed break from writing my dissertation. There are few things in this world more comforting than perusing the spines of books, never knowing what you might stumble upon. A few minutes into my trip, I found a hardcover copy of Maryse Condé’s Segu, translated by the late Barbara Bray. The dust jacket was pristine and its cover depicted a dying African man surrounded by his family beneath a pulpy font. I instantly knew that I had to buy it, having recently talked about the novel’s translator with a friend. Unfortunately, Barbara Bray’s name appears nowhere on the cover of Segu—not on its first edition or any subsequent editions—which led me to wonder, how do we remember translators when they are gone? What becomes of the many lives they’ve lived through the words of others? Since that day in the warehouse-sized bookstore in Middle Tennessee, I’ve considered how Bray’s translations of Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Guadeloupe’s most prolific writers, might help us to remember her life and her contribution to Caribbean literature in translation.

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Barbara Bray (née Jacobs) was born along with her identical twin, Olive, on November 24, 1924 in Maida Vale, not far from Regent’s Park in London. She was educated close to Maida Vale at the Preston Manor Grammar School in Brent and later studied English, French, and Italian at Girton College, Cambridge. After her university studies, Barbara married John Bray, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and they went to live together in Egypt, where Barbara took a position as an English teacher at the University of Alexandria in Cairo. In 1953, the couple moved back to London, where Barbara began a new job as a script editor for the BBC. In his obituary for Barbara Bray in the Journal of Beckett Studies, John Knowlson recalls conversations with Bray about her time at the BBC, when she and other producers had to fight with BBC executives and department heads to air avant-garde radio plays and programs, such as Harold Pinter’s radio plays. Three years before Barbara Bray left the BCC in 1961, her husband John died in a car accident, leaving her widowed and tasked with raising their two daughters, Francesca and Julia. After John Bray’s passing, Barbara met Samuel Beckett and the two began a multi-decade love affair in Paris that coincided with Bray’s entrée into the world of translation. READ MORE…

My 2017: Jacob Silkstone

December 29, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Jacob Silkstone

Perhaps the fitting thing to do would have been to throw the book into the water and let the waves close over it...

Assistant Managing Editor Jacob Silkstone travelled between several countries and two distinct stages of his life in 2017—and still had time to read a ton of literature! Today, in our final column, he reflects on the books that accompanied him on the move.

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“If I imagine something, I see it. What more would I do if I travelled? Only extreme feebleness of the imagination can justify anyone needing to travel in order to feel.”

The complete edition of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (translated by the incomparable Margaret Jull Costa) finally became available to English readers in 2017, and I first read Bernardo Soares’ hodophobic lines in an Airbnb flat in Portugal at the 40-degree height of summer. The water supply had been temporarily cut off and for hours the taps dribbled a thin brown fluid, but I had Soares’ life “of slow rain in which everything is … half-shadow” to keep me occupied.

In a year that began with the Trump travel ban and continued to be marred by small, scared attempts to shelter from the world behind various walls (both real and imaginary), it seems worth playing Devil’s advocate to Soares/Pessoa: perhaps there can be some justification for travelling “in order to feel.”

This year, I moved between several countries and two distinct stages of my life—having finally proposed after nearly nine years in a relationship, I got married in July. The evening after the wedding, I gave my copy of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness away on a whim to one of our guests, a foreign correspondent working in the Middle East. That copy subsequently embarked on a journey Arundhati Roy would have been proud of, travelling from Beirut to Syria to Yemen. READ MORE…

The Nobel’s Faulty Compass

November 20, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Carter

After all, it seems hard to believe that the magnetic north of the literary lies in Europe or in the languages that have emerged from it. 

In the will he signed in Paris on November 27, 1895, Alfred Nobel established five prizes in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and the promotion of peace. In the sciences, the key characteristic of a laureate’s contribution to the larger field was that it should be the “most important” discovery or improvement, while the peace prize was intended to recognize “the most or the best work” performed in pursuit of fostering what he called the “fraternity between nations.” Yet when turning to the award for careful work with language, Nobel would distinctly modify his own: he specified that the literary prize should go to whichever writer had produced “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”

From 1901 to 2017, women have exemplified that ideal direction a mere fourteen times. Although that dismal distribution has somewhat improved in recent years, it is nothing to brag about: only five women have won since 2004, and only six in the past twenty-one years. Such disappointing diversity continues when we turn to languages: of the 113 laureates in that same period, twenty-nine have written in English. That number does not even include three laureates who each wrote in two languages, one of which was English: Rabindranath Tagore, the songwriter who won a century before Bob Dylan and who also wrote in Bengali; Samuel Beckett, whose most famous work is titled En attendant Godot in the original French; and Joseph Brodsky, whose poems appeared in Russian and whose prose was written in the same language as the documents certifying the American citizenship he had acquired a decade before winning.

READ MORE…