Posts featuring Luna Sicat-Cleto

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 24, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Katarina Gadze, and MARGENTO

Dispatches from the Philippines, Croatia, and the Romanian diaspora!

In this week’s literary roundup from around the world, people in the literary community are both paying tribute to celebrated icons and paving paths for contemporary voices. From the Romanian diaspora, an exciting new publication threads the past and present, adding to an incredible legacy of literary journals. In the Philippines, book fairs are highlighting minority languages and independent publishers. In Croatia, new literary projects orient their local communities around the act of reading and writing, as well as making intellectual space to consider the role of the political novel. 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Romanian diaspora

One of the most significant recent events involving the Romanian diaspora was the debut release of the literary journal Littera Nova in Madrid, Spain, earlier this week. With an impressive range of established and emerging writers contributing literature both in original languages and in translation, alongside essays and criticism, the journal confidently joins a rich market as well as a solid and long-standing tradition. As the founding director Eugen Barz states in his prefatory note,  previous frontrunners in the literary journal landscape include post-WWII Romanian periodicals published in metropoles as diverse as Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu, and edited by legends such as Mircea Eliade, Alexandru Busuioceanu, George Uscatescu, Stefan Baciu, Vintila Horia, and many others.

In the wake of iconic late-Romantic/early-modernist Eminescu’s 173rd birthday, the issue also includes a significant number of remarkable texts referring to the great classic: an erudite and incisive essay from Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau drawing parallels between Eminescu and both Shakespeare and Dimitrie Cantemir; poems translated into English by K.V. Twain; and a selection from the poet’s correspondence by Ovidiu Pecican. The journal deftly balances criticism and creative writing/translation, featuring classic modernists such as Lucian Blaga and Ion Pillat (translated into Italian by Stefan Damian and Bruno Rombi, and into French by Gabrielle Danoux), and Surrealist master—and past Asymptote contributor—Gellu Naum (in English translation from Nicoleta Craete), amongst others.

The Romanian diaspora continues to contribute significant texts and translations in platforms all around the world; for example, Asymptote contributor Diana Manole has recently had one of her plays featured in EastWest Literary Forum, released a collection of new and selected poems by revered Nora Iuga (co-translated with Adam J. Sorkin), and is gearing up for the release of her own forthcoming poetry collection in Canada. Also, major diasporic poet, novelist, and critic O. Nimigean, whose rare social media posts are at times almost as impactful as his best-selling books, reasserted on Facebook the continued relevance of the late paradigmatic fiction writer and anti-Ceaușescu militant Paul Goma (himself an epitome of both domestic and exilic heroic resistance), particularly as reflected by Flori Balanescu’s recent books on the subject. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Kristina Tatarian, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Armenia, the Philippines, and Kenya!

This week, our editors on the ground are watching out for multilingual poetry events, emerging Armenian writers, solidarity in language and literature, the favourite texts of Filipino readers, translation in Southeast Asia, dialogues between authors in Nairobi, and PEN/HEIM Translation Grants winners. Read on to find out more!

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Armenia

The beautiful auditorium of the Carfesjian Center for the Arts, located at the Cascade Complex in Yerevan, is a frequent stage for literary readings. On the night of October 8, the center hosted a performance as part of antiBabylon, a multilingual poetry event that brought together literary communities from Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Germany. Organised by PANDA Platforma, an NGO from Berlin, the event took place in Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, as poets visited each other’s countries for joint workshops and performances to create, translate, and perform. The Project’s aim is to create a “free multilingual poetic space,” and test if poetry can answer the most burning existential questions of today’s troubled world.

On the same day, IALA’s Emerging Writers Showcase took place online. This showcase featured readings from Armenian authors championed by the organisation as mentees or winners of the Young Armenian Poet Award. By supporting emerging literary talent, the organisation adds to the global effort of Armenian artists to accelerate cultural revival in the country.

The Armenian diaspora around the world plays a crucial part of setting the cultural agenda for Armenian literature, and now, the groundbreaking collection We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, edited by Aram Mjorian, is available from University of Texas Press. The collection will feature essays from writers and poets of Armenian origin, shedding light on diverse experiences of “Armenianness” and personal perspectives on ethnicity, identity, and the sense of home. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Logic of the Soap Bubbles” by Luna Sicat-Cleto

April 30, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Bernard Capinpin

. . . actually, it has now become more complicated because I now get imaginary enemies and lovers.

The mania present in this week’s Translation Tuesday is forceful and visceral, poured forth with a tide of senses, memories, tastes, smells, and visions. Upon the arrival of a spectral personification named Sandali, the inner monologue of Luna Sicat-Cleto’s narrator detonates, threading seamlessly through the past, the present, and the future. The word sandali, in Filipino, can be roughly translated as “moment.” In this story, we are reminded of exactly how broad, and how various, a moment can be.

That moment comes, unexpected, uninvited, she just appears, like a visitor, a visitor whom I cannot shove off, I let her inside, offer her coffee, she will not drink the coffee, she will merely stroke the cup’s ear, and will look at me from head to toe, like a child, she will stare, and I know that she is sizing me up because I too am sizing her, she will look out the window and whisper something about the weather, I will nod, as if I had heard what she had whispered but actually hadn’t, I have been deaf for a long time, I don’t recognize the noise I heard, I no longer know if birds still sing in the morning, whatever noise I heard, I’m sure that my eardrums have already burst, a noise that had pierced through to my brain, but it’s funny that I still recognize the sound of my own name, and this gives me hope, hope is a dangerous thing, they say that it is what thrusts people to madness, and when the visitor called my name, I did not know if I was dreaming, I lifted my head up and smiled, I was about to mention something about the weather, or our weight, whether we have gained or lost some, but I had forgotten what I was about to say as soon as she squeezed my palm, where the pulse lies, where the welt from the blade rested and she whispered: flee, flee and I will know what she wanted to happen, she wanted to sleep with me, I will not object, I will be even the one to usher her to bed, and I will feel her trembling, I will take off her clothes and she will do the same and we will begin our voyage, that’s how I see it, a voyage I will not object to, I will try not to think, I will let it be, she will come again tomorrow, my door will be open, I will not refuse, for I want our world to be filled with our children, the whole universe even, so that I wouldn’t feel lonely anymore, isn’t it right, Sandali, for that is her name, Sandali, she has neither parent nor sibling, neither home nor job, she is not bound to anything or anytime. Sandali, her name does not suit her, perhaps I needn’t give her a name, she is like a poem, a poem that does not have a name, if a person labels a poem a poem, it vanishes, it disappears like bubbles that can no longer be touched.

READ MORE…