Posts featuring Miguel Ángel Asturias

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 21, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, Kathryn Raver, and Rubén López

The latest from Guatemala, Taiwan, China, and France!

This week, our editors take us through Central America, France, and China to explore the reaches of literature, from a transcendent event honouring the poems of Robert Bolaño, to the new World Book Capital in France, and works featuring vital new voices from the Chinese language. Read on to find out more!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

When I entered the room, it looked like a coven: a group of people gathered around an edition of Roberto Bolaño’s Complete Poetry. Each member of the group would take turns to step into the centre, leaf through the text for a moment, and then recite one of the Chilean author’s poems at random, like a poetic Russian roulette. As I took my seat, one of the young men was reading the final verses of “The Romantic Dogs”. I had arrived at the event without much certainty about what it would be like; the poster from Perjura Proyecto, a cultural and artistic dissemination space, only said “The Poetry Came” and had a sketch of Bolaño’s silhouette. And, of course, it also mentioned the date and time—May 23, 17:00.

When it was my turn, I decided I wanted to read “Godzilla in Mexico”, my favorite poem by Bolaño. I clumsily flipped through the text while trying to make conversation with the rest of the participants, but I couldn’t find it. I apologised to the group because I would break the Russian roulette and put the bullet in the centre; I searched for it on my phone. As I recited “Yo leía en la habitación de al lado cuando supe que íbamos a morir”, I was overcome with a deep tenderness. I saw us, in the midst of a vertiginous and infamous city—a group of no more than ten people gathered to read Bolaño’s poems to each other. I thought about the infinite forms of cultural resistance in which we exist, all self-managed, all on the margins, all filled with beauty. READ MORE…

Thread, A Loom, A Skein: Rita M. Palacios on Maya Ts’íib as a Departure from Literature

January 3, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Ts’íib radically departs from notions of literature because the written word is not the be-all and end-all of society and culture.

Guatemalan scholar Rita M. Palacios’ body of work reexamines the hegemonies that mediate literary, cultural, and knowledge production, particularly in Maya oral storytelling, literature, and material culture. In the book she co-authored with Asymptote’s former editor-at-large for Mexico, Paul M. Worley, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press, 2019), they argued for a decentering from the Euro-American critical vocabulary of literary theory and arts criticism through the lens of ts’íib—”an understanding of Maya artistic and cultural production that includes and exceeds the written word.” Drawing from Maya artists and authors such as Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Waldemar Noh Tzec, and Humberto Ak’abal, whose œuvre range from murals to textiles, from cha’anil (‘performatic’) to ceramics, from monuments to poetry, Palacios and Worley make the case for the ts’íib as one of the various Indigenous-centric departures from and unlearnings of our colonial worldviews on literary production and knowledge systems.  

In this interview, I conversed with Dr. Palacios on ts’íib as a form of autohistorical knowledge production that is beyond the Western imaginary, the Maya and non-Ladino writers and writings within Guatemalan and Central American literatures, and the rightful refusals against translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a conversation on Mexican and Guatemalan literatures with Paul M. Worley, you said

[T]he many challenges (structural racism, censorship, a lack of government funding, to name a few) that writers in countries in the Majority World face directly impact how and what is written, how it’s published, and who it reaches, and so we, readers and critics, would do well to pay attention.

Can you speak more about these gaps and dissimilarities in terms of knowledge production, especially in literature, in the Global Majority versus the North Atlantic?

Rita M. Palacios (RMP): Given the way Western political and economic powers have shaped our world, the anglophone North Atlantic enjoys a certain monopoly over the manner in which we think and write about each other, privileging certain modes of artistic production over others, as well as creators, reading publics, and even the critics. This is not to say that we are helpless or that we are wholly bound by a system that privileges and rewards those who uphold it. It does mean that things are much more challenging for those who live, think, and create outside those parameters.

Generally, when it comes to literature, that which is written, packaged, and sold by the millions is not a literature that aims to represent us all, but a literature that affirms the places (real and imagined) we already occupy and the systems built around them so that we continue to inhabit these spaces, sustaining those big great powers. Despite the challenges their authors face, the literatures of the Global Majority are rich, diverse, and challenging; they are multilingual, multivocal, and multiversal. Rarely are these literatures sold in the same manner as blockbuster novels because of the threat they pose. And these authors recognize the danger of being subsumed into “national” or canonical literatures, as is the case with Mikel Ruíz (Tsotsil) who notes the tokenization of Indigenous literatures in Mexico (2019). READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 27, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary News from Palestine, Central America, Romania, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a new Palestinian literary and culture magazine, the 2023 PEN Open Book Award longlist, and more. From a Palestinian literary festival to the birthday celebration for the “national poet” of Romania, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

A first is always exciting, always an event; in fact, it’s called “a first” even if a second never comes. And when there is a second time, it’s an opportunity to celebrate and to remember the first.

This week the Palestinian literary community is anticipating both a first and a second.

The Palestinian literary scene is witnessing the birth of Fikra Magazine, an online Palestinian cultural and literary magazine – writing and art by and for Palestinians. According to partners and co-founders Aisha and Kevin, Fikra is dedicated to “high-quality content that doesn’t conform to stereotypes and old-fashioned ideas about Palestine. It’s original, it’s inspiring, it’s bold.” What is exciting about this new publication is that every piece is professionally translated from Arabic to English—or vice versa. Since “Palestinians in the Diaspora often don’t read Arabic as their mother tongue,” the creators say in their promotional materials, “we want our writers to become part and parcel of the international writing-guild as well.” In Fikra, the creators promise, “you’ll find Palestinian writers and artists from all corners of the word – from Gaza, the West-Bank, East-Jerusalem, 48, and the diaspora.”

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Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

July 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.”

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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…

“Guatemala has always produced great writers”: An Interview with Guatemalan Poet and Feminist Ana María Rodas

October 9, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

One day, poetry simply came out of me. One day, I was filled with poetry.

Wearing a thin sweater, a colorful scarf, and a dazzling smile, Ana María welcomed us to her house in Zone 15, Guatemala City. Outside it was pouring, much like when she presented her famed Poemas de la izquierda erótica (Poems from the Erotic Left), forty-six years ago. She offered us tea—“To fight back the cold,” she said, still smiling—and told us we had to do the interview in the living room, not upstairs, because, “There are books scattered everywhere; imagine, a lifetime spent collecting books.” And, yes, one can only imagine.

Ana María Rodas, born in 1937, is a veteran Guatemalan poet, journalist, and teacher. Her career spans more than sixty years. She has released close to twenty books, and her work has been translated into English, German, and Italian. In 1990, she simultaneously won the poetry and short story categories of the Juegos Florales de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe. In 2000, she won the prestigious Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature for her life’s work. She is also one of the leading figures of Guatemalan and Central American feminism. She has lived her whole life in Guatemala. And one cannot say this lightly. She grew up during the Jorge Ubico dictatorship (1931–1944), admired how the Guatemalan Revolution toppled Ubico in 1944, thrived during the so-called Ten Years of Spring, lamented the 1954 CIA-backed coup that removed the democratically elected, progressive president Jacobo Árbenz, and witnessed the atrocities of the Civil War (1960–1996). Many of her friends and colleagues were killed during that time. Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and her dear friend, Luis de Lión, author of El tiempo principia en Xibalbá—considered one of the cornerstones of contemporary Central American literature. Even if she never picked up a rifle or joined the militarized resistance, her feminist struggle and intellectual defiance have influenced many generations.   

She’s not a cynic, though. Or bitter. She’s hopeful. “Even though we have a brute for president,” she says, “I believe in resisting.” And resisting, Ana María has done.

But as much as Ana María is grandmotherly and warm, as much as she’s a jokester and amicable, she is also analytical, astute, and disarmingly agile. She’s a force of nature, a rising tide, and an unmovable object. Her poetry is sensitive, electric, and subversive.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 27, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Anna Aresi, Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, and José García Escobar

Our wide-ranging literary dispatches this week cover protests, translations, and debuts.

This week’s dispatches report on a four-day literature festival in Italian-speaking Bellinzona in Switzerland, a new podcast dedicated exclusively to Guatemalan and Central American literature, as well as news of the arrest of journalist Hajar Raissouni in Morocco and a theatre group resisting such censorship and freedom of the press violation with a performance of Don Quixote.

Anna Aresi, Copy Editor, reporting from Switzerland

An interest in mapping (often the result of conquests and colonization) and remapping—rethinking what was erased and systematically left out in the mapping process—is at the core of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel. In Lost Children Archive, mapping is related to sound: “Focusing on sound forced me to hear as opposed to seeing, it forced me into a different rhythm. You cannot consume sound immediately,” she explains, “when focusing on sound, you have to sit with it, let it unfold.” It is within this rhythm, she adds, that English emerged as the language that was conducive to the writing of this novel, which she had begun writing in both English and Spanish simultaneously.

Luiselli reflects on this and other aspects of her writing in an intense conversation with Italian writer Claudia Durastanti, in the intimate setting of Bellinzona’s social theater. 

Every year, Bellinzona—the capital of Swiss Italophone Canton Ticino—hosts Babel Festival, a four-day event entirely dedicated to literature and translation. This year’s fourteenth edition, entitled “You will not speak my language,” explored the limits and boundaries of language and literature, as well as languages that are “imagined, invented, despised, censored, regional, silent, visual, and enigmatic.”

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“From a madhouse to a monastery”: Twenty-Five Years of Guatemala’s Magna Terra Editores

August 5, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

We turned into a McDonald’s of books . . . It was madness!

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Guatemala’s longest-lasting publishing house, Magna Terra Editores. Founded in November 1994 by poet and novelist Gerardo Guinea—and now run by him and his son Paolo—Magna Terra has published more than two thousand books and has propelled the careers of writers across three generations. As the press nears its bodas de plata, early this month I sat down with the two editors to talk about Magna Terra’s beginnings, the press’s many houses, and transitioning from a hectic McPress to a much more Zen indie house that boasts some of the best books produced in the country. Its author list is undoubtedly proof of this.

—José García Escobar

In the early 1990s, when Magna Terra was nothing more than a dream, its founder, Gerardo Guinea, and his family were exiled to Mexico City by the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). He was one of many. Other famed Guatemalan writers, such as Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Raúl Leiva, also chose to live abroad given the local political climate. After all, the government often persecuted writers. Otto René Castillo, Luis de Lión, and Alaíde Foppa are just a few of the many intellectuals the government and army killed during the war. While in Mexico, Gerardo had the chance to visit and become familiar with local publishing houses. He met with Joaquín Diez-Canedo of Joaquín Mortiz Editorial, now part of Grupo Planeta, and Carlos López of Editorial Praxis. As he watched the editors working, the books piling up on the shelves enthralled him. He wondered, as the talks of peace in Guatemala became more frequent, if he could create something similar at home. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

February 8, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Kelsey Woodburn, Lou Sarabadzic, and Paul M. Worley

Join as us we celebrate indigenous writers, intercultural connection, and the importance of linguistic diversity.

This week, we return with three dispatches exploring multicultural and multilingual connection. We begin with a reflection on the work of Humberto Ak’abal, an influential Indigenous poet who wrote in both K’iche’ Maya and Spanish. We also explore the multilayered dialogue between China and New York in the Hong Kong literary scene, and get an exciting firsthand account of the recent Creative Multilingualism conference in the UK.

 Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors-at-Large, reporting from Guatemala

As declared by the United Nations, 2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages. According to their website, of the 7,000 languages currently spoken on the planet, over 2,500 are currently endangered. In Mexico, the rest of Latin America, and around the world, many hope this global recognition will lead to wider acceptance of Indigenous languages, as well as to increased opportunities for their oral and written expression.

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In Conversation with Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez

March 15, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by José García Escobar

We mustn’t be allowed to be jailed by our own countries.

Last October, the Spanish publishing house Alfaguara put out Ya nadie llora por mí, the most recent novel from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer, Sergio Ramírez and sequel to his 2009 novel, El cielo llora por mí (The Sky Cries for Me). A couple of weeks later, the Spanish Ministry of Culture announced that Sergio was the winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most important literary award for Spanish-language writers. Other laureates include Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Sergio is the first Central American writer to receive this distinction. He has published around thirty books, two of which have been translated into English: Divine Punishment (McPherson & Company) and the 1998 Alfaguara Prize winning novel Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea (Curbstone Books).

Three months later, Sergio and I—his umpteenth interviewer since November—got together at a fancy hotel on the misty mountains of Guatemala City, hours before he presented Ya nadie llora por mí in SOPHOS bookstore. I imagined all the questions Sergio had answered during the past few months. What does it feel like to have won it? Where were you when you got the news? Can you give us a preview of your acceptance speech? I should ask him about his favorite Guatemalan dish, I thought, to shake things up.

Sergio is kind but equally incisive, serene, and voracious. He speaks with care and potency about Central American literature, being a writer, and Centro América Cuenta. Hosted in Nicaragua, this is the biggest literary festival of the region that seeks to strengthen Central American writers and bring them closer to the rest of Ibero-America. Sergio, with a cup of coffee in his hand, is also critical of the contaminated reality of his country. A reality from which his work often comes to life.

In Ya nadie llora por mí (Nobody cries for me anymore) inspector Dolores Morales has been discharged from the National Police, and he now works as a private investigator. He mostly handles cases about adultery for clients with no money. Then the disappearance of a millionaire’s daughter takes him out of his routine. In Sergio’s latest novel we also get to see how corruption and abuse of power underlie the revolutionary discourse of contemporary Nicaragua.

“As a citizen, I desire a different reality,” he says. “As a writer, I take advantage of it.”

Sergio is arguably the most important Central American writer today.

José García Escobar (JGE): What was it like to revisit detective Dolores Morales for your latest book? Did you have the story for Ya nadie llora por mí first, and then realized you needed Dolores to tell it? Or was it the other way around?

Sergio Ramírez (SR): I came up with the story first. I wanted to write about Nicaragua today, and for this, I needed a character like Dolores: a detective and former guerrilla. Noir fiction, or novela negra, as we call it, gives me the opportunity to look at the events I’m writing about from afar. With this distance I can add humor, irony. Also, given his background, this character helped work around that distance. Dolores is often bound by his ethic, a type of ethic he picked up from his years as a guerrillero; he uses that critical thought and critical distance for his work, but at the same time he’s always at risk of getting contaminated by that environment. He observes the situations as he would have in the past and is that moral nostalgia and critical distance that allows my character to lead the book.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 15, 2017  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Kelsey Woodburn, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, and Paul Worley

Your weekly literary news from around the world.

Our team is always keen to keep you up to speed on the most recent prizes, festivals, and publications regarding the most important writers around the world. With this in mind,  we are excited to bring you the latest news from our editors-at-large in Mexico, Central America and Indonesia. Stay tuned for next week! 

Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors-at-Large, reporting from Mexico: 

The Tsotsil Maya poetry and book arts collective Snichimal Vayuchil held a book presentation for its latest publication, Uni tsebetik, on November 30 at the La Cosecha Bookstore in San Cristobal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico. A collection of works by the group’s female members, the volume was introduced by the Tsotsil sculptor and multimedia artist Maruch Méndez and anthropologist Diane Rus. The event is part of a big month for the group, which includes the publication of their selected works translated into English, and a reading of works from Uni tsebetik at the Tomb of the Red Queen in the Maya archeological site of Palenque.

The same night, the State Center for Indigenous Languages, Arts, and Literature (CELALI) held a book presentation for its latest publication, Xch’ulel osil balamil, by poet and artist María Concepción Bautista Vázquez. The anthology Chiapas Maya Awakening contained her work in an English translation by Sean S. Sell, who was interviewed in Asymptote in April.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 27, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alice Inggs, José García Escobar, and Lara Norgaard

Your news from the literary world, all in one place.

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us up to speed on literary happenings in South Africa, Central America, and Brazil.

Alice Inggs, Editor-at-Large, South Africa: 

South Africa has eleven official languages, a fact not often evident in local literary awards and publications, which generally skew towards English and Afrikaans as mediums. However, the announcement of the 2017 South African Literary Awards (SALA) has done much to change this perception.

In addition to including five contributors to narratives in the extinct !Xam and !Kun languages (drawn from the Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd archives), a biography in Sepedi (Tšhutšhumakgala by Moses Shimo Seletisha) and poetry collections in isiXhosa (Iingcango Zentliziyo by Simphiwe Ali Nolutshungu) and the Kaaps dialect (Hammie by Ronelda S. Kamfer) have been shortlisted.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

September 29, 2017  |  in Weekly Roundup  |  by Flora Brandl, Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, and José García Escobar

Traveling the world, one book at a time!

Your weekly shot of global literary news is here! Today we travel to Austria, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Morocco to find out about the latest prizes, performances and literary festivals. 

Contributor Flora Brandl reporting from Austria: 

In the southern state of Styria, the oldest Austrian festival for contemporary art, Steirischer Herbst (Styrian Autumn), recently opened with a powerful speech by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. Styrian-born, Haas is one of the most renowned figures of the international New Music scene and currently teaches at Columbia University.

In his opening speech, Haas reflected on the dynamics of the remnants of Nazism and the burgeoning avant-garde art scene in Styria. While Nazism was always at the forefront of fighting so-called “degenerate art”—“for they knew: art is dangerous for them”—it also provided fertile grounds for a creative form of resistance: “We [artists] were spurred by the pain and the rage and the grief,” Haas recounted. He ended with an invocation that the role of artists today is to “spread the virus of humanitarianism” in the wake of a worldwide rise of fundamentalism. A political speech with a very personal note, the entire speech can be read in the original German here.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

July 21, 2017  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García, Kelsey Woodburn, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Paul Worley, and Valent Mustamin

Join us for a spin across the literary world!

Another week full of exciting news! Paul and Kelsey bring us up to speed on what’s happening in Mexico and Guatemala. We also have José García providing us with all the updates about Central American literary festivals you could wish for. Finally, we are delighted to welcome aboard our new team-members, Valent and Norman, who share news from Indonesia. 

Paul Worley and Kelsey Woodbury, Editors-at-Large for Mexico, report:

In conjunction with partners such as the Forum of Indigenous Binational Organizations (FIOB) and the Indigenous Community Leadership (CIELO), the LA Public Library in California, US, recently announced that it will host the second annual Indigenous Literature Conference on July 29 and 30. As stated on Facebook, the conference’s “first day will be dedicated to the indigenous literature from (the Mexican state of) Oaxaca,” with “the second (being) broader in scope.” Among those slated to participate are the Oakland, California-based Zapotec writer and artist Lamberto Roque Hernández, Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo, and Me’phaa poet Hubert Matiuwaa, whose Xtámbaa was recently reviewed here in Asymptote.

On July 14 in Guatemala, K’iche’/Kaqchikel Maya poet Rosa Chávez announced the publication of a new poetry fanzine entitled AB YA YA LA. Limited to 40 in number, each copy is unique and contains different details.

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