Posts featuring Olga Tokarczuk

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 4, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Mexico, North Macedonia, and the Philippines!

In this week’s round-up of literary news from around the world, our editors report on an exciting translation-centric colloquium in Mexico, a prestigious award going to a new translation of one of North Macedonia’s most canonical novels, and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s spotlighting of the Philippines in its 2025 edition—a choice that has met resistance from local publishers due to the fair’s Zionist sympathies.

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

They say that no matter what you do, there is always a saint from which you can ask for help. In the case of translators, that is Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the Council of Trent, his translation became the official Latin Bible in the western hemisphere.

With this in mind, the fourth Coloquio de Traducción Literaria San Jerónimo (Saint Jerome Literary Translation Colloquium) took place last week in Veracruz, Mexico. The event was dedicated to fully immersing participants in the art of translation and fostering discussions on what it truly means to translate. It was organized by the Culture Office of Veracruz and the independent publishing company Aquelarre Ediciones, which also sponsors a prize dedicated to literary translation.

Among the participants were notable figures such as Fabián Espejel, the recent winner of the Bellas Artes Margarita Michelena Literary Translation Award; Mario Murguía, who won the same prize last year; José Miguel Barajas, the translator of Mallarmé into Spanish; and José Luis Rivas, a poet who has translated works by Derek Walcott, John Donne, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot. READ MORE…

Louisiana Literature Festival: Portraits of Language in the Flux of Loss

August 28, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Just beyond the white backdrop of the stage, a multiplicity of silent, unspoken languages lingers.

From August 17 to 20, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Zealand, Denmark, hosted the twelfth edition of the annual Louisiana Literature Festival. Since 2010, on the lawns parenthesized between Louisiana’s wings and the Øresund Strait, authors from around the world—including Adonis, César Aira, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, Mariana Enríquez, and Itō Hiromi—have participated in readings, interviews, and conversations. The festival has also regularly hosted the most exciting names in Danish literature, such as Naja Marie Aidt, Dorthe Nors, and Signe Gjessing. This year, Asymptote’s Assistant Editor Michelle Chan Schmidt was in attendance, and reports now on the festival’s fascinating intersections, discussions, and performances. 

The Louisiana Literature Festival has no theme, and as such, widely varying discussions of language and writing recur across the four days. In this year’s line-up of forty authors, sixteen write in languages other than Danish. Most of them are authors of English or Swedish, and thus there are only a few individuals representing other languages: Haruki Murakami in Japanese, Constance Debré in French, Claudia Durastanti in Italian, Eva Menasse in German, Camila Sosa Villada in Spanish, and Fríða Ísberg and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in Icelandic. Despite the limitations of this Euro-heavy selection, the festival’s vibrant dialogues present studies across language—including that of signs, of family, and of binaries in societies marked by syntaxes that divide rather than combine. In an interview, the Irish English-language writer Claire Keegan says that “narrative feeds on loss,” and this idea of loss feeds back across the festival’s symphony of languages in conversation.

Icelandic:

During an interview with her Danish translator, Erik Skyum-Nielsen, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir states that her favorite childhood books were dictionaries. Each letter was a new chapter in a book of thirty-two chapters—a history of a language “in the margins” of global literature. Writers like Ólafsdóttir and Fríða Ísberg, as well as their translators across most European languages (with the addition of Arabic and Turkish in the case of Ísberg’s novel, The Mark), are instrumental in not only the continuance of Icelandic literature, but also in diversifying Icelandic modes of expression in a language anchored in the legacy of the sagas.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 14, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Julia Sherwood, Sofija Popovska, and Wambua Muindi

Literary news from Poland, Kenya, and North Macedonia!

In this week of updates on world literature, our Editors-at-Large bring news on an upcoming film adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s The Peasants, a monthly calendar highlighting African writers and literatures, and the most recent winner of the esteemed Golden Wreath in North Macedonia! From Asymptote contributors’ recent accolades to a brief look into Vlada Urošević’s poetry, read on to learn more!

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

A film version of the modern Polish classic, The Peasants by Nobel-prize winning author Władysław Reymont, will hopefully hit the screens later this year, following a lengthy delay caused by COVID and the war in Ukraine. Those familiar with the Gdańsk-based filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman will know that this won’t be your run-of-the-mill costume drama; the film uses the same painstaking hand-painted technique that the team pioneered in their earlier acclaimed short film Loving Vincent. Originally scheduled for release in 2022, the production of The Peasants came to a standstill, as twenty-three of the artists working on the film were Ukrainian and based in a studio in Kyiv. Interestingly, it is the film that we have to thank for the new English edition of The Peasants; since the existing translation published in 1924 was rather outdated, Welchman commissioned Anna Zaranko, winner of the 2020 Found in Translation Prize, to translate a couple of chapters for him and subsequently managed to persuade Penguin Classics to publish the complete novel, which is nearly 1000 pages long. 

In 2021, one year after Zaranko won it, the Found In Translation Award went to Ewa Małachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas for their new English version of Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s 1932 satirical novel The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma. They discuss the novel with Daniel Goldfarb in the first episode of his series of Encounters with Polish Literature. Now in its third year, this consistently illuminating series of monthly videos that Goldfarb has been producing for the Polish Institute in New York has clocked up twenty-six episodes so far. In Episode 2, which focuses on Andrzej Sapkowski, Goldfarb is joined by David French, who has translated six out of the fantasy writer’s eight novels in the Witcher series into English, as well as all three parts of his Hussite Trilogy. In the most recent Episode 3, Goldfarb and the scholar and translator Benjamin Paloff introduce Leopold Tyrmand, author of one of the great Warsaw novels and popularizer of jazz in mid-twentieth-century Poland, a transformative figure in Polish culture between the death of Joseph Stalin and the post-Stalin thaw.

There have been nominations and prizes galore for Asymptote contributors: Marta Dziurosz has won the First Translation Prize of the UK Society of Authors 2022 for her ‘truly astounding translation’ from the Polish of Marcin Wicha’s Things I didn’t Throw Out, sharing the prize with editors Željka Marošević and Sophie Missing. Mikołaj Grynberg’s heartbreaking collection of short stories, I’d Like To Say Sorry But There’s No One To Say Sorry To, translated by Sean Gasper Bye, has been named a finalist of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature (the winner to be announced on September 12). Olga Tokarczuk’s monumental The Books of Jacob in Jennifer Croft’s translation finds itself on the shortlist of the 2023 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literary Prize alongside fellow Polish author Maciej Hen and Anna Blasiak, translator of his book According to Her (see interview). 

And finally, if you are a writer or translator with at least one published book, are currently working on a writing project, are interested in learning more about the Polish literary community, and have a connection with any UNESCO City of Literature outside of Poland, don’t miss the opportunity to apply for a two-month literary residency in Kraków (July 1 to August 31, 2023). The deadline for applications is April 23.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 31, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Meghan Racklin, and Thuy Dinh

The latest literary news from the United States, Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora, and the Philippines!

This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!

Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States

Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.

Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”

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Breaking Down the 2022 National Book Award Longlist

September 17, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

A selection to whet your appetite for translated literature!

Now in its fifth year, this rebooted annual award for translated literature deserves a serious look. How does its newly released longlist compare to the Booker International counterpart?

Unlike its Booker International counterpart, works from European languages dominated, continuing the trend from previous years. Previous winner (and frequent Asymptote contributor) Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth was one of the only two titles from Asia.

Order a copy of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.

As with the 2020 selections, only one title appeared in both the Booker International and the National Book Award longlists, and it was an Olga Tokarczuk novel translated by Jennifer Croft. We hope it will be third-time lucky for this illustrious duo!

Order a copy of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.

New Directions is the only publisher to have two titles on the longlist. Aside from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which our Criticism Editor Barbara Halla chose as her clear winner from last year’s Booker International longlist, is also nominated.

Click here to order a copy of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken.

Incidentally, Aitken, who is the only longlisted translator to ever be nominated for his work on different authors, was interviewed in our pages last year. This year, we sat down with Mónica Ojeda, whom interviewer Rose Bialer calls “one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today.” Her Jawbone made the cut:


Order a copy of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.

We hope we’ve whetted your appetite with these selections. Take a look at the full longlist here! Oh, and by the way, we may receive a small commission for your purchase(s), which will go toward supporting our advocacy for a more inclusive world literature. Other ways to sustain our mission include signing up as a masthead member, or joining our Book Club!

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 29, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Julia Sherwood, and Peera Songkünnatham

Literary news from Thailand, Poland, and the Philippines!

In this week’s collection of literary news from around the world, our editors report on political dissident writers in Thailand, a literary festival in Poland, and prizes for writers in the Philippines. Read on to find out more!

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

Activists critical of the Thai establishment have to contend with not only the threat of royal defamation laws but also charges of mental illness. No one knows this more intimately than writer, translator, and bookseller Small Bandhit Aniya: in 1965, he was thrown in a psychiatric hospital by police after he camped outside the Russian Embassy in Bangkok and wrote “It is better to die in Moscow than to stay in Thailand” on the embassy walls in chalk. In 1975, he was charged with lèse-majesté for a booklet lambasting Haile Selassie I, the emperor of Ethiopia, but escaped imprisonment due to being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This professional-opinion-turned-legal-fact would become the saving strategy for his lawyers in subsequent decades, most recently in 2014—to the dismay of the man himself, who insists he’s perfectly sane.

Starting this week, a literary translation initiative is putting a spotlight on Bandhit’s work along with the voices of other allegedly insane subjects in the kingdom. Under the theme “Madman, Madwoman, Madhuman,” the website Sanam Ratsadon released an excerpt from Bandhit’s autobiographical novel, in which he plays with the idea that he may indeed be insane. Rather than rejecting the diagnosis outright, as he has in his public statements, Bandhit takes the strange route of fictionalizing madness. “There is no doubt that I am mentally ill,” he writes. “Many things I have done in the past and will do in the future clearly signal that I am a psycho, the kind with paranoid schizophrenia.” Is this satire? In any case, this is a literary experiment that has yet to be fully appreciated and properly interpreted in Thailand. May the world be introduced to him, then.

Meanwhile, the short story “Sound of Laughter” by Mutita Ubekka, published as part of the same initiative, questions the self-help, positive-thinking mindset of the Thai public health sector and its allies through the perspective of a woman who is pushed to the brink of suicide by the country’s sociopolitical conditions, like many others in the “Sufferers Association of Thailand.” The story was originally written for a 2020 creative writing contest under the sunny theme of “Day of Suffering That Passed” as part of the project “Read to Heal the Heart.” Seeing through it all, the madwoman discovers her own way of overcoming suffering—through the Jokeresque laughter in a therapist’s office.

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On Women Who Refuse to Die: Who Will Win the 2022 Booker International?

May 25, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

What worlds have we been missing in prohibiting or dismissing women’s writing?

As we countdown to the 2022 Booker International Prize announcement on May 26, the contenders for the award offer new indications and perspectives by which to think about the world of literature and translation. In the following essay, our resident Booker expert Barbara Halla considers the digressive and variegated realm of “women’s writing”—that five out of the six titles on the shortlist were works by women authors is both evidence of the work’s scope and diversity, and also an overwhelming rejection of that old and tired idea: that women’s writing is simply of any gender-specific experience.

Since 2019, I have been relentlessly punished by the memory of this essay by an Albanian critic who argued in favor of the inherent superiority of men’s writing. His reasoning went like this: men write to triumph over life, whereas women write to survive. And for that very reason, the author claimed, men’s literature has universal appeal, as men are able to overcome the limitations of their own lived experiences and perspectives, while women’s writing focuses only on their painfully limited (i.e., domestic) existence.

My frustration with this article was compounded by finding its logic replicated elsewhere, in other books about the history of women in literature, and even during a conversation with another Albanian male writer a few months after reading that article. In the ensuing Q&A, the writer in question issued a complacent mea culpa about his lack of interest in women writers—he simply found their writing too limited and introspective. Of course, this is understandable. After all, it is easier to relate to Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei or Goethe’s Faust when one spends their days in the battlefield before making a deal with the devil and are whisked away for a night of debauchery with witches. After all, this is what “real” life is actually about, and it’s not like men ever write about minor concerns like marriage or childcare.

I’m being facetious, but this understanding of literature is pernicious—this desire to determine artistic value along essentialist gender lines. It also seeks to explain the existence of global and local literary canons as meritocratic, rather than the result of conscious policy decisions that have contributed to the erasure and devaluing of women’s writing. I was wondering about this argument as I made my way through the six books shortlisted for the Booker International 2022—five of which were written by women and published in the past fifteen years in South Korea, India, Poland, and Argentina. To be straightforward to the point of being trite: these five books undermine the notion that there is anything akin to a universal “women’s writing.” READ MORE…

The International Booker Comes Home

April 4, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Barbara Halla

There is much to be said about the (fleeting) feeling of accomplishment in seeing a favorite longlisted.

With the upcoming announcement of the Booker International shortlist on April 7, our in-house Booker expert is here to take you through the impressive longlist, discuss the intersection between closed-door judging and fervent public online discourses, and the increased visibility of the translator in bringing these vital titles into the English-language sphere, Read on to find out more!

The International Booker Prize, like a number of other British literary prizes, has become a unifying topic amidst a very active online community. Twitter is the kind of place where bubbles of connections and affinities naturally form, but participating in this nexus simultaneously fosters a detached sense of irony that makes any earnest acknowledgment to it a touch mortifying. I am willing to take the risk of too much earnestness today because, for the sake of honesty, my relationship to the International Booker would not be the same without this community.

I became a regular follower of the prize after attending a meeting with the judges at Shakespeare and Company in Paris back in 2016 (a discussion I left certain in the knowledge that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, was going to win, as it did). But it was entering in conversation with other readers and translators through Twitter that made the International Booker an event that I await impatiently every March. We make a friendly race out of reading the entire longlist, and debates about the merits of each selection get unreasonably heated, as we work to change the minds of others about the books we love—or even loath at times. Not to mention that I would be very happy not to have the “what constitutes nonfiction” debate again in my lifetime, which was in full swing both last year, with the longlisting of In Memory of Memory and The War of the Poor, and in 2019 when The Years was shortlisted.

Perhaps more importantly, being part of this community has shaped the approach I take the reading (and reviewing) the list. Thanks to it, I am constantly aware of the labor that goes into each book, not merely the translation but the efforts by the translators themselves, often acting as both agent and publicist. For instance, when Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker in 2018, Jennifer Croft had spent a decade advocating for it to be published. Furthermore, participating even somewhat actively in the discussion happening on places like Twitter is to be aware of the uneven dynamics of the publishing world. Much has rightfully been said about the International Booker’s Eurocentrism (which this year’s longlist provides a refreshing break from), but at the same time, as an online participant in these communities, you see in real time that the Booker is probably replicating trends that exist within publishing at large. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Erica X Eisen, Julia Sherwood, and Lee Yew Leong

In which we discuss the International Booker Prize longlist and bring you literary news from Poland and Uzbekistan!

This week, our editors from around the world discuss the 2022 International Booker longlist (released just yesterday), the Polish literary world’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, and literary nationalism in Uzbekistan. Read on to find out more!

Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2022 International Booker Prize landed yesterday and we’re chuffed to see so many of our past contributors (20!), former team members (five!), and Book club titles (two!) on it! We’re especially thrilled for Anton Hur, who debuted in a big way by making the cover of our Fall 2016 edition with his translation of Jung Young Su’s “Aficionados” (we are proud to have played a small role in ”changing his life,” as he himself attests). Hur has not one but two titles on the 13-book list—a feat which, as far as we know, has never been accomplished before in the (admittedly short) history of the International Booker Prize. You can find his very smart metafictional essay on translating Bora Chung from our Winter 2021 issue here (accompanied by a translation into the Korean by Chung herself!); Hur also facilitates Rose Bialer’s interview with Sang Young Park here (both Chung and Park appear respectively with Cursed Bunny and Love in a Big City).

In stark contrast to last year’s longlist, which saw only one work from Asia included, this year was a bumper year for Asian representation, with five titles—among these, nominees Norman Erikson Pasaribu and translator Tiffany Tsao also first appeared together in Asymptote (read their debut in English here). We extend our warmest congratulations to editor-at-large David Boyd, whose co-translation, with Samuel Bett, of Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven—Kawakami’s inclusion this year makes up for the glaring omission of Breasts and Eggs last year—is also nominated. Before we let you check out the list on your own, we note, with no small measure of delight, that Phenotypes, our Book Club pick for January 2022, and After the Sun, our Book Club pick for August 2021, were also selected for the longlist, proving that joining our Book Club is one of the best ways to encounter tomorrow’s prizewinners today. Find our interviews with the two respective author-and-translator duos here (Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn) and here (Jonas Eika and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Best of luck to all nominees—and may the worthiest pair (or trio) win!

Erica X Eisen, Blog Editor, reporting on Uzbekistan

The month of February saw celebrations in honor of the 581st birthday of the poet Alisher Navoi, a key figure in the history of Central Asian literature who was born in 1441 in what was then the Timurid Empire. While festivities occurred in several countries of the former Soviet Union, they were most pronounced in Uzbekistan, where Navoi’s work is seen as foundational for the country’s national literature. In various parts of the country, admirers of the poet held readings of his ghazals and reflected on his life and legacy.

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Describing the Entire World: On Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob

February 16, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Tokarczuk does not glorify the past, but neither does she offer us the comforting illusion that we have left its barbarism behind.

Olga Tokarczuk has long been recognized in Poland as one of the most important authors working today, but it is only in the last few years that she has received her due recognition in the English-speaking world. The course of her rise to fame in English has been in some ways unexpected, beginning as it did with one of her more experimental fictions, Flights, which is also among her longer works. Although this seems to bode well for her continued success, it is in some ways unfortunate that Flights was the first of her novels to receive such attention, because it may give readers the wrong impression: Tokarczuk’s work, though ambitious and wonderfully complex, is in fact best characterized by an extraordinary vivacity and approachability.

That this grace and elegance can also be appreciated by Anglophone readers is due, in part, to the brilliance of Tokarczuk’s translators, and the particular genius of Jennifer Croft is once again on display in The Books of Jacob. Croft beautifully captures the distinct quality of Tokarczuk’s prose: the lightness, the playful curiosity, the lyricism. This is harder than one might think: I translated a few lines of The Books of Jacob myself for an academic essay I wrote on the novel, and it is humbling to compare my version to hers. As Croft recently explained in an essay on the process of translating the novel, part of the trick is managing word order, a complex phenomenon in Polish that, if rendered too faithfully in English, makes for an awkwardness that is utterly alien to Tokarczuk’s style. To get her right, it is necessary to take some liberties, and it requires a truly gifted translator to find the right balance.

A big part of what distinguishes Tokarczuk’s work is its spell-binding immersiveness. Many of her novels, like the much earlier Primeval and Other Times and House of Day, House of Night, have a fairy-tale quality (one that has much in common with the works of magical realism so popular in the 1990s), produced in part by her fondness for interweaving notes of magic or mysticism but also more generally by her narrators’ sense of wide-eyed wonder at the world. The Books of Jacob is very characteristic in this regard, particularly in its interest in the occult and otherworldly. At the opening of the novel, we meet Yente as she awakens on her deathbed and suddenly floats above the scene, viewing everything from on high. “And this is how it is now, how it will be: Yente sees all.” And so the story begins, establishing a perspective that hovers between life and death, outside of time and space, a striking combination of detachment and sensuous detail. At one moment, it ponders the conventions of geographical borders; at another, it notes the particular scent of a sweaty body.

But against expectation, Yente is not the novel’s narrator, nor even the book’s focal point, though she reappears occasionally to survey the scene and meditate on the vagaries of human designs and plans. Instead, the novel moves among a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own wonderfully idiosyncratic set of concerns and interests. There are the various members of the Shorr family (it is they who inadvertently make Yente immortal, having attempted only to keep her alive long enough that her death wouldn’t ruin ruin the wedding they are hosting.) There is the priest and encyclopedia author Benedict Chmielowski, who dreams of describing the entire world, and his pen-pal and aspiring poet, the noblewoman Elżbieta Drużbacka. There is the doctor Asher Rubin, whose cosmopolitan interests in European culture and philosophy draw him gradually away from the Jewish community. And one of my personal favorites, Moliwda, a lonely, wandering Polish nobleman who moves to Turkey, giving himself over to various utopian experiments in search of a place where he will belong. From these bits and pieces of the various characters’ lives, gradually, a larger story emerges.

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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 8, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar, Kristina Tatarian, and MARGENTO

The latest in global literary news from Ukraine, Guatemala, and Belgium!

The naming of Abdulrazak Gurnah as our latest Nobel laureate in Literature is what’s topping headlines around the world this week, but there’s plenty more happening outside of the Swedish Academy. Our editors on the ground is bringing news of multi-media literary festivals, architecturally transformative contemporary art, Ukrainian translation forums, and the passing of a beloved Guatemalan writer. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brussels

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest was hardly over when another literature festival was announced in Europe’s capital: Les Voix en Ville (Voices in the City), organized by Lettres en Voix. This year’s edition featured mostly collaborative projects involving writers, musicians, and filmmakers presenting concerts, readings, workshops, and “cinematic poems.” The venues were as diverse as cathedrals, museums, theaters, pubs, and public squares, while the works presented were more often than not site-specific. Maud Vanhauwaert, for instance, after recently receiving ovations at Planetarium Poetry Fest, participated by reading an “Ode to the Socio-cultural Worker” at the legendary literary cafe La Fleur en Papier Doré. The poem culminated in a work that went beyond the text per se, resulting in a video of the reading which featured images of the venue and a music soundtrack—an illustration in and of itself of the many “workers” who had contributed from behind the scenes.

In the meantime, Brussels’ literary and arts scene is frantically resurfacing from the lockdown. Among the 300 exhibiting artists, 150 workshops, 100 animations, and “concerts, live, dance, street art, performance, and literature” events inundating Ixelles (the arts quarter of Brussels), there was also a “coup de coeur” (heartthrob, sudden crush) exhibition at the animated Demeuldre art gallery. Among the highlights was Bert Mertens, a senior artist with a fresh eye for estranging details and collaged panoramas who mesmerized the visitors from the moment they entered with the hyperrealist light radiating from his paintings. The diversity of forms and approaches of other artists—ranging from graphic art to photography to sculpture to installations to comic strips—also succeeding captivating one’s attention. Still, what really overwhelmed the audience and kept visitors wandering the upper floors and attic of the 19th-century china shop for hours on end was the Talk C.E.C. exhibition, which reunited dozens of artists from France, Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere in a joint project converting the place—its architecture, its interior and exterior walls, the literal holes in the walls, the cafe, kitchen, and even the bathrooms—into a powerful collective manifesto revisiting and fusing sacred traditions, unorthodox spiritualism, and transgressive eroticism from an urgently environmentalist and culturally inclusive perspective.

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

As summer ended festively with the thirtieth annual Independence day in Ukraine, a succession of literary events showcased new national literatures and opened up conversations about the changing trends in translation. Not long ago, the Ukrainian Book Institute established Translate Ukraine, the first translation initiative of its kind to be sponsored by the government, and which has helped literary festivals turn their focus towards an international audience. As a result, a record number of Ukrainian titles were translated into English in the past five years. M any Ukrainian publishers have noted that international literary festivals are not the only places to showcase the wealth of contemporary literature available in the country, stressing the importance of supporting local literary forums to better promote Ukrainian letters globally. Earlier this year, the famous literary festival Kyiv Book Arsenal hosted publisher B2B meetings to facilitate international translation deals and pitch the best of Ukrainian literature to publishers. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 2, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Julia Sherwood

The latest news from Poland and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news from Poland and Central America. In Poland, the life and work of the renowned poet Adam Zagajewski has been celebrated after he passed away, while Olga Tokarczuk has published a children’s book; and in Central America, a new literary magazine has been launched to feature LGBTQ+ voices. Read on to find out more! 

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

The literary community not just in Poland but around the world has been mourning the loss of  the great Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski, who passed away in Kraków on 21 March, aged seventy-five. The winner of numerous literary awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2004) and the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize (2014), Zagajewski was appointed a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 2016. His 2002 poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” (translated by Clare Kavanagh) captured the sombre mood after 9/11. In his final interview, published last summer on culture.pl, he defined poetry as follows:

I’m partial to a very old definition articulated by an Italian Jesuit poet and philosopher at the turn of the 18th century: “Poetry is a dream made in the presence of reason.” I adore that, as it contains two elements—something wild connected to imagination and dreams, yet still kept in order by reason. A sort of dialogue with the imagination.

Although he had been mooted as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years, Zagajewski never received that accolade. Olga Tokarczuk, who won the prize in 2018, and has “always held that writers don’t really have biographies, and that the best way to find out about them is to read their books,” was nevertheless compelled to write a biographical essay, which has recently appeared on the Nobel Prize website (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones,) in which she tackles the subject with her customary warmth and originality.

Tokarczuk has also branched out into picture books with Lost Soul, a “meditation on the fullness of life,” illustrated by Joanna Concejo and also translated by Lloyd-Jones. The translator is also behind the English version of the delightful second outing of the matronly sleuth, Zofia Turbotynska, in Karolina and the Torn Curtain, a retro crime story set in the 1890s in Kraków, penned by Maryla Szymiczkowa, a.k.a. the writer-translator duo Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński. For further details of these Polish books and more, due to appear in English 2021, look no further than this helpful list compiled by culture.pl.

The latest threats to freedom of expression in Poland are summed up in a report by constitutional lawyer and former journalist Anna Wójcik. They relate to a 1,700-page anthology on the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland during the Second World War, Night Without End. The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, published in 2018. A Warsaw district court ruled in February that its authors, prominent Holocaust researchers Professor Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa and Professor Barbara Engelking, who heads the Polish Center for Holocaust Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, must publicly apologize for statements alleging that the mayor of the village of Malinowo shared responsibility for the death of Jews there in 1943 at the hands of Nazi Germans and that he robbed a Jewish woman of her possessions.

To end on a positive note: in December 2020, writer, publisher, and head of the Pogranicze (Borderland) Foundation, Krzysztof Czyżewski, was awarded the Ambassador of New Europe prize by the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk and the Eastern European College in Wrocław for his book W stronę Xenopolis (Towards Xenopolis), while Szczepan Twardoch’s The King of Warsaw (trans. Sean Gasper Bye) was longlisted on 11 March for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize 2021.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Last month saw the launch of a new arts, culture, and literary magazine in Central America: Revista Impronta, which will focus on the work and voices of the LGBTQ+ community in the region. Made possible by the effort of journalist Daniel Villatoro, Revista Impronta has since shared work by Central American artists such as rapper Rebeca Lane, writer David Ulloa, poet Roy G. Guzmán, fashion designer Manuel de la Cruz, and comic book artist Breena Núñez.

Additionally, authors, bookstores, and festivals across Latin America recently came together to honor the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, who would have turned 100 this year. Monterroso is most famous for books such as La oveja negra y demás fábulas (The Black Sheep and Other Fables), and for his story “El dinosaurio” (“The Dinosaur“). Augusto Monterroso was also awarded the Juan Rulfo Award in 1996, the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 1997, and the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature in 2000 and is regarded as one of Guatemala’s finest authors.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 5, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jiaoyang Li, and Julia Sherwood

This week's latest literary news from Poland, Sweden, and China!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Poland, Sweden, and China. In Poland, Anna Zaranko’s translation of Kornel Filipowicz was awarded the 2020 Found in Translation Award; in Sweden, an anthology will soon be released of writings on coronavirus, featuring many international writers including Olga Tokarczuk; and in China, bookshops are responding to challenging times by moving to online engagement with their reading community. Read on to find out more! 

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

Since she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, Wisława Szymborska’s poetry has been appreciated around the world, while the work of her partner of twenty-three years, the master story teller Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990) remained largely unknown outside Poland. Fortunately, this has changed with The Memoir of an Anti-hero by Kornel Filipowicz, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2019 in a translation by Anna Zaranko. On March 31, Zaranko received the 2020 Found in Translation Award in recognition of her “quietly understated yet immensely evocative rendering of Filipowicz’s prose, which The Sunday Times’s David Mills described as ‘provocative, troubling, awkward, a proper classic.’”

On May 27, the winner of the eleventh Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage, awarded by the City of Warsaw, was announced online (the fourteen-minute video of the ceremony has English subtitles). The prize went to Katarzyna Kobylarczyk for Strup. Hiszpania rozdrapuje rany (The Scab. Spain Scratches its Wounds, 2019 Wydawnictwo Czarne), a book about grappling with historical memory. The jury praised it as “a fascinating story that blends the nightmarish and the grotesque, in which reality reveals its metaphorical dimension. It is proof that one can create real literature relying solely on facts.” READ MORE…