Posts featuring Tahira Naqvi

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Rubén López and Suhasini Patni

The latest in literary news from Central America and India!

In this week’s round-up of the latest in global literary news, we are celebrating award honourees and writers redefining their national literatures by working through the art of translation. From keeping memory alive and imagining the future, these are some of the texts that connect past, present, and future.

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

The Guatemalan writer Gloria Hernández was awarded with the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature on November 3. The prize, founded in 1988, is given annually to Guatemalan writers whose career has had an impact in the international landscape. It includes a monetary compensation of Q50,000 (USD4,700), a diploma, and a medal. Additionally, one of the awarded writer’s books is reedited and published.

Hernández was the seventh woman in history to receive the prize. In her speech, she devoted the award to “the female and male writers fallen performing writing and critical thinking against the enemies of freedom, art, and light,” mentioning several martyrs from the Guatemalan state terror of the 80s, such as María López Valdizón, Alaíde Foppa, Otto René Castillo, Irma Flaquer, Roberto Obregón, and Luis de Lión. She also talked about the role of women in storytelling, as they are the ones that keep the memory of the clan alive. “That memory which was my grandmothers is now living in my mother.” Long an an advocate for children’s literature, she additionally stated that “In the face of ignorance and foolishness that considers children’s literature a minor genre, I only smile and continue with my work.”

The nineteenth edition of the International Book Fair in Guatemala (FILGUA) is close; thousands of writers, editors, scholars, and artists from a wide range of disciplines will gather from November 24 to December 4. There will be more than a hundred book releases, several contests, conferences, and workshops. The fair will resume its face-to-face format after COVID restrictions, but will also keep a virtual schedule, and the organizers hope to reach an audience of 2.4 million people there.

This year, Korea will be the honored guest, and its embassy will hold several activities like Korean writing workshops, a traditional costumes exhibition, a taekwondo demonstration, a Korean art show, and a K-pop concert. The inaugural conference is entitled “The relation between Korea and Latin America,” and will be presented by Juan Felipe López Aymes, a scholar from the Regional Center of Multidisciplinary Research form Universidad Autónoma de México. READ MORE…

In Review: Ismat Chughtai’s Quit India

October 19, 2017  |  in Reviews  |  by Aamer Hussein

This varied and beautifully calibrated volume succeeds in sustaining the legacy of one of India’s most radical twentieth-century authors.

Twenty-six years after her death, Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) is one of Urdu’s most famous short story writers; among her immediate contemporaries, only Saadat Hasan Manto’s reputation matches hers, and we can confidently say that she has no successor.

The Quilt, the first of her works to be presented to international audiences in the year of her death, was a collection of her short fiction. The title story, which had a lesbian theme, created a scandal and attracted the ire of colonial censors when it was first published in the early forties. Other stories in the volume proved the author to be a storyteller of the finest calibre. In 1995, more than half a century after its original debut, a translation of her magnificent feminist bildungsroman, The Crooked Line (1942), where the heroine’s life paralleled her own, pre-empted and fictionalised many of the ideas from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Although it is still in print in the US with the pioneering Feminist Press, the UK edition has been discontinued. Several more translations of her stories, essays, memoirs, and long and short fiction, accompanied by a slew of biographical and critical studies, have enhanced her reputation year by year and made her one of the most translated writers across the subcontinent. However, they have only been published in India and Pakistan and have not been picked up by Anglo-American publishers.

Chughtai’s fiction ranges from stories for children and reminiscences of her friends and family, to the harrowing low life in Bombay’s slums and drug-fuelled high life in the city’s gaudy film world, to a novel about Islam’s first martyrs—a choice that surprises admirers of this iconic socialist-feminist icon. But even today some critics claim that The Quilt overshadows her other fictions and use the early stories to measure her later work. Others, including myself, would say this is grossly untrue: Ismat, though she preferred to write about what she knew best, was versatile within her chosen range of subversive kitchen sink drama and outspoken social satire, as we can see from the several renditions into English of all her major works by Tahira Naqvi, her most frequent translator, which are published in Delhi by the pioneering Women Unlimited (Penguin India also publishes a handful of translations by Mohammad Asaduddin).

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