Posts featuring Yeng Pway Ngon

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 29, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kwan Ann Tan and Shawn Hoo

The latest news from Singapore and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you news from Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore, the literary community has been remembering the achievements of eminent Chinese-language writer Yeng Pway Ngon after he passed away. While in Malaysia, a new anthology has been published, which has collected writing about the lockdown. Read on to find out more! 

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore

On January 10, the literary community in Singapore and abroad mourned the passing of eminent Chinese-language writer 英培安 Yeng Pway Ngon. Winner of the Cultural Medallion, SEA Write Award, and four Singapore Literature Prizes, Yeng’s writing spans poetry (his latest collection is 石头 Stone), novels (including award-winning 骚动 Unrest and 画室 Art Studio), radio plays, and essays in the manner of Lu Xun. To fully appreciate Yeng’s contribution to Singapore’s cultural landscape, one must also look to his role as a bookseller, having founded two iconic Chinese-language bookstores, Vanguard Books and Grassroots Book Room, that have indelibly shaped the reading culture. In an online literary memorial service on January 15, organised by Grassroots that was attended by more than 170 participants, former students, friends, writers, and cultural workers recited some of Yeng’s verses and looked back at his public and private life. The singularity of Yeng’s influence on Singapore literature has led the Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao to pose the question of finding the next Yeng Pway Ngon. As we remember this acclaimed cultural figure, read a play by Yeng (translated by Jeremy Tiang) from the January 2014 issue of Asymptote.

In other news, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize 2021 announced its winners on January 16 in a virtual ceremony. For the first time in the prize’s five-year history, the prize has been awarded to not one but two novels. The winning manuscripts are Sebastian Sim’s And the Award Goes to Sally Bang! and Meihan Boey’s The Formidable Miss Cassidy. They each receive SGD$15,000 in prize money as well as publication. This comes as Epigram Books announced just days before that they will stop publishing in the United Kingdom and focus on their Singapore business. Setting up its London arm in 2016, founder Edmund Wee had initially hoped that the move would allow a Singapore title to get onto the longlist of the coveted Man Booker Prize. After more than thirty titles and four years of work, the effort has proved—at least for the time being—futile. The good news, on the other hand, is that the cost savings from discontinuing the UK endeavour will be redirected to prize money for expanding the Fiction Prize shortlist from four to six novels. READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Paper Republic

September 24, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Dylan Levi King, Emily Jones, Eric Abrahamsen, Jack Hargreaves, Nicky Harman, Yao Lirong, and Yvette Zhu

Read Paper Republic is one of the most important things we can do . . . to deliver on our mission of getting more people reading Chinese literature

In the preface of the formidable Narrative Poem, Yang Lian wrote: “Long must be identical with deep, and we have to make it new for a depth never before expressed.” This maxim is Yang’s contemporary grasp of the enormously, incomparably complex world of contemporary Chinese letters, which threads tradition with novelty, comprehension with inquiry, intelligence with intuition, and is profuse with dislocations, disruptions, oppressions, and erasures. Diving into this amassment—either as reader or translator—is often an overwhelming endeavour, so it is both a relief and a source of joy that such a thing like Paper Republic exists, an online hub that serves as a platform for new Chinese writing, a resource for Chinese-English translators, an extensive database, and the base of a vibrant community eager to share dialogue and talents. In our second feature for National Translation Month, we’re proud to shed a spotlight on their impressive accomplishments with a text written cumulatively by their brilliant team.

“Paper Republic began very simply as a group blog, run by translators of Chinese literature into English,” writes founding member Eric Abrahamsen. “It was 2007, four or five of us had found each other in Beijing, and we formed a sort of mutual support group/social club.”

Since then, Paper Republic has grown and changed almost beyond recognition; incorporated as a company, we’ve spent a decade making concerted efforts to interest western publishers in Chinese literature, producing book reports, and even dabbling in literary agency. A few years ago, however, we began to focus on readers and translators. We are now a registered charity/non-profit organization, made up of a team of volunteers based in America, UK, China, and Japan. In addition to providing information about Chinese literature to people in English-speaking countries, we promote new Chinese writing in translation, publish free-to-read short fiction and essays online, host an extensive database on Chinese writers and their English translators, mentor Chinese-to-English translators, and provide resources to schools teaching Chinese.

In order to introduce Chinese writers to the world, we started Read Paper Republic back in 2015—sourcing, translating, editing, and publishing one short story every single week for a year, completely free to read. It was a mammoth undertaking, and the fact that we managed to pull it off at all is testament to the generosity of the authors and translators involved. One of the things that is special about Read Paper Republic is that every story, no matter how experienced the translator, is edited by a member of the team, who also checks the text against the Chinese, assuring literary quality as well as accuracy. From the very first series, we had aspiring translators offering their work; our editing process is both beneficial to them, and also fits perfectly with one of our aims as a non-profit: to mentor new translators. READ MORE…

2018: A Year of Reading Adventurously

January 5, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Caitlin O'Neil, Chris Power, Claire Jacobson, and Theophilus Kwek

In 2018, I’ll be making an effort to trace my inheritance as an Anglophone, Southeast Asian poet of faith and colour.

After the recently concluded blog series in which we looked back on 2017’s literary discoveries, we bring you our New Year’s reading resolutions.

Chris Power, Assistant Editor:

I work in French and German, so I’ll start with my French literary resolutions: I’m reading Marx et la poupée (Marx and the Doll) by Maryam Madjidi with my friend and former French professor, the psychoanalytic literary theorist Jerry Aline Flieger. Excerpts of the novel of course appear in our current issue. If it isn’t my favorite work we’ve published, then it stands out for being the one that overwhelmed my critical faculties. I couldn’t write about it in the disinterested manner that I prefer. Instead I wrote a confused, gushing blurb listing my favorite scenes and describing how it brought tears to my eyes. An emphatic “yes” was all I could muster. Next on my list is Réparer le monde (Repair the World) by Alexandre Gefen, to which Laurent Demanze dedicated a beautiful essay in Diacritik in late November. I’m looking forward not only to an insightful survey of contemporary French literature, but also to a provocative anti-theoretical turn in the history of literary theory, namely a theory of the utility of literature (to repair the world) which cites pragmatist philosophers like John Dewey. Gefen introduces this theory enticingly through a reading of Barthes in his lecture “A quoi bon ? Les pouvoirs de la littérature (La tentation de l’écriture)” / “What’s the use? The powers of literature (the temptation of writing)” which is available online, but I must admit that I’m reminded of a Baudelaire quote dear to me: “Être un homme utile m’a toujours paru quelque chose de bien hideux.” (“To be a useful man has always appeared to me to be particularly hideous.”) In 2018 I’ll also continue exploring the work of Sarah Kofman, who seems to me to be a diamond in the rough of historical amnesia and a potential dissertation topic. She’s exactly the kind of Nietzschean, Parisian philosopher-poet of the 1960s who worked at the intersection of philosophy and art that we’ve grown so comfortable labelling a “theorist,” but she hasn’t (yet) acquired the cult following of her dissertation advisor Gilles Deleuze or colleague Jacques Derrida.

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Annaliza Bakri on the Politics of Malay Language and Literature in Singapore

October 16, 2017  |  in Interviews, Profile, Translator's Profile  |  by Annaliza Bakri and Tse Hao Guang

I consider translation to be a key to understanding and elevating humanity.

Annaliza Bakri is an educator and translator. She believes that literary works can be the subliminal voice that cultivates greater understanding, awareness and consciousness of the past, present and future. An ardent advocate of works that are beautifully penned in Singapore’s national language, she strongly believes in the divine art of translation where shared heritage and mutual discovery promote humanity. Our Editor-At-Large for Singapore, Tse Hao Guang, recently caught up with Annaliza about her work and about the politics of language and literature in Singapore.

Tse Hao Guang (HG): You teach, write papers, translate Malay texts into English, and organise programmes and panels on Malay culture, language and heritage. What is the driving force behind all this work? What first got you interested in this? You seem to be one of a few people here doing what I’d call literary activism.

Annaliza Barki (AB): There’s a lot of commitment and responsibility when you call yourself an activist. I don’t think it’s as much about activism as it is about sharing ideas and knowledge. In class, I use literature to teach the Malay language. Grammar and syntax can make for a dry learning experience. With literature, however, you examine ideas, explore culture, and enrich your worldview. Literature reveals intricacies of the human identity to us, and, I believe, reignites in us a flame of humanity. This is also one of the many reasons why I translate literary works. What I gain from the interweaving of cultures in my translation work allows me to better understand humanity and human predicaments.

I was part of the organising team that initiated the cultural-literary seminar series CITA@The Arts House in 2012. We provided a platform for the sharing of Malay culture, in both English and Malay, to both adults and students. Part of CITA involved inviting our older writers to speak about their work, writers who were active in the 1970s and still continue to write today. The kind of honour and gratitude we have for them made younger people curious to attend and listen, as it had been a while since we last heard from them. It was interesting for me too, as a teacher who had read and even taught their books, but had no idea who they were apart from their role as writers, or what their aspirations were. Beyond giving these writers prizes like the Cultural Medallion or the Tun Sri Lanang, I think we, as a nation, honour them by giving them a chance to engage an audience in person once again.

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