Strong voices in poetry and protest, remembered: this week marked the unfortunate loss of two poetic voices in protest. Romanian poet Nina Cassian sought exile in the United States after her poems satirizing the Romanian regime stepped on too many toes. Doris Pilkington Garimara exposed systematic injustice toward the Aborigines in Australia most famously through her book, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence. It may have happened last week, but the literary world is still reeling from the death of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani remembers García Márquez’s memory while Salman Rushdie asserts that Gabo was “the greatest of us all.” We might see more from him, still: an unpublished excerpt, En Agosto nos Vemos. Or step back in time and read the magical realist’s profile on fellow Colombian pop sensation, Shakira.
Video artist Ali Kazma accuses the government in Turkey of intentionally dumbing down its citizens in an online protest essay entitled “Something Rotten in the Republic of Turkey.“ At the Beijing Film Festival, American filmmaker Oliver Stone implores Chinese filmmakers to make movies about Mao. It’s a tough life for the tech-savvy in Russia, according to the unceremoniously ousted founder of the country’s largest social network, VKontakte.com. Political unrest in Ukraine persists, and it’s getting tougher and tougher to writer through the crisis: the country’s literati take sides.
The last week of April (gasp!) already, in literary accolades: the Caine Prize for African writing has announced its shortlist, featuring short-story writers from Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ghana, and Zambia. The Österreichischer (Austrian) Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur has been awarded to Moscow-based Ljudmila Ulitzkaja. And Claudia Rankine has won the Jackson Poetry Prize awarded by Poets & Writers—snagging a well-deserved 50,000-dollar check in the process!
Does marginalia count as translation? Some booksellers claim to have found William Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary. Mistranslation goes deeper than poorly phrased signs and misguided tattoos. In South Korea, the new book The Culture of Mistranslation explores some unfortunate translations in poetry and prose from the early 20th century to the present. Reading James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is hard enough, but could you translate it into Chinese? Meanwhile, all too few Turkish masterpieces are translated to English—and those that are remain largely unnoticed: here’s a primer for what you’re missing out on.
Do you have any plans for the weekend? Have a book and a rose (the event features past contributors Alex Zucker and Eric Becker!). Or, catch Austrian writer and Asymptote contributor Josef Winkler with Adrian West, our very own contributing editor this Tuesday, April 29, at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC!