Language: Gujarati

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, India, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on documentaries about poetry, award-winning short stories, and exciting translation fellowships. From novels shortlisted for big prizes to upcoming movie screenings, read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Taiwan’s 60th annual Golden Horse Awards will be held on November 25 and Hong Kong film director Ann Hui’s most recent documentary Elegies is nominated for the Best Documentary Feature. Elegies was already selected as the opening film for the Hong Kong International Film Festival earlier this year, which was a rare occasion as poetry—the subject of the documentary—used to be a niche literary interest in the city. The first part of Elegies presents a sketching of contemporary Hong Kong poetry through interviews of Hong Kong poets and archival materials of Xi Xi and Leung Ping-kwan. The second and third part of the documentary are dedicated to two Hong Kong poets, Huang Canran and Liu Wai-tong, respectively, who both have deep cultural roots with Hong Kong but choose to live elsewhere. Hui studied literature at university, and poetry had long been a subject matter that the director wished to explore through the medium of the moving picture. The film is her way of paying homage to local poetry and the city, as well as an elegy for a bygone era.

To celebrate the nomination and achievement of Elegies, M+ Museum has organised a few screening sessions of the documentary in November. The November 18 screening includes a post-screening dialogue with the director and the featured poets, moderated by M+ film curator Li Cheuk-to. Ann Hui will discuss her ideas about poetry and the implications of poetry for her film productions. The three artists will engage in conversations on the essence of poetry, as well as their own stories of poetry writing. READ MORE…

I Carved A Girl Of Stone: Nuzhat Abbas on Feminist, Decolonial, and Anti-Imperialist Translation

What drives my work at trace is perhaps a desire to destabilize the spaces I was made to enter and reside in . . .

Since its inception in 2019, Tkaronto/Toronto-based trace press has published “literature that illuminates, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour, and resistance.” Re-emerging after a brief hiatus during the pandemic, their first anthology River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023) assembles emergent and experienced feminist translators, scholars, and writers from Palestine to Uganda, from Indonesia to Kashmir—spotlighted by, among others, Khairani Barokka, Suneela Mubayi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Yasmine Haj. In the foreword, the decolonialist historian Françoise Vergès describes the vestiges of imperialism, the dominance of the languages of Euro-American colonisers, the myths of globalisation, and the “hegemony of national languages” inflicted by neocolonial nation-states. Having read and reviewed the anthology myself, I think of it as a complex re-mapping of literary hemispheres “twisting through the atrocities of literary empires and post-colonial capitalism.”

In this interview, I asked trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born writer and critic of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, about the literary publishing house she has founded; how independent presses can stay true to a transnational, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist ethos; and writings from her archipelagic birthplace in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Having founded trace press, in what ways do the values of decoloniality, anti-imperialism, feminism, and anti-racism occur as concrete practices in translation and in publishing? And what is the opposite of that?

Nuzhat Abbas (NA): I prefer to pose such questions to my writers and translators—to inquire how they, in their practice, think through such challenges, especially in relation to localized tensions and displacements, both historic and geographical. For example, trace is located on a forcibly white-settled and renamed space where Indigenous and Black resistance and creativity continues to resist and respond to histories of profound violence and displacement. As racialized im/migrant-settlers working with non-European literatures and languages, how do we ‘translate’ and write toward Black and Indigenous readers in the Americas, and toward each other, as people from the global majority, scattered around the globe, displacing each of our certainties? This is a question for me, a beginning question, one that can only be answered in practice—and differently—by each of the books we make and the conversations that emerge. Building space for these kinds of ‘after-publication’ conversations is very much part of what I want to create with trace

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary news from Sweden, Romania, and India!

In this week’s updates on world literature, our Editors-at-Large bring you updates on literary awards and interdisciplinary festivals! From applied computer science for literature to books for Dalit History Month, read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Earlier this month, Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth was announced the recipient of the inaugural Sara Danius Foundation Prize. Vigdis Hjorth is one of Norway’s most prominent writers, with over twenty novels and several young adult books published over the last forty years. English-language readers know her from titles like Is Mother Dead (2022) and Will and Testament (2019), both available in translation by Charlotte Barslund. Is Mother Dead was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and Will and Testament was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in the USA for best translated novel. The Danius Foundation emphasized Vigdis Hjorth’s “groundbreaking and magnificent narrative that disrupts the order with style and clarity” in explaining their motivation for awarding Hjorth the Sara Danius Foundation Prize. The award consists of SEK 50,000 and an artwork depicting Sara Danius, painted by Stina Wirsén. Sara Danius was a Swedish scholar of literature and aesthetics, a literary critic and an essayist, and the first female permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. After her passing in 2019, her family created the Sara Danius Foundation, with the purpose of supporting female pioneers in literature, humanities research, criticism, essay writing, journalism, and artistic activities. This year’s award ceremony will take place at the Sven-Harry Art Museum in Stockholm on May 3. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Bulgaria, India, and the United States!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large bring us news on literary festivals, award-winning works, and poetry open-mics in Bulgaria, India, and the United States! From discussions of disinformation and machine translation at the Sofia International Literary Festival, to a poem performed in the Metaverse, to double-Booker wins in South Asia, read on to learn more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Writers are powerful creatures. They think up imaginary worlds that sometimes appear more tangible than the mundane reality most of us face on a daily basis. What happens, however, when malicious groups deliberately blur the line between illusion and fact in an attempt to sway public opinion in a specific direction? How does one fight disinformation, and can literature teach us to differentiate between the plausible and the ridiculous? These are only some of the questions the 2022 edition of the Sofia International Literary Festival, held December 6–11 during the Sofia International Book Fair, endeavored to answer.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

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…

What’s New in Translation: July 2022

Introducing new translations from the German, Gujarati, and Spanish!

In this month’s round-up of exciting new translations from around the world, our editors review an artful and intertextual graphic novel from Nicolas Mahler; a lyrical, genre-bending tale of creation and storytelling from Spanish writer Manuel Astur; and a compilation from Gujarati writer Dhumketu, a master of the short story. Read on to find out more!

sussex

Alice in Sussex by Nicolas Mahler, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2022

Review by Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Frankenstein’s monster make an unlikely combination, but in Alice in Sussex, Austrian comic artist and illustrator Nicolas Mahler brings the two together in his vivid reimagining of a classic tale. The title of the graphic novel makes references to both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and H. C. Artmann’s parody of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s FrankensteinFrankenstein in Sussex, suggesting an intertextual playfulness that is further substantiated throughout the work. Mahler’s seven-year-old Alice—the same age as Carroll’s—experiences an adventure as equally nonsensical as the original’s, but her journey is even more rife with complexities, incorporating a wide range of literary and philosophical references. To sum it up, this adventure down the White Rabbit’s hole is a humorous, inventive set, in which Mahler can play with his own literary and philosophical influences.

Readers familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can certainly remember the beginning of the children’s classic, in which Alice complains that there are no pictures or conversations in her sister’s book. Mahler’s Alice encounters the same boredom when reading her sister’s copy of Frankenstein in Sussex, and thus initiates the White Rabbit’s invitation into his hole, promising to show her “a lavishly illustrated edition.” Drawn sitting by an infinity-shaped stream, the waters foreshadow Alice’s seemingly never-ending descent down the chimney into a huge house underneath the meadow, as well as the long, elaborated, and bizarre dream that follows. Although the promised book cannot be found on the Rabbit’s bookshelf, the graphic novel actualises it—illustrating Alice’s encounter with Frankenstein’s monster later in the story. It also tries to acknowledge her other desire—for conversations—by letting her meet and converse with other idiosyncratic characters. Both, however, turn out to be anything but desirable for young Alice.

In Lewis Carroll’s original, Alice ponders on her identity after experiencing a series of queer events: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” Likewise, Mahler’s Alice is confronted with the same crisis, visually represented by Alice falling into the huge, fuzzy cloud of smoke drifting from the pipe of the Caterpillar, who then asks her: “Who are you?” Alice is unable to answer the question, but she also doesn’t make any great effort; her desire to escape is stronger than any liking for strange conversations. A further existentialist twist is introduced when the White Rabbit can only find The Trouble with Being Born by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran on his bookshelf, and the Caterpillar tells Alice an important thing about life: “Being alive means losing the ground beneath your feet!!!” Such aphorisms are commonly sprinkled throughout the graphic novel—reminiscent of The Trouble with Being Born; the pain of life is treated with levity and amusement, with Alice being tossed around on the Caterpillar’s body, and the Caterpillar’s writhing shifts with his many legs in the air. While Alice is dismayed at losing the ground beneath her feet, the Caterpillar is comfortable with it. Despite being infused with dark humor, Mahler’s style is never overly harsh on his characters; his drawings are delightful, exuding a sense of gentleness. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Book fairs, Booker longlists, and magazine launches from Thailand, Puerto Rico, India, and Romania!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on the political undertones of a Bangkok book fair, new translations of Indian literature, new magazines out of Puerto Rico, and celebrations of Francophone literature in Romania. Read on to find out more!

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

Bookworms are back wheeling their suitcases around in the country’s biggest book fair. It is the place to get another year’s worth of kong dong (“pile of pickles”)—i.e., unread books. After a cancellation last year and a move online the year before, the twelve-day National Book Fair, organized by the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand is being held at the new rail transport hub, Bangsue Grand Station, until April 6. Many publishers, both major and independent, release new books in anticipation of this event, where they can get a bigger cut from sales and buyers have come to expect extra-special discounts. With over 200 publishers participating, author meet-and-greets, and predictable logistical complaints at the temporary new venue, we can perhaps sense a return to normalcy.

If one looks at this normalcy more closely, however, one can see an increasing trend of explicit politicization in the largely commercial enterprise. The calendar of main-stage events includes book launches by pro-democracy politicians from the Move Forward Party and the Progressive Movement (of the disbanded Future Forward Party). The names of four such politicians, all men, grace the official calendar—without the titles of their books, oddly enough. The Progressive Movement is also publishing its first translation: an illustrated children’s book, นี่แหละเผด็จการ (Así es la dictadura) by Equipo Plantel, first published in 1977 in post-Franco Spain. These examples provide quite a contrast to ostensibly political but effectively depoliticizing events led by, for lack of a better word, the literary establishment, like the panel discussion “Stepping into the Third Decade of the Phan Waen Fa Award: Political Literature for Democratic Development,” featuring three award committee members and a literary scholar.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Stay up to date with the literary world from Hong Kong to Palestine to India!

This week, allow our editors-at-large to take you around the world to find out about the most exciting literary news. From Hong Kong, the highly anticipated 21st Hong Kong International Literary Festival has announced its first slate of writers. New lyric dispatches allow us to hear from a variety of voices from Palestine. Finally, fellowships and festivals from India are worth your attention. Read on to learn more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:

After a two-year-long hiatus with its main website, Cha, Hong Kong’s popular English literary journal, is open for submissions again from July for their Auditory Cortex 2021 special feature. Co-edited by Lian-Hee Wee and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, the issue accepts poetry written in various Englishes, acknowledging the diversity of the language across multiple territories. The auditory cortex is the first point in the brain reacting to sound, and as such the publication is looking to document the acoustics of lesser known varieties through a series of recordings accompanying the texts. Cha is also calling for abstracts for the Backreading Hong Kong’s 2021 academic symposium, “Translating Hong Kong,” with Hong Kong Baptist University and The University of Toronto Scarborough this December. In addition to new insights into translation practice, the symposium hopes to explore the cultural and linguistic implications of interpreting works about Hong Kong, whether translation reiterates the colonial dominance of English and how it feeds into the city’s culture.

Back for its 21st year, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival just announced its initial line-up of writers and speakers. Held between November 5 to 15, this year’s festival is entitled the Rebound Edition and will focus on themes of resilience, recovery, and mental health. It has so far confirmed the appearance of Amor Towles, Paula Hawkins, Damon Galgut, and Mary Jean Chan, as well as local emerging writers Alice Chan, Virginia Ng, and Angus Lee, with more details to be announced in late September.

Beyond the page—and my usual reportage of Chinese-English translation happenings—Asia Society Hong Kong Center is hosting a series of six screenings and talks of Korean films with English subtitles between now and December. Titled “Beyond K-pop: Korean Families in Films,” the program features new and classic hits including Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), Ode to My Father (2014), and Minari (2021) which won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language. The films offer portrayals of Korean families in different eras and social contexts, addressing issues of historical strife, separation, and immigration. READ MORE…

Winter 2017: Intimate Strangers

Who better to bare our intimate, struggling self with than several thousand of our closest friends?

January 2017: I have turned 40. Though I no longer remember when exactly I set down the rule for team members to refrain from sending me email over weekends, it is likely the embargo originated from this time. Entering a new decade is an occasion to take stock, to insist on a proper work-life balance. But 40 has always felt like an especially significant milestone, possibly because, as a teenager, I’d read an essay in which the narrator wonders obsessively if he’d land on the “right side of forty,” the obsession guiding his every life decision. Then his fortieth birthday comes, and with it the realization, like thunder, that he has lived life wrong. I’ve not lived life wrong, but I have certainly lived against the grain. Around this time I notice, for example, that I am spacing out more and more in gatherings with former classmates when talk turns to acquiring a second property. I stumble upon David Williams’s devastating essay in World Literature Today and can’t tear my eyes away from the line: “I couldn’t see it at the time, and I certainly refused to acknowledge it, but when my parents’ overeducated, thirty-something child chooses to sell his labor well below a living wage, they can be forgiven for thinking that their blue-eyed son is engaged in a sophisticated form of self-sabotage.”  Perhaps, this is why our sixth anniversary issue comes with what Australia editor-at-large Tiffany Tsao calls below a “frankly [desperate]” editor’s note; still, as she says, “who better to bare our intimate, struggling self with than several thousand of our closest friends?”

. . . you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else . . . This phrase hails from Amanda DeMarco’s brilliant rumination on life as a translator, Foreign to Oneself. Published in our Winter 2017 issue, the essay is composed entirely of excerpts from other texts (this particular quote is taken from Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby). As I reread these words while writing this essay, my vision began to get a little blurry. I’m being maudlin, I know. But where else is one entitled to get weepy if not in a retrospective that invites writers to indulge in nostalgia? And the truth of this observation about being a translator sang out all the more because this was also the issue in which my translations of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry made their debut.

At that point, I was Asymptote’s Indonesia Editor-at-Large (my country of focus is now Australia, where I reside), and a few months earlier, I’d come across some of Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s poetry. Having heard that he’d recently won the Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition, I reached out to him via Twitter to ask if I could work with him to translate his poems for our poetry editor’s consideration. This issue marked the start of an ongoing and very fruitful translator-writer partnership with Norman, who later came on staff and is our current Indonesia Editor-at-Large. English-language versions of Norman’s other poems were subsequently published in various magazines, and awarded both a prize and a grant from English PEN. The collection from which these poems are excerpted will be published by Tilted Axis Press in March 2019. If it weren’t for Asymptote, I’m not sure if Norman and I would have ever started working together. READ MORE…

Spotlight on Indian Languages: Part IV

Our suffering / turned into / bruises on our backs

The ongoing blog feature on Indian poetry, tied to our Special Feature in the Winter 2017 Issue of Asymptote, has reached its fourth installment. This time, we present a poem by Gujarati Dalit poet Priyanka Kalpit. She is one of the very few women writing Dalit poetry in Gujarat today. Her text below was translated by Gopika Jadeja.

 

Bitter crop

Our ancestors
sowed their sweat

In return
we reaped
bonded labour

Our suffering
turned into
bruises on our backs

At times, that searing pain
turns into a firefly
and burns

For a little while
the horizon of the soul
turns burning red.

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Highlights from Our Winter 2017 Issue

The editors of our Indian Languages Special Feature share how they curated the incredible poetry lineup

We begin the week again with an update on a new initiative that will help us continue beyond April 2017: This week, we’re thrilled to welcome Shelley Schanfield and Fiona Le Brun as our new sustaining members! Our most updated tally, as reflected on the right-hand column, is now 37! If you’re considering becoming a part of the family too, why not let lighthouse keeper (and hit author) Reif Larsen take you on a tour, before you sign up here!

*

This body didn’t burn itself:
It was burnt down.
These bones didn’t scatter themselves:
They were scattered around.
The fire didn’t combust on its own:
It was lit and spread around.
The fight didn’t initiate on its own:
It was started somehow.
And the poem didn’t compose itself:
It was written down.

—from “Mohenjodaro” by Vidrohi, translated from the Hindi by Somrita Ganguly

India, according to its constitution, has twenty-two ‘scheduled’ languages, with hundreds more spoken across its twenty-nine states and seven union territories. While it is impossible to capture the full swath of India’s languages in a single Special Feature, Asymptote’s Winter 2017 issue offers a glimpse into the political and aesthetic possibilities of Indian languages. The Feature’s nine poets, covering seven languages, were chosen with the aim of celebrating the diversity and dissent within contemporary Indian language poetry.

Vidrohi’s “Mohenjodaro” emerges directly from a site of protest, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the revolutionary spirit of which has recently come under attack from various political factions. Vidrohi spent most of his life as the unofficial, resident poet-activist of JNU, reciting but never writing down his poems—as a mark of resistance. But his words have been preserved in differing transcriptions by various students. “Mohenjodaro,” like many of Vidrohi’s works, has no definitive text—it carries on the centuries-old tradition of oral poetry in the Indian subcontinent. Aggressive and unabashed, the poem, with each line, builds its indictment of patriarchy, colonialism, and of the nation itself. To honor the poem’s orality and to observe how literature can exist in multiple lives, the Special Feature includes two translations of “Mohenjodaro.” Each translation stems from a different ‘original,’ and so is markedly different, reminding us that language resides beyond the page, in telling, listening, and remembering.

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Calling All Translators of Indian Literature

Asymptote celebrates the diversity and dissent within Indian writing

Only two weeks left to submit to Asymptote’s first-ever Special Feature on Contemporary Indian Language Literature in English Translation!

Since we first announced the Feature in August, we have received some very exciting work from all across the Indian map. And we can’t wait to find more voices, because in a country so large, we know there are more out there.

Take advantage of these last two weeks to revise your best translations and send them in!

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