Another week has flown by and we’re back again with the most exciting news in world literature! This time our editors focus on Hong Kong, Poland, and Spain.
Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong:
This year’s Hong Kong Muse Fest ran from June 23 to July 8. Themed “Museum Is Typing . . .”, the event presented an array of exhibitions and activities that took place across public museums in Hong Kong. It aimed to explore Hong Kong’s cultural heritage, history, arts and science, providing a variety of new and interactive experience to reshape the audience’s conception of the museum. Besides museum exhibitions, the programmes also included literary elements, such as the special programme, “Human Library” (part of “Sparkle! Counting the Days”), which invited members of different communities to share their life stories with readers. In the “Crossing Border” Special Talk Series, “Extraordinary Intrinsic Quality of Grandmasters—Bruce Lee vs Jin Yong”, speakers shared their views on the achievements of Chinese martial arts actor, Bruce Lee, and martial arts fiction writer, Jin Yong.
The new online Chinese publishing platform of the House of Hong Kong Literature, p-articles, has been launched officially for more than a month. The platform is going to organise a roundtable discussion on “Connecting Online Cultural Media” on July 15, an occasion where representatives of various online cultural media in Hong Kong will discuss the significance of digital media and the decline of traditional media for cultural development.
Recent interdisciplinary literary events also include the photography exhibition of the Hong Kong poet Liu Waitong, “The Darkening Planet: Liu Waitong Photography Exhibition”, which is open to the public in the Kubrick Bookshop in Yau Ma Tei from July 6 to July 31. The exhibition showcases new photographic works of Liu, capturing darkening, shadowy and twilight moments of life during the poet-photographer’s numerous travels.
Approaching late July, the city’s most popular book event, the Hong Kong Book Fair, will run from the 18th to the 24th in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Themed “Romance Literature”, the book fair will feature a series of talks and introductions of Hong Kong romance writings, alongside seminars and talks on publishing and reading.
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland:
Olga Tokarczuk’s 2007 novel Bieguni was near-impossible to find in bookshops during my visit to Gdańsk in late May, soon after the book—Flights in Jennifer Croft’s translation—won the International Man Booker Prize (read this interview with Tokarczuk in TANK magazine). Two earlier novels by Tokarczuk have previously appeared in English in translations by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who received the 2018 Transatlantyk Prize on June 22, an award honouring the most distinguished ambassadors of Polish literature abroad. The award was universally applauded, by Olga Tokarczuk and the many other authors she has championed over the years—dubbed “Antonia’s gang” by crime writer Zygmunt Miłoszewski—as well as a number of the younger generation of translators with whom she has generously shared her experience as mentor. At a ceremony held in Kraków, Cambridge-based literature scholar Stanley Bill described Antonia Lloyd-Jones as not merely an ambassador for Polish literature but a “one-woman embassy”.
At the end of May, Lloyd-Jones and one of her “gang”, poet and novelist Jacek Dehnel, presented Lala (2018, Oneworld Publications), a celebration of his grandmother’s life against the backdrop of twentieth-century European history, at the Hay Festival and in London. The twentieth anniversary of his death, 2018, has been proclaimed Zbigniew Herbert Year, and on June 5 Londoners also had a chance to hear selections from his work, read by another great poet, Ryszard Krynicki, and translator Alissa Valles in an evening dedicated to his memory.
This year’s Wisława Szymborska award went to Swedish poet Linn Hansén and her translator Justyna Czechowska, as well as to Polish poet and past Asymptote contributor Julia Fiedorczuk, for her collection Psalmy (Psalms). And one of the 2018 laureates for the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture is the Borderland (Pogranicze) Foundation and Centre, based in Sejny, a small community in northeastern Poland close to the Lithuanian border. Co-founder of Borderland Krzysztof Czyżewski notes: “Fascism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism are not part of the character of people. The breeding ground of these ideas is solitude, neglect, poverty, and many other things. And remember: no one is born a xenophobe. Something happens to people in their lives to make them that way and we all carry responsibility for it.”
Manel Mula Ferrer, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain:
This last June, Quim Monzó, one of the most iconic figures of contemporary Catalan literature, was awarded the prestigious Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes. The award, granted by the cultural association Òmnium Cultural, rewards scholars and writers for their contribution to the cultural life of the Catalan-speaking territories.
Monzó’s career spans more than forty years, combining fiction, journalism and translation. His short stories are concise but full of nuances, often infused with an intelligent sense of humor. In a video celebrating the occasion, some of his more than twenty translators described his style as a combination of pure language and pure humanity and a navigation between the evidence and the extraordinary. If you are curious to read an example, his story “Life is so Short”, translated by Peter Bush, was published in our Summer 2011 issue.
The writer focused his acceptance speech on his beginnings, growing up in an almost bookless house, and praised the figure of the public library. More specifically, he spoke about the bookmobile, a medium that allowed him to access literature during his younger years, but also the kind of vehicle on which a group of Catalan intellectuals (including Mercè Rodoreda and Joan Oliver) escaped to exile in the month of January of 1939, months before the end of the Spanish Civil War.
This year, the writer was notified of the award via post rather than with a phone call: on October 16, 2017, the president of the association granting the award, Jordi Cuixart, was preemptively jailed after the accusation of sedition, allegedly committed in September 2017 by participating in the organization of protests against the police raids that were aimed at dismantling the framework for the Catalan independence referendum of 2017.
At the end of his speech, Monzó wondered whether it will someday be necessary again to use a bookmobile to escape “from injustice, oppression and tyranny”.
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