This week, our writers bring you news from El Salvador, where the country’s last remaining indigenous language, Náhuat, has been celebrated; the Czech Republic, where coronavirus is having a huge impact on the book market; and Hong Kong, where organizations such as PEN are using digital initiatives to promote literature during this period of social distancing. Read on to find out more!
Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador:
Since 2017, Salvadorans have celebrated the National Day of the Náhuat Language. The holiday is in accordance with other international celebrations of ancestral languages as proclaimed by the United Nations in 1999. The National Day of the Náhuat Language is part of an ongoing effort over the past several years to revitalize Náhuat language and culture. Náhuat is the last existing indigenous language of El Salvador; its other indigenous languages of Lenca and Cacaopera/Kakawira are extinct.
El Salvador has had a deeply traumatic history concerning its indigenous population. Its most infamous historical event was in 1932, La Matanza, in which the Salvadoran government suppressed a peasant rebellion and killed over ten thousand protesters, many of them Pipil, the people of Náhuat culture and language. Because of events like La Matanza, the indigenous populations opted to forget their culture and languages, and instead learned and spoke only Spanish, in fear of being revealed as indigenous and executed.
In the past decade, two documentaries have come out focusing on the lives of indigenous people currently living in the few remaining towns where Náhuat is still spoken: the first documentary was released in 2013 and directed by Sergio Sibrían; the second documentary was released in 2015 and directed by Roberto Kofman.
For COVID-19 quarantine, the Spanish Cultural Center of El Salvador began an artistic campaign on their website and Facebook page titled #14Días14Artistas. The objective of the campaign was to showcase artistic pieces from fourteen Salvadoran artists working in various disciplines such as theater, poetry, prose, and performance art.
One artistic piece showcased was a memoir cookbook by Elena Salamanca who commented on her motivations: “In this time of quarantine, I decided to make a cookbook because I have no talent for cooking and it’s something that I must do for myself every day, three times a day. It is time for self-care. Cooking also brings me closer to the memory of my grandmother and the other women who have been subjected to the social and gender divisions of labor. Thanks to their sacrifices—and sometimes their forgetfulness—I can now dedicate myself to writing and thinking. In the words of Virginia Woolf, those women who have cared for others and their children have allowed Shakespeare’s sister to be born.”
Another artistic piece showcased was a performed monologue by Lorena Juárez Saavedra. The monologue recounts memories from her youth, memories of happiness but also anger, and moments of nostalgia that fill us to the brim, that transport us to the past. “My first kiss came out of a confinement similar to our quarantine today,” said Saavedra. “It’s one way that art always saves us from our troubled hearts.”
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is one of the few European countries that has, so far, managed to keep the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic under control. That is a reason why Czech novelist and Asymptote contributor Radka Denemarková decided to cut short her three-month literary residence in Taiwan. Some of the blog posts she penned while waiting to return home to her family intriguingly contrast the swift and efficient response of the Taiwanese authorities with that of mainland China and are available on the writer’s website in English.
However, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on the Czech Republic’s book market. The country’s main literary event, the annual Svět knihy (Book World Prague 2020), due to be held in May, is the next book fair domino to fall, after those in London, Leipzig, Paris, and Bologna. Initially postponed until October after the government banned all public events as a measure to combat the spreading of the virus, it has now been cancelled altogether as “the future is too uncertain and threats facing the entire book profession too grave for a successful and dignified book fair to be held.” The government’s decision to close all bookshops has pushed the previously healthy and expanding Czech book market to the brink of collapse. Translator Viktor Janiš has summed up the chain of events: “Euromedia, the largest Czech book distributor and the third largest publishing house, has de facto defaulted. It sent all its third parties—publishers, translators, authors, DTP operators, graphic designers, editors—a letter saying ‘since all our bookshops are closed, we aren’t generating any income, hence we are unable to pay you until further notice.’ This will have—and has already had—repercussions throughout the industry. But chiefly it has merely accelerated a process that has already been going on: bookshops have no customers to speak of (and e-commerce has tanked too), so they aren’t paying distributors. Distributors aren’t paying publishers, and they in turn aren’t paying us, translators, authors, editors.”
Euromedia has since backtracked, promising to do their best to honour their commitments. Czech publishers have now banded together, appealing to the government to come up with a rescue package for the beleaguered industry, similar to measures in place or planned in Sweden, France, Norway, and Germany. On April 9, the Czech government was poised to adopt a package totalling about 47 million USD, of which just under 18 million USD would support dance, theatre, art, and books—much less than the book industry has called for. Concerned about these developments, several cultural institutions have stepped up their efforts to save culture: from 6:30 p.m. on April 9, Czech Radio 2 aired a twelve-hour live marathon of conversations with writers, actors, and other major figures in the arts as well as the Minister of Culture, called “Long Live Theatre! Long Live Books!”. The Moravian Regional Library, with its daughter agency, the Czech Literature Centre and the Association of Czech Libraries, has launched a campaign to boost the sale of e-books: “Buy a book, save a publisher!”
Literature is also being kept alive by virtual events, such as a Básne v karanténe (Poetry in quarantine), initiated by two small Slovak organisations, which arranged for five pairs of poets —Czech and Slovak, and one Polish—to read from their works on Facebook on five consecutive evenings from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. in late March. Radio Prague kicked off a video series, Czech Books You Must Read, with writer and translator Pavla Horáková—whose novel Teorie podivnosti (Theory of Strangeness) received the top literary prize for fiction, the Magnesia Litera, in 2019—presenting War with the Newts, Karel Čapek’s dystopian masterpiece, originally intended as a warning against the rise of Nazism but uncannily prescient of the current pandemic.
One of the few publishers to have been spared by the crisis is Prague’s Karolínum Press, whose excellent modern Czech classics series has recently added English translations of works by two giants of Czech literature: A Czech Dreambook (trans. Gerald Turner) by Ludvík Vaculík, and Bohumil Hrabal’s Why I Write? The early prose from 1945 to 1952 (trans. David Short), both reviewed in LARB, the former by Michael Tate (Jantar Publishing) and the latter included in an in-depth review by Stephen Delbos of three books by Hrabal published over the last couple of years.
Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
After SARS in 2003, which killed 299 people in the city, Hong Kong is no stranger to infectious outbreaks. When COVID-19 hit, people were quick to don masks to protect themselves and others (it was only after April Fool’s, on CNN, that I read the headline: “Asia may have been right about coronavirus and face masks, and the rest of the world is coming around”).
Given the recent resuscitation of trauma, we naturally have a lot to say about the imaginations and fears surrounding disease. With the digitalization of almost everything, PEN Hong Kong and local literary magazine Cha organized a Zoom panel discussing plague literature. Featuring the speakers Ilaria Maria Sala, Guo Ting, Oliver Farry, and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, the event went into the historical contexts of the genre, going across centuries from Pu Songling to the works of Alessandro Manzoni, and Colm Tóibín. The bilingual poetry magazine Voice & Verse has also been accepting poetry submissions in Chinese and English on themes evoking the current state of affairs, like “Virus” and “Masks,” the latter of which is for their upcoming fifty-fourth issue to be released in the summer.
While this period of social distancing is a time to explore new uses for our digital tools, other initiatives take a moment to look back. In 2015, Hong Kong’s long-running non-profit art space Para Site published A Journal of the Plague Year, a collection of writing, essays, and conversations based on the eponymous exhibition curated in 2013, ten years after the SARS outbreak. Now, Para Site is rekindling collective memory through a charity sale of the book, with half the proceeds going to organizations supporting migrant workers and medics in this current crisis. With highlights including translated pieces from writers Dung Kai-cheung and Shih Shu-ching as well as a translated conversation between writer and critic Lawrence Pun and artist Pak Sheung Chuen, among others, A Journal of the Plague Year analyzes concepts of contagion and postcolonial psychology through Hong Kong’s rich history of epidemic, from the plague in 1894 to SARS in 2003, and now enriches our thoughts around COVID-19.
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Read more dispatches on the Asymptote blog: