This week, our writers bring you news from Sweden, where readers have been mourning the loss of two esteemed writers, Per Olov Enquist and Maj Sjöwall; the United States and Europe, where writers and artists have been collaborating for online exhibitions; and Tibet, where the Festival of Tibet has organized an unprecedented “Poets Speak from Their Caves” online event. Read on to find out more!
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
Recently, Sweden lost two of its most prominent writers. On April 25, writer and journalist Per Olov Enquist, also known as P. O. Enquist, died at the age of eighty-five. He first became known to readers outside of Sweden with the novel The Legionnaires (in English translation by Alan Blair) which was awarded the Nordic Prize in 1969. In fact, many of his over twenty novels were awarded, including The Royal Physician’s Visit (translated by Tiina Nunnally), for which he received The August Prize in 1999, the most prestigious literary prize in Sweden. Enquist was also a literary critic, an essayist, a screenwriter, as well as a playwright. Several of his plays premiered on The Royal Dramatic Theatre and were directed by Ingmar Bergman. Furthermore, Enquist translated Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart and Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.
Just four days after Enquist’s death, another noteworthy writer and journalist, Maj Sjöwall, passed away aged eighty-four. Together with her partner Per Wahlöö, she wrote the ten Martin Beck police mysteries in the 1960s and ’70s, which have been translated into around forty languages. With the Martin Beck mystery series, Sjöwall and Wahlöö established a subgenre within Swedish crime fiction that had critique of the society as an essential part. This then paved the way for the success of the Nordic Noir, including writers such as Henning Mankell (of the Kurt Wallander series, several of which are translated by Ebba Segerberg as well as Tiina Nunnally) and Stieg Larsson, author of the first three Millenium series books (translated by Reg Keeland). Larsson’s wildly popular crime series has, after his unexpected passing in 2004, been continued by David Lagercrantz.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Europe and North America
One of the most notable recent victims of the coronavirus is a legendary figure of Romanian and French literatures, Paul Goma, who passed away two weeks ago in a Parisian hospital, aged eighty-four. A huge novelist writing compelling sagas chronicling the dismantling of Romanian democratic society and private life after WWII by the Soviet occupants and their domestic myrmidons, Goma was imprisoned repeatedly and indomitably suffered unspeakable duress until he was forced into exile by Ceaușescu in 1978 and relocated to France as a stateless person (a status he obstinately maintained till the day he died). His uncompromising ethics and scathing portrayal of major writers and public figures’ collaborationism with the communist regime prevented him from ever being reinstated back home (even in post-communist Romania), in spite of his international fame and herculean—editorial and otherwise—efforts from foremost historians and writers such as Flori Bălănescu. The literary community in his Romanian home province (the present-day Republic of Moldova) seemed more diligent though in recuperating his work and stature, as Moldova even nominated Goma for the Nobel Prize in 2013. As artist Dan Perjovschi put it in a cartoon that has since gone viral on social media, “everybody has kept dead silent about Goma for thirty years, now everybody’s gonna eulogize him for . . . five minutes.”
Perjovschi also did a yet another indelible show on April 1 at MoMA, this time “virtually,” on the website, part of which features a cartoon depicting both a mask and Earth seen from space with the same caption, “single use . . .” The current single use, the online one, has actually become the MO of previously analog events and venues as well. Past contributors Flavia Teoc and Diana Manole have been active lately on that front, the former being involved in the going digital of a longstanding Danish event series, and the latter in a (Romanian-)Canadian-German video poem collaboration with Rodica Drăghincescu and Münster Theatre. In Brussels, the co-organizer of a seminal event chronicled on our blog, Alexander Streitberger will soon be curating an online exhibition vernissage, while the Poète national (poet laureate) of Belgium, Carl Norac, is currently allotting fifteen hours a day to his program Fleurs de funérailles (Funeral Flowers), which sees Belgian poets dedicate poems to those killed by the pandemic. Norac will also be featured in a livestreamed performance later this month.
Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Tibet
While poets often get in their caves, mental and spatial, at the call of their muse, the ongoing quarantines/lockdowns across the globe have beckoned them to speak from their caves. Just at the end of Latse Library’s celebration of the poetry month with powerful readings from Tibet and exile, the Stay at Home Online Festival of Tibet registered an unprecedented “Poets Speak from Their Caves” event on May 2. Organized in Brisbane by Tenzin Choegyal, a Tibetan singer/songwriter, and attended by over 50,000 viewers, this was the twelfth edition of the Festival of Tibet.
Enlaced in the sine wave of a Tibetan singing bowl (which, Tenzin Dheden reminds, is not Tibetan), the poetry recitations in Tibetan, English, and Chinese by some twenty-four poets and poetry lovers from India, Australia, China, and the United States left me enchanted in my quarantine cave in Brazil. There are endless takeaways from the session: the existential journey in Bhuchung D. Sonam’s “In search of your warmth/I follow the path of a vulture’s flight/and my sparrow wings take me/to the desolate corner of the room”; the connectivity of cultural memory in Tenzin Dickie’s “I bequeath to you words that can open secret pass in the mountain just for you”; an overdose of the drug of peace by Katie Noonan; the nostalgia for “the host of divinities long gone” in Kyinzom Dongue’s reading; the innocence of teenage love in a poem by Neema Chhoyang; the fortitude in the sixth Dalai Lama’s “unwritten love that remains in the heart”; and gratitude in Sonam Tsomo’s “When the sun shines through your window/remember to open your lungs/for it’s a blessing to feel the warmth and the comfort to know you survived those who lost.”
The new temporary world of COVID-19 has also got Tibetans debating on China’s various political pitfalls. In China itself, “For the moment, it appears not to loathe Tibetans/not to loathe Uyghurs/But to be Wuhanese has become a label to avoid at all costs,” writes Tsering Woeser in her “Poems from a Plague: A Tibetan Meditation.”
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