Monthly Archives: July 2020

What’s New in Translation: July 2020

July 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan, Jiaoyang Li, and José García Escobar

New publications from Argentina, Quebec, and Portugal!

This month, our selections of the best in newly translated global literature consists of a thrillingly varied medley of styles, from a fictional Argentine study on an obscure poet, a French-Canadian narrative of images and their thrall, and Fernando Pessoa’s cheekily fabricated dossier of a fascinating character. Though they may perhaps be united by a mutual captivation for how the mundane strikes the artistic process, the writers of these exciting works are transforming what may be familiar matters with a unique and singular language. Read on to find out more!

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Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020

Review by José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large

As much as Sergio Chejfec’s Notes Toward a Pamphlet offers a detailed voyeuristic look on trains, passengers, silence, and a radio announcer eating carrots, it’s also a gripping character study filled with philosophy and subtle humor. The use of randomness and meticulous narration of everyday, seemingly ordinary events, are no rarity in Chejfec’s work—the internal monologue of Masha, the meditative hotel clerk in his novel The Incompletes, as one example. Though they may appear disjointed, they often ignite the narrative and strengthen the enigma.

I think of Onetti and Piglia, and Chejfec, with his hidden tension and disarmingly beautiful writing—amplified by Whitney DeVos’ fiery translation—holds his ground against such giants.

In Notes Toward a Pamphlet, we see a nameless narrator following, or rather, discovering a poet named Samich. Unknown and unpublished, Samich does not even have a completed book to his name. He is solitary and lives a sedentary life in rural Argentina. His work, we learn, is scattered in magazines and “collectively-authored books.” But we can’t talk about poems per se. For these publications, Samich takes a fragment, at random, from the “writing mass.” There are no themes in his writing. No topics, concerns, or inspiration. No coherence or unity. But this is not an eccentricity. This, we understand, as we get to know Samich, is the way he viewed and experienced literature, based on “intuition instead of ideas.” Samich’s literary ways and lifestyle are almost like the antithesis of Bolaño’s Visceral Realists.

Notes Toward a Pamphlet is not bound by plot. There is no plot, but there is movement. But movement, motion, progression, and development, though noticeable, is rarely explicit. There’s barely any dialogue, action, interaction between characters, or issues to be resolved. Instead, we watch Samich grow. We see his flaws and contradictions. But his evolution occurs not in an artificial, literary way, but closer to how people experience it in real life: subtly and slowly. Samich’s growth is almost imperceptible. And while his life seems unexceptional and tedious, Chejfec’s mesmerizing writing, and the narrator’s prying, maintains the momentum. READ MORE…

Good News: We’re Expanding!

July 10, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Come be a part of our movement, submit an application today!

Do you want to help amplify underrepresented voices in world literature? If so, consider coming aboard our international crew! We have openings in several exciting positions fitted to different skill sets and interests, from Assistant Blog Editor and Assistant Interviews Editor to Copy Editor and Graphic Designer. Apart from receiving training for a career in world literature, every single team member stands to make a world of difference in supporting our quarterly issues, daily blog, book club, and more. What’s more, with our tenth anniversary and new projects on the horizon, you’d be joining us at an incredibly exciting time!

Don’t wait! Check out our open positions and submit your application today!

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 10, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary developments from Taiwan, the US, and Japan!

The disparities of COVID-19’s grip over us is becoming gradually more apparent as certain countries celebrate recovery, while others continue to shelter in place. In Taiwan and Japan, processions are resuming after the interruption, with film festivals and award announcements taking over headlines, while in the US the situation remains somehow at once unpredictable and static. In Taiwan, reportage literature seeks to reset old injustices; in Japan, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize reveals its nominees; and in the US, a beloved literary event is put off for another year. Read our editors’ dispatches from the ground here!

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Taiwan

The 2020 United Daily News Literary Prize has been awarded to the Malaysia-born Sinophone novelist, Chang Kuei-hsing (張貴興), who has been living in Taiwan for the last four decades. The prestigious award went to the author’s latest novel, 野豬渡河 (Wild Boar Crosses the River) which depicts his hometown in Malaysia, Sarawak—a city occupied by the Japanese in the 1940s. Asymptote has previously featured Chang’s “Siren Song” (translated by Anna Gustafson) in our Winter 2016 issue.

The Taiwanese author notable for his reportage literature, Lan Bozhou (藍博洲), will soon have new book published by Taipei’s INK Publishing in July: 尋找二二八失蹤的宋斐如 (Searching for the Missing Song Feiru in the February 28 Incident ). Consistent with Lan’s previous focus on giving a voice to the victims of Taiwan’s White Terror (1947-1987), this new work again inquires into the difficult question of the whereabouts of Song Feiru, a Taiwanese intellectual and founder of a newspaper criticizing the government in the 1940s. The namesake of the book was kidnapped by the Kuomintang and went missing after the outbreak of the infamous February 28 Incident in 1947.

Although the global situation of COVID-19 has been rapidly evolving with uncertainty, Taiwan has luckily arrived at a relatively safe status, and many local activities are resuming this summer as a result. The island-wide screenings of Xin Qi’s (辛奇, 1924-2010) films from mid-July to late-November, and the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival (with the theme of the beloved Italian director, Federico Fellini) from late-July to mid-August, are among the events leading this trend of recovery in Taipei. Xin Qi was one of the few prolific and prominent Taiwanese-language film directors in the 1960s, whose five cross-genre cinematic works have been digitally restored by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, and will be screened around Taiwan’s theatres, both new and old, during the festival. As for the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival, it is a part of the global tribute to Fellini’s 100th birthday anniversary (“Fellini 100”), and will broadcast twenty-four of the director’s films, most of which are 4K versions, freshly restored.  READ MORE…

On Durian Sukegawa, Translation, and Literature in the Face of Crisis

July 9, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Kent Kosack

He said, “I just line up the facts and add flashes of poetry.”

I started working with the educational arm team at Asymptote this past March, when COVID-19 was just declared a global pandemic. As I read through the spring issue, I also kept an eye on the news, watching the US government lurch from outright denial of the disease to a hodgepodge and feckless response—then I came across Alison Watts’s translation of an article based on Durian Sukegawa’s book, Cycling the Road to the Deep North. The piece is a series of vignettes about Sukegawa’s bike tour to Fukushima, in which he tells stories of the lingering destruction from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, the tsunami and earthquake, and the people carrying on their lives in its wake. Stories of the contaminated soil, of trees with toxic leaves. Stories of burned-out schools and shuddered businesses. And—the story still unfolding—of the Japanese government’s response: its ineptitude and indifference to the wishes of its citizens. The similarities to the current COVID-19 crisis were, at first, depressing, but as I reread Alison’s translation of Sukegawa’s words, I was heartened by them. Because though both crises remain dangerously unresolved, it was evidence that there remain people who are asking the necessary questions, telling the stories we need to hear.

Each issue of Asymptote is accompanied by an educators’ guide, a valuable resource for teachers who are interested in bringing world literature into their classrooms. Offering thematic breakdown of the issue’s content, contextual information, lesson plans, and possible discussion questions, Asymptote for Educators is one of our most exciting and collaborative endeavours. Learn more about it here!

Kent Kosack (KK): When I was preparing a lesson plan for the Asymptote Spring 2020 Educator’s Guide, I chose the piece you translated—an excerpt from Durian Sukegawa’s Cycling the Narrow Road to the Deep North; it felt connected to what is happening now, to the COVID-19 crisis.

Alison Watts (AW): Yes, and next year is the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. It’s a timely opportunity.

KK: In more ways than one.

AW: When I first read it in 2018, I knew I wanted to translate it, but I knew it’d be difficult to sell.

KK: How was it received in Japan?

AW: It did win the Japan Essayist Club Prize, but it’s not a huge bestseller or anything. It was published by a small publisher; it’s Fukushima literature. There’s this new genre that has evolved since the disaster in 2011, all kinds of poetry, music, and literature that resulted from Fukushima, and the tsunami and earthquake as well.

KK: I read your Words Without Borders essay about your own personal reaction to the crisis. It seems to have almost coincided with your transition to becoming a full-time literary translator.

AW: I became a full-time literary translator in 2016. In 2015, I was ill for a year and I couldn’t work. At the end of that, I decided that life’s too short. I’m going to do what I want to do, nothing else. Sweet Bean Paste—the novel of Durian’s that I translated—when I read it, I thought: I love this book, I have to translate it, I’m the only person who can translate it [laughs]. I did the synopsis and samples and gave it to the agent and said, please use this to sell the book. Eventually, I got the job to translate it. As it turned out, that was in the beginning of 2016, the year I had decided to devote myself to being a literary translator. It all worked out. Like the gods were sending signals.

KK: Fortuitous. And how difficult was it for you to transition to translating this work versus Sweet Bean Paste?

AW: Essentially, it’s the same style. Durian has a tight, minimalist style. It’s quite difficult to translate because it can come across as too simplistic in English.

KK: Is that from his background in journalism, that more pared-back style?

AW: There’s that, but he’s also a poet. When I asked him before I translated Sweat Bean Paste: “How would you describe your style?” He said, “I just line up the facts and add flashes of poetry.” READ MORE…

Os bichos me fantasticam: On Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark

July 8, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Austyn Wohlers

Both Lispector and Clark use human contact with animals as a way to get closer to a paradoxical self-alienation that leads to self-actualization.

One of the greatest pleasures of a text can result from its echoes throughout other mediums, when we startle upon the themes and traits of our most cherished authors beyond the page. In this essay, Austyn Wohlers traces the dialogue that forms between lauded Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and visual artist Lygia Clark, most notable for their mutual application of animality and wildness.

Clarice Lispector’s fascination with animal life is one of her defining qualities as a writer: readers may be familiar with G.H.’s fateful encounter with a cockroach in The Passion According to G.H., or Lucrécia’s bodily identification with horses in The Besieged City. Her ideas about how animals affect the humans who encounter them were complex, as one can see in this excerpt from her posthumously-published novel A Breath of Life, referencing Lispector’s real-life dog Ulysses:

Contact with animal life is indispensable to my psychic health. My dog reinvigorates me completely . . . All he does is ‘be.’ ‘Being’ is his activity . . . When he falls asleep in my lap I watch over him and his very rhythmical breathing. And—he motionless in my lap—we form a single organic being, a living mute statue.

This description of animal-human contact as a “living mute statue” reminds me of Lispector’s contemporary (and fellow Brazilian) Lygia Clark’s Bicho sculptures. Mostly created in the early 1960s, the Bichos were a series of unique sculptures largely designed to be handled, manipulated, and warmed by the viewer as one would hold a small animal. In The Abandonment of Art, Cornelia Butler writes that she “imagined the encounter with [the Bichos] as something like an exchange between two organisms”—forming, in other words, the same “living mute statue” that Lispector describes. Both Lispector and Clark use human contact with animals as a way to get closer to a paradoxical self-alienation that leads to self-actualization: Clark’s empty-full (vazio-pleno), described by Suely Rolnik as the moment “when the silent incubation of a new reality of feeling is underway,” and Lispector’s wild heart—the thing itself—the it.

The word bicho does not have a direct cognate in English, and is usually translated as “beast,” “critter,” “animal,” or “pet.” The word in Portuguese has a diminutive quality, so the cutesiness imparted by words like “critter” and “pet” convey the tone well, and communicate the lighthearted spirit with which Clark expects viewers to play with the Bichos while palliating—or perhaps humanizing—their more serious, transformative, “living mute statue” nature. Interestingly, the word bicho appears often in Lispector’s writing, and though Lygia Clark’s usage is often translated as “critter,” Lispector’s is translated as the more serious word “animal.” Elizabeth Friis provides a few examples from Lispector’s novel Água viva in her essay “In my Core I have the Strange Impression that I don’t Belong to the Human Species: Clarice Lispector’s Água viva as Life Writing?”:

Ás vezes eletrizo-me over bicho.
Sometimes I get electrified when I see animals.

Os bichos me fantasticam.
Animals fantastricate me.

Não ter nascido bicho é uma minha secreta nostalgia.
Not having been born an animal is a secret nostalgia of mine.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Flickers of Light” by Yasumi Tsuhara

July 7, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Toshiya Kamei

“In that case, you should avoid that tunnel. It’s known for ghost sightings.”

This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you a contemporary ghost story from best-selling author Yasumi Tsuhara. In “Flickers of Light,” our everyman protagonist believes he’s stumbled across a stroke of good fortune when the car of his dreams comes into his possession. But this supposed luck harbours a decidedly unlucky secret. Warned to avoid Kaerimi Tunnel, our protagonist finds himself encountering a chilling memory that may not actually be his own.

In Omiya lives a man dubbed “Count Dracula”—he goes by “Count” among his friends. He makes a living churning out mystery novels. They say he’s well known in his field; you might recognize his name if I were to mention it.

On the other hand, I’m a ne’er-do-well thirty-something man who has never held a regular job, partly because a succession of calamities befell me while I was still in my twenties. Needless to say, my life has nothing whatsoever to do with the publishing industry. Even so, whenever the Count and his hangers-on invite me to unofficial after-parties following movie premieres and award presentations named after somebody famous, I show up just for the fun of it, feeling like a fish out of water. Once I’m there, various hands shove their business cards into mine, dazing me with their illustrious names and titles, while I shove back my card that lists no job title and give them a self-mocking sneer while thinking my life isn’t bad at all.

Speaking of mystery, I met the Count under mysterious circumstances. I almost ran over him. Even though I wasn’t drunk or half asleep behind the wheel, I didn’t see him until it was almost too late. A tall, black-coated figure stood in the flood of crisscrossing headlights as if sprouting out of the road’s surface.

The near miss took place inside a tunnel on the outskirts of Omiya. I was on my way back to Tokyo after removing the sound equipment from an event site. I drove a company-branded Toyota HiAce that belonged to a former college classmate of mine. The president and only full-time employee, he often sent me to this kind of gig.

As I braked hard and skidded to a screeching halt, all the equipment went flying toward the driver’s seat. Even though the Count nimbly stepped aside, I ended up grazing him with the front bumper, pushing him down to the ground. When I jumped out of the car, he was already on his feet.

READ MORE…

The Two Plagues of Evgeny Vodolazkin

July 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by José Vergara

Vodolazkin can imbue the plague with the metaphysical import and apocalyptic logic necessary to his tale.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rewrites our realities, so do writers around the world take up their instruments to render the new world into text. In the following essay, José Vergara discusses the newest work by Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin, Sister of the Four, a existentialist-absurdist play that cohere’s the writer’s familiarity with the pandemic as subject, and the unprecedented facts of what we face today.

This isn’t Eugene Vodolazkin’s first pandemic.

The author’s initial encounter with a brutal, contagious disease took place across fifteenth-century Russia and Europe, the setting of his acclaimed novel Laurus (2012). In it, Vodolazkin chronicles the life of a healer turned holy fool, pilgrim, and monk; Arseny, as he is called in his youth, first loses his parents to the plague, and after training as an herbalist under his grandfather, falls in love with the sole survivor of a village that succumbed to the same pestilence. He then spends his days atoning for what he considers his sins by serving God and miraculously curing the ill. Disease is omnipresent, as Arseny walks fearlessly into plague-stricken homes to do his work. For him, as it is for his world, this illness is something entirely familiar—it is part of everyday life and has its own traditions of suffering, prayer, and death, imbuing the book with a well-suited sense of apocalypticism. Likewise serving as a plot device, it also draws Arseny into the orbit of various characters.

Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the award-winning Russian author and specialist in Old Russian Literature has returned for another round. In doing so, he propels us into the era of corona-literature, a subgenre which is sure to spike in popularity in coming years. Published as the first in a series of four separate plays released weekly as audiobooks and e-books starting May 18, 2020, Sister of the Four is Vodolazkin’s attempt to make sense of our shared descent into this surreal existence. The play focuses on the titular four: a group of patients being treated for COVID-19 at the Albert Camus Hospital for Infectious Diseases, an imagined setting whose name immediately establishes Vodolazkin’s wry humor and self-awareness when it comes to literary precedents. The main characters consist of: a pizza delivery impresario with delusions of grandeur who goes by the name Funghi; a writer who has been having trouble producing original work for a decade and a half—totally unlike Vodolazkin with his impressive output; a man who claims to be a parliamentary deputy; and last, the chief doctor who eventually catches the virus himself and, in an apparent reference to Anton Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6,” becomes part of the very ward under his supervision. To round out the primary cast, the playwright includes a nurse, who, at the end of the first of two acts, announces herself to be Death incarnate.

This motley set of characters, the circumstances that bring them together, and plenty of alcohol contribute to Sister of the Four’s carnivalesque atmosphere, where the specter of death—both theoretical and apparently embodied in the Nurse—motivates discussions on everything from marriage and the qualities of a life worth living to pizza toppings. In the face of their impending end, the characters feel compelled to play a game of confessions, resulting in several reveals in the play’s latter half. All the while, the disorder of the day muddles the characters’ ability to communicate effectively. The addition of a French cognac at the end of act one doesn’t help, even if distracts the heroes from their condition. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 3, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Jiaoyang Li, and Quyen Nguyen

Bringing the latest in literary news from China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam!

Literature has the fortunate habit of making itself known via a variety of media. This week, our editors from around the world introduce a thrilling TV adaptation from one of China’s most promising authors, the protests in Hong Kong making its way through its censored literatures, and a Vietnamese classic that has been underserved by its celebrated translation.

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

This week, Hong Kong is stricken by Beijing’s passing of the sweeping new national security law for the city. The law was unanimously passed on June 30 by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, bypassing Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and without consulting the citizens. Details were not even revealed until 11 p.m. on the same day, to be put into effect on July 1. The details of the national security law indicate that the new law has broad offences, can override Hong Kong law, allows trials to be closed to the public, and requires the establishment of a National Security Office in Hong Kong directly controlled by Beijing, among other key points. The priority given to the new law can possibly erode Hong Kong’s judicial independence and be in conflict with Hong Kong’s common law tradition.
Fear towards the establishment of the new national security law has been spreading since the passing of the proposal in late May during the National People’s Congress.

Critics expect that the law will adversely influence Hong Kong’s freedom of expression and citizens’ rights to oppose decisions or policies determined by the government or China. Under such an intense political climate, quite a number of political works have been recently published, striving to defend free speech and publication, including Sociology professor Dr. Chan Kin Man’s Letters from the Prison, as he was sentenced to sixteen months imprisonment for his participation in the Umbrella Movement; and media professional Ryan Lau’s That Night in Yuen Long, which is a work of documentary literature on the 2019 Yuen Long attack.

Meanwhile, regardless of the continued threat of COVID-19, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council decided that the Hong Kong Book Fair would be held as scheduled from July 15 to July 21, under the theme of, “Inspirational and Motivational Reading”. However, with the implement of the new national security law, the publication sector is concerned about the displaying of politically sensitive books at the Book Fair being potentially prosecuted. Some publishers have already suspended the production of some books related to the anti-extradition movement and have given up displaying books related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Although the actual impact on Hong Kong’s freedom of speech is yet to be fully revealed, tangible effects of fear induced self-censorship are pervasive. READ MORE…

Luis de Lión: Unearthing the Lost Poems of a Disappeared Poet

July 2, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by José García Escobar

Luis de Lión is the desaparecido number 135. Luis de Lión was questioned and tortured for twenty-two days. He had diabetes.

Though every human tragedy has its witnesses, too often those who speak the truth about them are forcefully silenced, whether by censorship, imprisonment, or murder. During the brutal Guatemalan Civil War, the violence and repression inflicted on the populace was felt heavily in the national literature, which saw many great writers suffer in its wake. In this essay, José García Escobar reports on one of the disappeared, the prolific poet Luis de Lión, and his daughter’s poignant search for her father’s lost texts.

Mayarí de León, the daughter of the Guatemalan writer, poet, and teacher Luis de Lión, was seven years old when her father was kidnapped for the first time, in June of 1973. He was kept in prison for eight days.

“When he was released, many of his friends came over,” Mayarí tells me over the phone. “We were living at my aunt’s house in Zone 1, and they came and talked to him.” She also remembers that Ana María Rodas, poet and friend of Luis’s, was there. “She cut a carnation and put it in my hair,” she says.

Mayarí doesn’t remember much else—quietness. Solemnity. Downcast eyes. She was too young and didn’t get to hear the grown-ups’ conversation, and probably wouldn’t even have been able to record more than a phrase in her memory. But she understood what was going on: men had captured her papá. Mayarí claims that from that moment on, she had nightmares. Dreams of ravines filled with dead bodies woke her in the middle of the night.

In 1973, thirteen years into the Guatemalan Civil War, the government and Guatemalan Army often targeted intellectuals and dissidents. Other writers such as Otto René Castillo and Roberto Obregón had been killed already, and many would follow, including Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and José María López Valdizón. Then, the thirty-four-year-old Luis was an upcoming literary talent, a prime example of how Guatemalan writers, despite the lack of access to publishers or editors, continued to produce work of high quality. Luis himself, by 1973, had published two short story collections, and his novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá had received second place in Quetzaltenango’s Juegos Florales in 1972—the first place having been declared void.

“My hands started sweating too,” Mayarí says. “Whenever I’m nervous or excited, whenever I’m taken by extreme emotion, my hands sweat. This started after my father’s first kidnapping.”

Eight days after Luis was taken into custody by the Policía Nacional, he was released. Thanks to the intervention of the Universidad de San Carlos’ student’s association, he was allowed to walk out; Luis had been kidnapped alongside the association’s general secretary. “He came out all bruised and thin,” Mayarí says. “But I know that this first detention confirmed his ideology and social calling.”

Mayarí claims that her father never told her of his days in detention, but she has come to know of Luis’s struggle through his unpublished poems and stories, collected over a search lasting for the last fifteen years. From it stems Luis’s latest publication El papel de la belleza—The Role of Beauty: an anthology of his poetry, which spans from 1972 to the very last poem he wrote before his second kidnapping in 1984. El papel de la belleza, in true de Lión style, shows many of his typical concerns and interests, his militancy and ideology, his attention to social issues and indigenous struggles, his care for the quotidian, his devastating and scenic use of language: minimalistic, casual, relaxed, always elegant. READ MORE…

On Hunter School: Indigenous Stories from Taiwan

July 1, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Saul Thompson

The Chinese language sings an altogether different tune in the mouths and hands of indigenous Taiwanese storytellers.

Hunter School by Sakinu Ahronglong, translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk, Honford Star, 2020

“I’m dumb,” I told an editor to whom I had shown an essay. “I haven’t read much, and the things I write nobody reads. I can’t write essays like other people.”

“Sakinu, why would you want to be like anyone else?” she said. “Everything in you is literature, things other people don’t have and can’t imitate. Sakinu, let everyone know all the things you keep hidden, let your life story, and Paiwan history, come flowing out of your pen.”

Translation specializes in the improbable, bringing faraway stories to unlikely audiences. The English-language translation of Hunter School (superbly crafted by veteran translator Darryl Sterk) goes further than most in this regard, because although Hunter School was originally written in Chinese, the author has no Chinese heritage, and his people have until recently had no voice in the world of Chinese-language literature, despite being part of the Chinese world; his name is Sakinu Ahronglong, and he is an indigenous man of the Paiwan ethnicity.

Like all of Taiwan’s many indigenous ethnicities, the Paiwan are an Austronesian people more closely related to the Maori of New Zealand than to the Han Chinese who now compose the majority of Taiwan’s population. Though their voices have been marginalized, they remain inheritors of living wisdom, passed from mouth to ear for millennia. Now, Sakinu’s stories have made the quantum leap, first from fireside storytelling to Chinese text, then finally into English, and they are here to show us a new way to relate to our planet and to people who have lived closest to nature for the longest time. This book is a fighter. It had to be. It has fought its way tooth-and-claw through the brambles of oppression—cultural cleansing, intolerant Christians, economic exploitation, etc. etc.—and against all the odds, here it is.

Hunter School begins with the author, Sakinu Ahronglong, in school. Flying squirrel school. Getting to class isn’t a simple commute. Luckily, young Sakinu has a guide in the form of his father, a consummate hunter who holds deep compassion for the animals he meets on his forays, and who teaches Sakinu many things, like the names of the bigwigs in local monkey society. The early chapters are short, leading readers on a tour of Sakinu’s mountain forest childhood and his wilderness education. As the book progresses and Sakinu’s world expands, the chapters stay short. They weave a sequence of life stories, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between a wild ancestral homeland and modern life in a globalized, post-industrial country. In the wilderness, we get to know a world that, for all its wildness, is still very much lived-in (and has been for thousands of years before the Han Chinese arrived in Taiwan in the sixteenth century). These stories show us a new way of imagining the wild realms of mountain and forest, which many of us are only acquainted with (and fond of) from various ventures into the “backcountry.” Of course, it’s only the “backcountry” if you don’t live there. In these pages, we see how people like Sakinu’s grandfather used to live entirely civilized lives in the wild before the time when much of the world’s nature was cordoned off from human society, emptied of most of its indigenous residents, and divided up into national parks, commercial forestries, and mines. READ MORE…