This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Lebanon, the Vietnamese diaspora, and France. In Lebanon, Jadaliyya has published an essay on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and Lebanese author Nasri Atallah has been included in a new anthology, Haramcy; in the Vietnamese diaspora, December 6 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, a prominent Vietnamese scholar who helped to improve the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe; and in France, whilst bookshops have suffered from national lockdowns, a new translation of poems by contemporary poet Claire Malroux has been released. Read on to find out more!
MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon
Arab sci-fi lovers rejoice! An Arabic translation of the late American science fiction author Octavia Butler’s Kindred is coming out with Takween Publishing. Dr. Mona Kareem Kareem, a writer, literary scholar, and Arabic-English literary translator, worked on the Arabic manuscript during her residency at Princeton University. She will be holding an online talk, “To Translate Octavia Butler: Race, History, and Sci-Fi,” on December 7. Tune in as you wait for the manuscript with sci-fi jitters! In other translation news, Kevin Michael Smith, a scholar and translator of global modernist poetry, translated two poems by Saadi Youssef for Jadaliyya. Yousef is a prolific writer, poet, and political activist from Iraq and we are delighted to see more of his work profiled in English. Also on Jadaliyya is this beautiful rumination on the late Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi and his political imagination. Abu Madi wrote spellbinding poetry and was part of the twentieth-century Mahjar movement in the United States, which included the renowned Lebanese author, Gibran Khalil Gibran.
In publishing news, Bodour Al-Qasimi, founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, an Emirati publishing house for Arabic books, has been announced as the president of the International Publishers Association! Al-Qasimi has tirelessly worked on expanding the scope of the Arab publishing industry and we are happy to see her achieve this feat. Award-winning artist and cultural entrepreneur, Zahed Sultan, is seeking to release Haramcy, an anthology with twelve writers from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, including Lebanese author Nasri Atallah. It is set to be published with Unbound Books and the anthology addresses pertinent themes of love, invisibility, and belonging. In the spirit of the holidays, if you are feeling generous and capable of donating, then consider contributing to the Haramcy Fund.
We know the holidays are upon us and you are looking forward to cozying up with a book or two (or five in our case!). We have some new Arabic literature in translation for you to read during the holidays! The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize shortlist has been announced! Another shortlist we are excited about is the Warwick Women in Translation Prize, which features Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Sudanese author, Rania Mamoun, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora
December 6, 2020 marks the 183th birthday of Petrus Ký, also called Trương Vĩnh Ký, whose prolific achievements as scholar, translator, and publisher helped broaden the cultural understanding between French-colonized Vietnam and Europe. His vanguard efforts popularized chữ quốc ngữ, or modern Romanized script—leading to its official adoption as Vietnam’s national language in the early twentieth century.
Petrus Ký’s life reflects the complicated history of modern Vietnam, his legacy literally embodying the contested notion of translator as traitor. Born in 1837, the son of a mandarin, Petrus Ký studied the Chinese script but converted to Catholicism after his father’s untimely death. In 1851—when he turned fourteen—Petrus Ký was granted a scholarship to pursue higher studies at Penang Seminary, Malaysia, then the center of Roman Catholic training in Southeast Asia. Here Petrus Ký excelled as a polyglot, mastering Greek, Latin, French, English, Spanish, Burmese, Khmer, Malay, Thai, Tamil, Hindi, among others.
At the height of his career, Petrus Ký served as translator and mediator between the Vietnamese monarchy and the French colonizers, advocating a peaceful approach to preserve Confucian tradition and self-rule for Vietnam. He also authored, translated, and published approximately 120 works in modern Vietnamese. However, Petrus Ký’s cultural dexterity, Catholic faith, and friendship with Paul Bert—the progressive resident-general representing the French Republic in colonized Vietnam—rendered him suspect and eventually caused him to withdraw from public life. In 1898, at the age of sixty-one, Petrus Ký died, disillusioned and bankrupt in Saigon, his epitaph Miseremini Mei Saltem Vos Amici Mei echoing the Book of Job (“Have Mercy on Me, O Ye My Friends”). Today Petrus Ký is still a divided figure, commemorated by the Vietnamese diaspora, but considered a traitor by the Vietnamese government.
If Petrus Ký’s legacy is still being defined by ideological concerns, historian John Kremers Whitmore, who died in November 2020, was able to forge an academic path unencumbered by politics. During the height of the Vietnam War—when Whitmore began his research on pre-modern Vietnamese history—antiwar activists had popularized an image of Vietnam as a stable and homogeneous nation, whose struggle against the West simply extended its longstanding fight for independence from China. In debunking this view, Whitmore’s textual approach suggests the idea of Vietnamese nationalism as a fluid and multilingual concept. While Whitmore’s insight is considered controversial in Vietnam, it has influenced other Vietnamese studies specialists, who support a holistic, regional, temporally situated outlook, instead of a linear, centralized, ideological construct of the Vietnamese nation.
Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from France
With the risk of France being overwhelmed by a second wave of the pandemic, French president Emmanuel Macron declared a new lockdown for at least until the end November. Although measures of this new lockdown began to be eased from November 28, this lockdown was a massive blow for businesses such as bookshops that weren’t classified as “essential businesses.” The main consequences of being categorized “non-essential” was the impossibility of keeping doors open to the public. Anger then grew among independent bookshops at the sight of large food stores and supermarkets still being able to sell books and media to the public. In order to achieve a fair position between independent bookstores and supermarkets, the French government promptly decided to close these cultural aisles in supermarkets. For many, this decision was hardly a solution, and cultural and political actors vocalised their anger. Since March, there has been a surge The survival of the creative and cultural sectors has been at the center of debates regarding the handling of this pandemic in France, as France’s strict lockdown measures were sometimes perceived as too strict, and as the first support measures announced in April started to look insufficient in the face of an eight-month-long pandemic.
On a more positive note, this November, the publication I was really looking forward to getting my hands on is Claire Malroux’s Daybreak: New and Selected Poems, translated from French by Marilyn Hacker (read her translations from French in Asymptote). This bilingual collection presents Malroux’s work that spans her earlier production as well as her very recent work. The emotional scenery of the selected poems, as well as her work on displaying the inner workings of memory, is quite perspicacious. Marilyn Hacker’s introduction is very correct by calling it a “disciplined lightness.”
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