This week our writers bring you the latest news from Poland and Thailand! In Poland, Julia Sherwood takes us through the Conrad Festival, the 2021 winner of the prestigious NIKE Prize, and the launch of the first ecopoetics course in the country. In Thailand, Peera Songkünnatham explains how an innovative series of illustrated children’s books have risked censorship for their depiction of government protests. Read on to find out more!
Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland
Tomorrow, 24 October, is the closing day of the 13th edition of the Conrad Festival that started in Kraków on 18 October headlined “The Nature of the Future”, which has sought to “imagine the shape of our near and distant future, all while thinking about the changes that we are going to witness in the natural environment”, as well as highlighting themes of feminism. International literary heavyweights—Han Kang, Rebecca Solnit, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Valeria Luiselli, Helena Janeczek, Elias Khoury, Lisa Appignanesi, Behrouz Boochani, Brandon Hobson, George Saunders and Petra Hůlová—as well as acclaimed Polish writers such as Julia Fiedorczuk, Mikołaj Grynberg and Dorota Masłowska have been taking part in discussions and presentations, held mostly online (the recordings can be watched on the festival’s YouTube channel.)
2021 NIKE Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award went to Kajś, Opowieść o Górnym Śląsku (Somewhere, A Tale of Upper Silesia), in which its author, Zbigniew Rokita, searches for his Silesian roots and grapples with his own ambivalent feelings about his native region. The decision to shortlist only one work of fiction while all the other books, including the winning title, represented nonfiction, caused some controversy. However, this is hardly surprising given the strong position of literary reportage in contemporary Polish literature. The genre even has its own award, the Kapuściński Prize (this year it went to Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland , translated into Polish by Martyna Tomczak) and its own teaching institution, the Warsaw Institute of Reportage whose founders and teachers include the most celebrated reportage authors Mariusz Szczygieł, Paweł Goźliński, and Wojciech Tochman.
Last year Filip Springer, one of the Institute’s teachers launched a new course, The School of Ecopoetics, the first of its kind in Poland. Feeling the need to explore what individuals and writers can do to prevent an ecological disaster, Springer, a writer and photographer (and past Asymptote contributor), approached the poet, translator, and literary critic Julia Fiedorczuk who is a leading exponent of ecopoetics in Poland (and also a past Asymptote contributor) to design the programme. Although the course was aimed at writers, poets, journalists, and critics, the organizers stressed that the School of Ecopoetics “is not a school of writing”. Instead, “its goal is to help the students develop ecocritical reflection, to change their way of thinking by drawing attention to the relations between human beings and non-human nature.” Judging by the enthusiastic responses shared by some of the first twenty graduates on the School’s Facebook page, the mix of traditional lectures and fieldwork (hiking through forests, sleeping in tents and discussions around the campfire) held from June 2020 to October 2021, was a resounding success. Recruitment for next year’s course starts in November.
Poet and runner Małgorzata Lebda set out on a real-life adventure in ecopoetics by running the length of the Vistula, Poland’s main river. Her ultramarathon project Czytanie wody (Reading the River) was her way of responding to the climate crisis and plans for regulating the river. “I run in order to observe the river and experience nature with all my senses,” Lebda said as she set out on 1 September from the river’s source in Barania Góra in the Silesian Beskid mountains. By the time she reached the Gulf of Gdańsk, where the river flows into the Baltic, on 29 September, she had covered 1113 km, the equivalent of 26 marathons in 28 days. The poet documented her journey in daily posts on Instagram and in the journal Pismo, illustrated with pictures by photographer Rafał Siderski, who accompanied her on her adventure, keeping an eye on her intake of food and liquids.
The fact that the father of Polish sci-fi was also acutely aware of the climate crisis may be less well known. In a 2000 interview Stanisław Lem said: “ . . . we must realize that we are disrupting the ecological balance of our environment in a terrible way.” As Lem (1921-2006) was born a hundred years ago, Poland has organized an array of events under the umbrella Year of Lem. The Polish Cultural Institute in New York has released an illuminating discussion of three of his major works with literature scholar and Lem expert Bożena Shallcross. The video, like the whole excellent series, Encounters with Polish Literature, hosted by David A. Goldfarb, is highly recommended. And for an introduction to Lem, the journal Przekrój has brought its English-language readers a translation of his story 137 seconds (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones).
This year also sees the centenary of another great Polish writer of the post-war generation, poet, playwright and translator Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014). Those not familiar with his work can start their acquaintance by watching this one-hour film (with English subtitles) documenting his years in the Silesian town of Gliwice, showing the impact of his work in Poland and beyond and letting his charming and modest personality shine.
Two outstanding examples of Polish nonfiction have recently appeared in English: in Mud Sweeter than Honey (trans. Zosia Krasnodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones) Margo Rejmer paints a vivid and harrowing picture of life under Albanian ruler Enver Hoxha’s brutal regime told through the voices of those who experienced it—victims, rebels and perpetrators (read an excerpt in our latest issue). The book, published by Restless Books (US) and Quercus Publishing (UK), has already garnered deservedly rave reviews, as has Marcin Wicha’s Things I Didn’t Throw Out (read an excerpt in Asymptote). And students of Polish literature with lots of money to spare can reach for the newly-published Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature. And last but not least, as Jennifer Croft’s hugely anticipated translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob is due out soon, The New Yorker has already published an excerpt from this monumental work.
Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand
A series of children’s picture books made news in late September when they were flagged by the Thai Deputy Minister of Education for “misleading” content—which is to say, an unabashedly positive depiction of anti-government protesters. After an official investigation, the government announced last week that three books in the series were beneficial to children, while the other five were classed as books “to be wary of” (ควรระวัง) as they might instil violence. Within days of the free publicity, the books’ first print run sold out, with more than 17,000 copies purchased via the project’s Facebook page วาดหวังหนังสือ or “Hope Books.”
Created by สองขา or “Two Legs” (Srisamorn Soffer), an author and schoolteacher based in Israel, the project injects something new into Thai society in more ways than one. It comes alive with the synergy between artists and activists. They confidently feature drawings of government crackdowns and nursery rhymes with words such as “democracy” and “human rights.” Then there’s the price: only 700 baht (US$21) for the eight-book set, with twenty-four colour pages per book. This project cuts through the class stratifications of children’s picture books between pricey imports with open-ended stories and affordable made-in-Thailand tales of moral and behavioural instruction. This division, argues psychiatrist Prasert Palitponganpim, is not only emblematic of unequal childhoods; it also severely limits what Thai authors and illustrators have been able to do—until now.
Instead of ideological content, what actually sticks for children, according to Prasert, is the gap in and between words and images to be filled by speculation and imagination. Here, the images are the real stars, with each book created by a different illustrator. Of particular note is เด็กๆ มีความฝัน (Children Have Dreams) illustrated by Mimininii. It is one of the “safe” books, yet includes many visual details evoking the 2020 protests. Each spread is a panorama full of little characters up to something. As an eight-year-old ends her review, “Oh, also, I really like the drawings. They look real, and every corner has tales of its own.”
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: