This week, we bring you news from India and Hong Kong! In India, Suhasini Patni reports on recent controversies in the treatment of translators, while in Hong Kong, Charlie Ng highlights the opening of a politically charged museum for visual culture and the release of a new cross-genre poetry collection. Read on to find out more!
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
Translated literature has been enjoying a boom in India ever since the launch of the JCB Literary Prize. This year, the winning novel is Delhi: A Soliloquy, written by M. Mukundan and translated from Malayalam by Fathima E.V. and Nandakumar K. Although the JCB Prize is committed to honoring translated literature, many noted that the translators were not called onstage to receive the award with the author. Fathima E.V. tweeted: “Frankly, I expected to be called onstage, in keeping with the JCB foundation’s stated commitment towards translated literature. It would have been fitting finale for a graciously organised function in which all the authors and translators were well taken care of throughout.” This incident feeds into the larger question of how translators are treated globally and recent demands for fairer wages and due recognition.
Sanjoy Roy, of Teamwork, the company that organizes the Jaipur Literature Festival across the world, also noted: “Translations earlier were not necessarily good ones, they’re excellent now. The JCB Prize has brought that out,” when discussing the festival for 2022. The festival will return to the city in a hybrid mode, with online and in-person events, and the venue will change from Diggi Palace to Hotel Clarks Amer.
Certainly, translations have gained wider popularity in India during recent years. One of the most anticipated novels of the year was Resolve by Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Resolve is about how marriage is turned into a social contract. Marimuthu, the protagonist, is on the quest to look for a wife. But he constantly must reevaluate his marital prospects when faced with rejections. The novel explores the challenges in a society afflicted by patriarchy and caste.
India also lost one of its most prominent writers from the Nayi Kahani movement of Hindi literature when Mannu Bhandari passed away on 15 November in Gurugram. Her work detailed the lives of middle-class working women and their ambitions. Financially independent women were still tethered to their social responsibilities, so their ambitions often conflicted with their love lives. It is these women that Bhandari had been known to present with a keen literary sensibility. Neelam Bhandari, who translated several of her stories, wrote a tribute for Scroll.in.
Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s highly anticipated new visual culture museum, M+ museum, was opened to the public on 12 November. Located in the West Kowloon Cultural District, the new museum of modern and contemporary visual culture is one of the largest of its kind in the world. Its wide range of collections encompasses visual art, design, architecture, and film. The museum also aims to foster interdisciplinary exploration between the visual and performing arts. Although the galleries in M+ do not refrain from politically charged themes, such as Kacey Wong’s floating house installation Paddling Home, which comments on the housing problem in Hong Kong, and May Fung’s video installation She Said Why Me, which contains footage of police and protesters in the 80s, artworks produced amidst recent political unrest are not included, as reported in a recent review from The Art Newspaper. The long-term impact of Hong Kong’s political restrictions and censorship on the development of the museum is yet to unfold.
Hong Kong based magazine, Zolima Citymag, published the fourth article of the “Hong Kong’s Great Writers” series recently, featuring fiction writer Dung Kai-cheung. The article discusses Dung’s attentiveness in his works, as well as his motifs including objects, the city as a convergence, and how the writer’s works reflect his character and literary influences. Dung is a prolific writer, but English translations of his works are relatively few. Currently, these include Cantonese Love Stories, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera, and the forthcoming The Catalog: A Record of Dreams of Splendour. However, with recent interest in Hong Kong literature, it is anticipated that more translations of Dung’s work will serve English readers in the future.
Cultural representation of Hong Kong has always taken many forms. Disabled Hong Kong illustrator and writer, Sophia Hotung, recently published her art collection The Hong Konger Anthology. The work includes seventy prints that parody the covers of The New Yorker magazine with the title The Hong Konger, which are presented alongside the illustrator’s own city poems. Local English-language bookstore, Bookazine, will host an “Author Talk and Book Signing” session on 4 December for the book launch.
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