Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Bringing news from Argentina, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

Book fairs, festivals, competitions, new publicationsthe literary world this week is filled with a flurry of events and announcements. From the ongoing debate between culture and commerce in Bueno Aires, to new releases from Hong Kong icons Dung Kai-Cheung and Xi Xi, to a celebration of poetry debuts in Haskovo, to a renewal of a beloved book festival in Karlskrona, the world of letters has no shortage of things to offer.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Buenos Aires

In his opening speech at the 46th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, author Guillermo Saccomanno issued a complaint: “When we talk about a fair,” he declared, “we’re talking about commerce. This is a trade fair rather than a cultural one, even if it claims to be the latter. At any rate, it represents an understanding of culture as commerce.” What’s more, he added, the country’s dire economic situation does not bode well for the Spanish-speaking world’s largest industry event.

Saccomanno was both right and wrong: right that the Fair’s pursuits are largely commercial, wrong that they’d be somewhat of a bust this time around. Perhaps to make up for two years of pandemic torpor, over 1.3 million visitors crowded La Rural’s sprawling halls in just under three weeks, from April 28 to May 16—a 30% increase relative to pre-pandemic figures. Sales, too, went up by about 10-20%.

In addition to bestselling genre sensations (American John Katsenbach among them), the Fair featured critically acclaimed writers from over forty countries. Stand-outs included Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Chileans Diamela Eltit and Paulina Flores, Spaniard Jorge Carrión, and locals Mariana Enriquez, Selva Almada, and Guillermo Martínez. There were over 1,500 book stands on display, helmed by everything from multimedia conglomerates to artisanal press co-ops, as well as over 1,000 programmed events that spanned readings, conferences, panels, book signings, and courses for every taste and age group.

It would be impossible, given this near embarrassment of riches, to mention just one or two based on quality alone. I’ll appeal to our journal’s métier, then, and focus on a few events related to the art (and, yes, the commerce) of translation.

First off, over the course of three days, the Argentine Association of Translators and Interpreters (AATI) hosted the seventh edition of its Jornadas de Traducción Editorial (Editorial Translation Conference). Topics ran the gamut from the strictly editorial (e.g., writing for translators, editing translated books) to the financial (e.g., funding, contract negotiations) to the critical (e.g., the rise in graphic novel translations, the underrepresentation of certain languages in the local market). Meanwhile, the ninth edition of the Fair’s Diálogo de Escritoras y Escritores de Latinoamérica (Latin American Writers in Conversation) opened with a roundtable discussion on transnational literature. Cuban Marcial Gala, Peruvian Diego Trelles Paz, Argentine-American Mike Wilson, and Chilean Gonzalo León talked about how living and writing outside their native countries has impacted their work.

Finally, the fifteenth edition of the Festival Internacional de Poesía, organized by poet Miguel Gaya, featured the roundtable “Traducir(se): poetas leen poetas” (“[Self-]Translation: Poets Reading Poets”). In this brand new addition to the festival’s roster, a series of emerging poets read their own translations of more established peers. Jorge Aulicino, for instance, read work by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Silvia Camerotto tackled William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; Inés Garland and Ignacio Di Tullio went with Sharon Olds.

“Argentina has a long tradition of reading poets who work in other languages,” said Gaya. “We also boast a long line of translators and promoters of [their] work. Honoring this state of affairs with a reading struck me as an act of justice,” he ended. Swap “poets” for “authors,” “reading” for “series of events,” and he could’ve been talking about the Fair at large.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Hong Kong:

Dung Kai-Cheung, one of Hong Kong’s most prolific writers, is set to release A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On, the English translation of his vignette prose collection The Catalog, published in 1999 (the collection was later known as 《夢華錄》). Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, A Catalog comprises ninety-nine short sketches of life in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the 1997 handover. Each snapshot is centered around consumer products or pop culture ephemera from the era—Hello Kitty, Air Jordans, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk—and features protagonists navigating whirlwind romances or dreamscapes of urban life.

In a magazine column, Dung mentions that the concept of The Catalog references Meng Yuanlao’s The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor《東京夢華錄》, a work from the early Southern Song Dynasty in the eleventh century, which offers nostalgic accounts of affluent life and festivals in the Chinese capital. Some of the vignettes from The Catalog have also appeared in Cantonese Love Stories: Twenty-five Vignettes of a City, a thinner volume released in 2017, also translated by McDougall and Hansson. Once released, A Catalog will be Dung’s third full-length work in the English language.

Xi Xi also has a new short story collection, Stone and Peach Blossom《石頭與桃花》, compiling fourteen stories previously published in periodicals and newspapers between 1961 and 2019. The collection is put together by poet and critic Ho Fuk Yan, who Xi Xi personally entrusted with the task. Out shortly after The Imperial Astronomer《欽天監》, Xi Xi’s latest novel, Stone and Peach Blossom is intended to be a proper compilation of her short fiction, a part of her oeuvre which may have only appeared in discontinued print. In Ho’s words, the collection takes its title from two of Xi Xi’s short stories, featuring a stone and peach blossoms respectively, evoking an imagery of vibrance blooming from between the cracks.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Although some of us in Eastern Europe were forced to experience the reality of what T. S. Eliot called the “cruelest month,” Bulgaria remained hopeful and said goodbye to April by celebrating the fiftieth edition of the renowned festival for poetry debuts, Southern Spring. The event, which, as tradition has it, takes place in the city of Haskovo, gathering together more than forty-five young poets from all parts of the country and presenting them with the thrilling opportunity to present their work.

In an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio, Maria Valcheva, deputy mayor of the Haskovo Municipality, explained that “this national competition, together with the special Literary Days that accompany it, is a truly unique event and the only Bulgarian forum that gives young poets, writers, critics, and just about everyone interested in the literary arts the chance to express themselves in front of a wider audience for the first time.” She added that “Haskovo is becoming a nationally acknowledged center for literature and even art in general—since, throughout the years, many debutants have been awarded for their drawings or paintings.”

The 2022 winner in the prose category was Yoanna Elmi for her novel Made of Guilt, which revolves around the life of a domestically abused child during the transitional period toward democracy, in Bulgaria after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When it came to the world of metrical compositions, Eva Gocheva was the poet whose work won the hearts of the jury. Her collection A Completely Different Story was described by the publisher and journalist Valentin Dishev as a book “devoted to everyday miracles, sadness, helplessness, but also profound insights and perseverance. Softly and delicately, but not without audacity, the poems take us through the various registers of life and being, only to remind us that the self must remain open to the meaningful.”

And indeed—what could be more important than the unrelenting search for meaning?

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Last weekend, Bok och hav (Book and Sea)—the book festival in Karlskrona, southern Sweden—returned after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Since the festival was last held in 2019, the format has changed: there were more events for children this year than previously, and writers from a broader range of genres were invited to participate. The festival’s first day, Friday 13, had the theme of horror fiction. Saturday was packed with seminars and writer talks, and on Sunday, the festival concluded with a city walk, inspired by the classic tale The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson (1906) by Selma Lagerlöf—one of Sweden’s most significant writers, and the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the walk, students read excerpts from the book in both the original Swedish as well as in Ukrainian. After financial difficulties in earlier years, the festival is now run by volunteers, but the hope is that Bok och hav will grow gradually in the future.

Writer, playwright, poet, and artist August Strindberg, a contemporary with Selma Lagerlöf and internationally known for his modernist plays like Miss Julie (1888) and The Ghost Sonata (1907), is the focus of a new podcast called Bläck Metal, which premiered last week. Strindberg’s collected works consists of seventy-two volumes, and the aim of the podcast is to dedicate each episode to one or two of his works. The concept, as the hosts Teodor Stig-Matz and David Andersson explain, is to talk about their readings of Strindberg in a way that makes the podcast relevant and entertaining even to listeners unfamiliar with the author’s work. They will not assume that the listener has read Strindberg, and they will explore the time and the context of his books in an accessible way. Stig-Matz and Andersson say that they are not Strindberg experts themselves; instead, they look forward to learning about him along with the listeners.

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