This week, our editors from around the globe report on recent literary awards in Hong Kong, examine the links between the literary scenes in Spain and Romania, and reflect on the passing of a revolutionary Iraqi poet. Read on to find out more!
Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong
The awards ceremony of the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards was conducted online on 22 May. Renowned Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheng Yin) was honored with the Life Achievement Award for her tremendous contribution to Hong Kong literature. Moreover, essayist Tung Chiao won the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts, and fiction writer Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung was awarded Artist of the Year for the literary arts category. While two works by Tse, Snow and Shadow and The Door, are available in the English language, Tung Chiao’s works have yet to be translated, despite the fact that he is already a highly acclaimed author in Chinese literary circles.
In an upcoming event organised by the House of Hong Kong Literature, Tse will talk about her newest book, The Ghost in the Umbrella, a collection of short stories in the magical realist style. The collection explores the lives and emotions of people in the city with references to Hong Kong’s political turmoils. The author will speak with another Hong Kong writer, Tang Siu Wa, about various themes in the book, including the collective trauma of Hong Kong people.
The concern for Hong Kong’s bleak political future was also the context for another literary event, a poetry session organised by Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine on 29 May titled “Writing Good Poetry in a Bad Era”. Lok Fung and Chris Song, who are both literary critics and poets, were in a dialogue regarding the metaphorical and healing power of poetry.
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine
Palestinians feel, even more than some Arabs, that the revered Iraqi poet Muthaffar (also spelled Muzaffar) al-Nawwab is theirs. After all, his famous 100-line “Jerusalem, the Bride of Your Arabism,” wrongly circulated as a standalone poem, rooted the Palestinian cause in modern popular Arab consciousness possibly before Mahmoud Darwish’s resistance poetry.
A household name throughout Iraq and an influential poet across the Arab world, al-Nawwab is especially famous among leftists and activists across generations for his powerful revolutionary poems and scathing invectives against Arab regimes and dictators. Born in 1934, he studied literature in Baghdad and worked as a teacher, but in the 1960s he spent years of his youth in Iraqi prisons because of his communist stance. He was sentenced to death, yet the free soul in him kept on fighting. Alongside fellow political prisoners, al-Nawwab dug a tunnel under his cell and escaped prison, then fled the country in 1970. Shunning mainstream cultural circles and living in exile in various locations for the last five decades, he went to Iraq only on visits—that is until his latest trip. On 21 May 2022, Muthaffar al-Nawwab’s coffin arrived in Baghdad from the UAE, where he had lived for over a decade and where he had died the day before.
Al-Nawab wrote poetry filled with revolutionary fervour, social anger, satire, and rebellion against injustice and corruption. During most of his life, al-Nawwab’s poems were banned in most Arab countries. Nevertheless, from the 1970s onward, they were widely circulated on cassettes, to the extent that scholarly studies cite these recordings. Except for the early poems in the Iraqi dialect, al-Nawwab never published, or even authorized, a collection of his own works.
In response to some critics who denounced his use of curses and insults when writing about the corrupt regimes across the Arab world, al-Nawwab wrote:
Forgive my angst, wine, and anger
and my harsh words
Some will call them
scurrilous
Fine
Show me a situation more obscene than the one we’re in
Read excerpts of al-Nawwab’s poems here, here, and here , or watch him reciting (in Arabic) the famous lines about Jerusalem here.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania
Romanian writers increasingly speak Spanish these days, while the Spaniards are enjoying more and more Romanian literature in translation. The 81st edition of the book festival Feria del Libro in Madrid, the theme of which is “voyages,” is taking place between May 27 and June 12 and features hundreds of book releases and events including a strong Romanian section under the aegis of the Madrid Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR Madrid). The events involves, among other remarkable releases, Un hueco en los huesos / O gaura in oase (A Hole in the Bones), a hot-off-the-press poetry anthology edited by established poet Ioan Es. Pop and legendary unorthodox feminist Angela Marinescu and translated into Spanish by Corina Oproae; a very timely work on the geopolitics of Russia and Eastern Europe from Silvia Marcu; a comics presentation/performance co-authored by Romanian Maria Surducan and Spaniard Natacha Bustos; and Primavera en Praga (Spring in Prague), a poetry collection by the widely translated Dinu Flamand translated into Spanish by Cătălina Iliescu. These events come right after another major Romanian-Spanish milestone, the international colloquium Lucian Blaga – entre la tradición y la modernidad presided over by the Romanian Embassy and celebrating the eponymous Romanian poet, philosopher, and playwright of the twentieth century for whom the Association of Romanian Writers and Artists in Spain is named. The event was co-organized by the latter alongside ICR Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau continues to fervently animate Romanian-Spanish-international literary exchanges and consistently respond to our requests for updates. One of the highlights of the event was the launch of a new collection of selected poetry by Blaga, La luz que siento (The Light I Sense), translated by the above-mentioned Oproae.
Back in Bucharest, writers and publishers are gearing up for the annual international festival Bookfest, which is slated to run from June 1 to June 5. The schedule announces over 100 Romanian and international events every day, and the capital’s edition is complemented by local ones all across Romania as well as in the neighboring Romanian-speaking Republic of Moldova. Further Romanian-international initiatives will be previewed on the occasion, and past Asymptote contributor Flavia Teoc recently announced the upcoming release of an anthology of contemporary Romanian poetry she edited and translated into Danish.
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