This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!
Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden
As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.
Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”
Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India
Ever since the right-wing, pro-Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, freedom of the press has been under constant attack in India. Journalists who write against the regime have been charged with bogus crimes and wrongfully imprisoned, often without trial. After the arrest of Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checker website Alt News, for allegedly offending religious sentiments, there has been a large crackdown on those who don’t comply to the standards set by the party. Caught in the crossfire was Jayant Kaikini’s Kannada adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof, which was being staged in a marriage hall belonging to the Veerashaiva sect in Anavatti village. Kaikini, an immensely popular Kannada writer and lyricist best known to an English-reading audience for his book No Presents Please (translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana), set his play “in post-Independent India, focusing on a Muslim bakery owner Bade Miyan in the backdrop of partition and migration.” The play, which shows Bade Miyan’s daughter entering into an interfaith marriage, has been staged many times in the last two decades. On July 3, however, a performance of the play was stopped midway by Hindutva forces who objected to the inclusion of Muslim characters and interfaith marriage in the piece.
It’s been dark days for democracy in India, but publishers have been steadily bringing out wide-ranging and diverse texts, especially since the momentous International Booker win for Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell. Vivek Shanbhag, best known to an English-reading audience for his book Ghachar Ghochar (translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur) talked about his latest play Illiruvudu Summane (Here Just Like That) with Scroll.in. Meanwhile, Jnanpith Award recipient Damodar Mauzo’s short-story collection The Wait and Other Stories, translated from Konkani by Xavier Cota, shows the non-tourist side of Goa by honoring its diverse heritage and focusing the gaze on the locals. Rather than presenting glittery beaches and popular temples, Mauzo concerns himself with exploring Goa’s unique colonial history, the Indian army’s role in Goa’s politics, and caste and religious issues in the state.
Sahitya Akademi, India’s largest academy of letters, also announced its 2021 translation prizes for twenty-two works of literature. The winners include veteran writer Kumar Navathe, who passed away this January, for his Marathi translation of Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies. A full list of awardees can be accessed here. The winners will receive a prize of INR 50,000 and a copper plaque.
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora
July 19, 2022 marks the second anniversary of Túy Hồng’s death. One of South Vietnam’s most accomplished writers, her passing in the summer of 2020—acknowledged by the media yet protected by privacy—belied an iconoclastic and eventful career.
Born in 1938 in Huế, Central Vietnam, Tuý Hồng (full name Nguyễn thị Túy Hồng) migrated to Saigon in the early 1960s and, with Nhã Ca, Trùng Dương, Nguyễn thị Hoàng, and Nguyễn thị Thụy Vũ, were known as the five “she-devils” of the Saigon literary scene in the two tumultuous decades before the fall of South Vietnam. Her male colleagues’ dismissive take on her writings as “blush-and-lipstick yodeling” further stoked her influence among generations of Vietnamese feminist writers. Wielding her potent pen, Túy Hồng fearlessly dissected working women’s lives, female friendships, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic abuse. Questioning the Zen Buddhist saying “never mistake the pointing finger for the moon,” Túy Hồng wondered why women should be overlooked when they were the very catalyst that led men to enlightenment.
Túy Hồng’s iconic 1970 novel Seeing My Reflection on the Wall (Tôi Nhìn Tôi Trên Vách) depicts Khanh, a married woman suffering from loneliness “as steep and inexorable as a mountain.” Khanh’s alienation results from gradual ruptures: her emigration from Huế for economic reasons, her volatile marriage to a Northerner who migrated South after the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into two countries. Amidst the couple’s tragicomic struggle, Túy Hồng’s prose elicits both literal and metaphorical hunger, describing how a morning can slip by “the way people devour half a jackfruit,” a husband’s smile “seems smug as salt-free broth,” and a woman’s laugh “crackles like warm baguette eaten this morning.”
Two years after her death, Túy Hồng, whose seminal novels still await English translation, appears with nine illustrious colleagues in a French short story anthology representing South Vietnamese literature. Vent du Sud (South Wind), published by La Frémillerie in June 2022 and translated by Liễu Trương, explores the diverse and vanguard spirit of literature under the Republic of South Vietnam (1954-1975). Impacted by the mass exodus of citizens who protested the North’s communist rule by migrating South in 1954, civil unrest incited by unstable Southern governments, and the erosion of traditional mores due to the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese literature—as showcased in Vent du Sud—illustrates the absurdity of geopolitical conflicts from the viewpoints of both men and women, who see themselves as pawns of history, prisoners of the past, rebels, martyrs, philosophers, and pilgrims.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: