This week’s roundup of literary news from around the world highlights exciting new publications and publishing trends! From a literary marriage in the United States to the return of a beloved author and history titles in the Philippines, read on to find out more!
Meghan Racklin, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the United States
Last week, at their annual awards ceremony—in person again for the first time since the onset of the pandemic—the National Book Critics Circle awarded the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize to Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. The new award brings attention to books translated into English and published in the United States, where only a small number of books in translation are published each year—Publishers Weekly’s translation database lists only 419 books in translation published in the United States in 2022.
Dralyuk, the award winner, is a poet and critic as well as a translator and until recently was the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His translation was selected from a competitive group of finalists which, notably, also included the translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob by Jennifer Croft—Dralyuk’s wife. Prior to the announcement of the award winner, the two gave an interview to the L.A. Times about their relationship to translation and to each other. Croft said “Once we started dating, I would find Boris on my steps, where he would tell me about what he had just translated. He gets so emotionally invested. . . . He’s so careful about every word. It was very moving and, I think, a large part of how we came together.”
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora
Thirty years after the international success of his debut novel Nỗi Buồn Chiến Tranh (The Sorrow of War), Bảo Ninh made an unforgettable comeback this month with Hà Nội at Midnight. Ten of the stories in this twelve-story collection have been translated into English for the first time by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran. Per Bảo Ninh’s request, two stories, “Untamed Winds” (“Gió Dại”) (translated as “Savage Winds,” in 1995 by Phan Huy Đường and Nina McPherson for Granta 50), and “The Secret of the River” (“Bí Ẩn của Làn Nước”) (translated as “The River’s Mystery” in 2003 by Trần Quí Phiệt for Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam), have been rendered anew by the current translators for this collection.
Several stories in the collection lyrically yet unflinchingly revisit the anti-heroic themes explored in The Sorrow of War, such as loss of innocence, survivor’s guilt, and postwar trauma, while others reflect Bảo Ninh’s keen observation of civilian life that encapsulates both the stoic gentility of Hanoi during the war years and its striving postwar atmosphere. Paradoxes recur throughout Hà Nội at Midnight—war severs familial ties and destroys infrastructure but also leads to serendipitous, life-changing encounters.
In their thoughtful English translation, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran have preserved Vietnamese diacritical marks for character and place names, to signal to Anglo readers that Vietnamese is a tonal language with six distinct tones, where a change in tone can shift meaning. Ha and Tran also deftly transpose Bảo Ninh’s subtle humor and his vivid yet casually oblique syntax marked by elisions, fragmentary clauses, and frequent shifts in point of view. As if to balance out this homage to the Vietnamese language and the author’s style, however, the translators apply a more interpretive, contextual approach to certain idiomatic expressions. For example, the title of the first story in the collection, “Rửa Tay Gác Kiếm,” an idiomatic phrase literally meaning “Hands Washed, Sword Set Aside,” is translated as “Farewell to a Soldier’s Life.”
Hà Nội at Midnight was published as part of a joint publishing venture between Texas Tech University Press (TTUP) and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN). Co-founded by Professor Isabelle Thuy Pelaud of San Francisco State University and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, DVAN endeavors to champion Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literature in translation that may risk being excluded from large mainstream publishers. TTUP, which customarily publishes books on the Vietnam War by American military personnel, has partnered with DVAN to shift its focus toward writers from Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
The 2022 book How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future by Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, has been a standout success of recent Filipino literature, with NPR pronouncing it “a memoir and manifesto,” and The Guardian calling it “a rallying cry to protect liberal progress.” The book has been translated into the Catalan, German, Spanish, and Swedish.
The book’s continuing success comes at a moment when the Philippine publishing industry is seeing broader interest in the history of right-wing strongmen, with a resurgence of interest in nonfiction about Martial Law and the era of Ferdinand E Marcos Sr.’s rule. Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) Press has published a new book by economist JC Punongbayan, False Nostalgia: The Marcos Golden Age Myths and How to Debunk Them, and Punongbayan is also a contributor to UP Department of History’s The Marcos Years: The Age of Crisis and Repression, along with activist Walden Bello, journalist Raissa Robles, among others. The University of the Philippines (UP) Third World Studies Centre reprinted copies of Marcos Lies due to insistent public demand. The ADMU School of Government has recently released Martial Law in the Philippines: Lessons & Legacies, 1972-2022 with essays by leading intellectuals Vicente L Rafael, Patricio N Abinales (also co-editor of The Marcos Era: A Reader), Teresita Ang See, and Julio C Teehankee.
At the beginning of the year, citizen-led Project Gunita dared Filipinos to a 12-months-12-books challenge focused on titles about Martial Law history. Among the titles were Martial Law in Cebu, which features contributions by Don Pagusara and National Artist for Literature Resil B Mijares, and O Susana! Untold Stories of Martial Law in Davao, edited by Macario D Tiu. Some of these Martial Law titles can be accessed through the free digital library by historical research centre Bantayog ng mga Bayani.
This renewed interest in Martial Law can as well be seen at the cinema, where two independent films—Oras de Peligro [The Hour of Danger] by veteran director Joel Lamangan and the musical Ako si Ninoy [I am Ninoy] by playwright-screenwriter Vince Tañada—present artistic responses to the proliferation of state-funded, mythologised movies that attempt to sanitise Marcosian evils. Khavn de la Cruz—fresh from the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam premiere of his latest films—disclosed that his novel Antimarcos, which won the 2022 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature’s grand prize, will be out this year from ADMU Press.
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