This week, our team brings you literary news from around the world, including an experimental poetry reading and a festival celebrating comics! From cross-continental prize to a new exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, read on to find out more.
Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States
On February 7, I watched as the internationally-renowned Mexican poet and recent Asymptote contributor, Rocío Cerón presented a spellbinding performance at New York University’s KJC Center. Through sound, voice, and moving images, the performance expands on Cerón’s 2022 book Divisible corpóreo, a poetry collection that thematizes the relationship between language, poetry, and the body.
While Cerón read from the book, the screen behind her projected images featuring her bedroom and herself. These visuals were not static. Rather, they transformed in rhythmic syncopation along with Cerón’s voice. In addition, Cerón not only read the book out loud. She also brought her poems to a further experiential dimension through several resources grounded in her voice: she raised and lowered her pitch and volume, repeated words and phrases with different speeds, and sometimes elongated vowels and stuttered consonants. The effect was dreamlike. I was immediately thrown into a trance, a characteristic effect of Cerón’s awe-inspiring transmedia readings.
After the audience’s applause, Cerón was interviewed by Irma Gallo, a student in NYU’s Spanish MFA program. During this Q&A, Cerón reflected on her creative process and approach to live readings, noting that her performances often include improvisation, which makes each one of them a unique, ephemeral experience. She also talked about the feminist elements in her poetry, such as references to lineages of women writers and reflections on the mitochondrial DNA, only transmissible from mother to child. To conclude, she specified that the book Divisible corpóreo is the second installment of a trilogy that explores the connection between poetry and different senses. The other two books are Spectio (2019) and Simultáneo sucesivo (2023). Paraphrasing Cerón’s own words, these collections explore the interrelation between what we can observe and what we can hear. Each text establishes an intertextual dialogue with the other two “creating,” in Cerón’s words, “a network of signifiers and symbolic fields that touch and traverse one another.”
The best way to get a sense of Cerón’s unique performances is to see them. Here is a recording of her February 7 event:
Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting on France
Bandes dessinées and other forms of illustrated stories have long held a special place in the Francophone arts and culture scene, from the classic Asterix et Obelix series to more recent titles like Persepolis. With comics making up one in four books bought in France last year, the market has undeniably been thriving even more since lockdown.
January 2024 marked the 51st Festival internationale de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême, a yearly event which celebrates the art and authors of comics and graphic novels worldwide. Hundreds of artists, publishers, and industry professionals were in attendance from around the globe, as were more than 200,000 attendants.
Chief among the creators present was the winner of last year’s Grand Prix (the festival’s most prestigious prize): comic artist and film director Riad Sattouf. Sattouf hosted a vibrant and immersive exhibition of his acclaimed work, L’Arab du future – a biographical portrayal of Sattouf’s upbringing that took him from France to Libya to Syria. Featuring an array of concept art, video extracts, and personal effects from Sattouf’s life, the exhibit not only brought to life the characters and places featured in the series, but also offered insight into the author himself and the historical and social contexts that inform his work.
Renowned British artist Posy Simmonds took home this year’s Grand Prix. In the festival’s fifty-year history, she is only the fourth woman and the first Briton to do so. But the celebration of her work isn’t stopping there. The Bibliothèque publique d’information at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently hosting an exhibition honoring Simmonds’s life and artistic career. Spanning from her early work to her beloved graphic novels, visitors to the exhibit can feast their eyes on nearly 130 original or unpublished pieces.
Comic enthusiasts who missed this year’s event or who couldn’t get enough needn’t fear; plans are already in motion for next year’s festival, with organisers promising that “the Festival will look, more than ever, at the bande dessinée as a form of literature in its own right, linked to the realities of the world…”
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Central America
In early February, Berlin’s Academy of Arts awarded the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize to Carlos Fonseca the Costa Rican-Puerto Rican author of Colonel Lágrimas, Natural History, and Austral. Every year, the Anna Seghers Prize is awarded to two writers, one German and one Latin American. Previous winners include Cristina Rivera-Garza, Lina Meruane, Julián Fuks, Gioconda Belli, Arturo Arias, and Claudia Hernández. In an interview with the German news outlet DW, Carlos expressed his joy at receiving this prize and said he’s proud to be among many authors he admires.
There is also exciting news about new and forthcoming books. A few weeks ago, prolific Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon revealed the title and cover of his upcoming novel: Tarántula, which will come out under Libros de Asteroide in May. And famed Nicaragua author Sergio Ramírez recently presented his latest novel, El caballo dorado (The Golden Horse). The novel, which includes a cast of remarkable characters, explores Nicaragua in 1917, during the American occupation. Ramírez, one of Central America’s most renowned authors, has written fourteen novels, including Castigo divino, Margarita, está linda la mar, El cielo llora por mí and Tongolele no sabía bailar. In 2017, he became the first Central American writer to receive the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, previously awarded to authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Elena Poniatowska.
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