This week, our Editors-at-Large take us to literary fairs, readings, and walks around the world, featuring Malaysia as the country of honor at Beijing’s annual book fair, an “in-progress” translation reading in New York, and a thought-provoking reflection on a traipse around sites made famous by the works of Carlos Monsiváis in CDMX. Read on to learn more!
Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large, reporting from China
Between June 18–22, the 31st Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) welcomed over 1,700 exhibitors from 80 countries, with Bangladesh, Belarus, Chile, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kenya, and Oman joining for the first time. Over 300 thousand visitors of all ages and backgrounds participated in the fair’s multi-sensory literary walk, from family-friendly activities to down-to-business panel discussions.
Children played in a room-size book of Moomins, took a Knight Bus ride, and were taught how to touch the large-print and Braille bilingual stories on display. A cultural corridor of books, crafts, and snacks made for a perfect getaway for friends and families, as well as page-turner for the palate, featuring everything from French patisserie manuals to Japanese izakaya histories. Those ready to get their hands dirty practiced the craft of ancient Chinese bookbinding and typefaces as spatial symbols in hands-on workshops, celebrating books as both aesthetic objects and conceptual mediums. Meanwhile, writers, translators, librarians, and publishers gathered to talk foreign rights, the rise of online literature, experiments in cross-media storytelling, and how we can protect creative labor while embracing technological possibility.
Through curated series such as “Beijing Writers’ Day,” “Author Focus,” “BIBF Ambassadors’ Salon,” and “Global Writers Talk China,” readers packed in to meet their favorite writers including Mo Yan 莫言, Xi Chuan 西川, Liang Hong 梁鸿, Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, and Kang Zhen 康震. With works translated into over thirty languages, Mai Jia 麦家 and Liu Zhenyun 刘震云 participated in conversations with their respective translators on the challenges of articulating in other languages the notion of Chinese people as an ethical and historical subject. Despite the challenges, Liu’s Russian translator Aleksei Rodionov put the author-translator friendship—and, I would say, BIBF’s vision on Chinese literature’s outbound journeys—beautifully: “I feel that we’re on the same homeland. Land as in dreamland.”
Malaysia, as the country of honor, brought Li Zishu 黎紫书 to the spotlight, who shared her vision for Mahua literature. While in the past, she argued, Mahua literature often focused on the expression of local color and cultural distinctiveness, truly powerful Mahua writing should uncover a unique voice even when engaging with experiences shared across borders. “As a Mahua writer, a boat adrift on the open sea, I’d think I’m alone—until one day, I came upon a big boat, its deck full of readers. A boat that I can rest upon, a boat that’d pull me in.” What a crystallization of things BIBF sets out to celebrate in literature, as put in Li’s novel Worldly Land 《流俗地》:
“If you don’t feel like talking, don’t. I’ll just sit with you for a while.”
你不想说话就别说吧。我在这儿陪陪你。
Mary Noorlander, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the United States
On Tuesday, June 24, a small group gathered in the backyard of Unnameable Books in Brooklyn to listen to five readings from in-progress translations. The event was hosted by Archipelago Books, a nonprofit press that publishes translations of classic and contemporary world literature. Armed with beer cans and pocket fans to combat the heat wave, we heard from: Jacob Rogers (translating from Galician, reading from Manuel Rivas), Karen Emmerich (modern Greek, Christos Ikonomou), Alyson Waters (French, Antoine Volodine), Jennifer Shyue (Spanish, Higa Oshiro), and Minna Zallman Proctor (Italian, Cesare Pavese).
All excerpts were selected from in-progress works; as Jacob Rogers quipped, his translation was “very in-progress . . . Like, second draft.” Despite his minimizing, Rogers was still able to win a laugh from his reading of the “meandering” Manuel Rivas from a work focusing on the complexity of a globalized world. The joke involved a boar hunting scene and a “Horcus Corpus / Horcus Porcus” wordplay made charming in Rogers’ translation.
Noticeably, Tuesday’s reading took place simultaneous to the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral race, which brought a particularly charged energy to the city and to the sweltering backyard gathering. This elephant in the room was acknowledged by Karen Emmerich in the introduction to her reading. Emmerich thanked Archipelago Books for being a press that “believes in authors,”, and selected a poem with an explicitly anti-fascist focus in honor of the election night. Her assertion that Archipelago is certainly a press that believes in translators is backed by the press’s impressive history of publishing translations, and the fact that each of the translators at this event are returning artists in the Archipelago catalogs.
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Mexico
After reading about literary geography, I began to wonder how cities and our living spaces are represented in literature, and what books and poems can reveal about them. In Mexico City (CDMX), literary walks have become popular in recent years. These guided tours explore neighborhoods and corners featured in books ranging from the late 19th century to the present.
On June 29, writer Agustín Sánchez led a literary walk through Mexico City’s Historic Center, exploring the area through the lens of Carlos Monsiváis’s work. Monsiváis, one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century Mexican literature, is renowned for his urban chronicles and essays on popular culture, cinema, and social movements. For him, the Historic Center embodied both chaos and order, home to mariachis, vagabonds, revolutionaries, bankers, and merchants; almost every story, he believed, could find a place there.
During the walk, Sánchez explored Monsiváis’s distinctive style and ironic, humorous gaze, which captured the contradictions of daily life in the capital. Key texts included Días de guardar and Cultura urbana y creación intelectual: el caso mexicano.
But what does all this tell us about the city? Beyond the visible social contrasts (like the homeless sleeping outside the Bank of Mexico), Monsiváis’s books and the walk itself reveal a zone made for passage, not residence. There are no homes there, only museums, offices, and businesses. That may be part of its richness. Monsiváis himself founded the Museo del Estanquillo to display the prints, drawings, and graphic art he collected.
This Monsiváis walk is just one of many held recently in CDMX. Earlier this year, readers explored Colonia Roma (yes, the one from Alfonso Cuarón’s film) through the work of José Emilio Pacheco. These walks offer a way to blend literature with the body, architecture, history, and urban design.
So, dear readers, how would you walk through your cities?
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