Posts by MARGENTO

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary News from Palestine, Central America, Romania, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a new Palestinian literary and culture magazine, the 2023 PEN Open Book Award longlist, and more. From a Palestinian literary festival to the birthday celebration for the “national poet” of Romania, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

A first is always exciting, always an event; in fact, it’s called “a first” even if a second never comes. And when there is a second time, it’s an opportunity to celebrate and to remember the first.

This week the Palestinian literary community is anticipating both a first and a second.

The Palestinian literary scene is witnessing the birth of Fikra Magazine, an online Palestinian cultural and literary magazine – writing and art by and for Palestinians. According to partners and co-founders Aisha and Kevin, Fikra is dedicated to “high-quality content that doesn’t conform to stereotypes and old-fashioned ideas about Palestine. It’s original, it’s inspiring, it’s bold.” What is exciting about this new publication is that every piece is professionally translated from Arabic to English—or vice versa. Since “Palestinians in the Diaspora often don’t read Arabic as their mother tongue,” the creators say in their promotional materials, “we want our writers to become part and parcel of the international writing-guild as well.” In Fikra, the creators promise, “you’ll find Palestinian writers and artists from all corners of the word – from Gaza, the West-Bank, East-Jerusalem, 48, and the diaspora.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Romania and the Philippines!

In this week’s literary round-up, we’re bringing coverage from the myriad intrigues of world literature, from storybooks highlighting Indigenous narratives to diasporic Romanian writers, romance writing to exiled heroes. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Romania 

As the Romanian literary scene is gearing up for the twenty-ninth edition of Gaudeamus book fair, organized by Radio Romania in Bucharest from December 7 through the 11, the literary diaspora is both very active and a hot topic in and of itself. A one-day seminar, entitled “European Cultural Representations of Romanian Migration and Exiles” took place at the Romanian Centre, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) last week. Presentations and roundtables on highlights from the Romanian diaspora across the Western world—such as religious studies international icon and fiction writer Mircea Eliade, Romanian-Spanish comparative literature pioneer Alexandre [Alejandro] Cioranescu, and former Asymptote contributor Matéi Visniec—were complemented by excursuses into the work and lives of personalities relevant to both Romanian and Spanish literatures. Former Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau, Director of the Romanian Centre and Romanian Language and Literature Lecturer, gave a talk about Alexandru Busuioceanu: a poet, art historian, and essayist credited for establishing Romanian as an academic subject at UCM back in the mid-twentieth century, after founding the UCM Romanian Centre in 1943.

Another major name of the diaspora is Paul Goma, renowned opponent of Ceaușescu’s regime and dissident fiction writer forced into exile (to Paris, France) in the late 1970s, after having survived numerous attempts on his life staged by the Romanian communist secret police or their accessories—only to die from COVID in 2020. A hot-off-the-press book dedicated to the dissident hero by historian, poet, essayist, and Goma scholar Flori Balanescu, Paul Goma: Conștiință istorică și conștiință literară [Historical Conscience, Literary Conscience], is to be launched at Gaudeamus in a week’s time, and it has already grabbed considerable attention on social media. Awarded poet and fiction writer O. Nimigean, himself a Parisian exile, commented on the text as a breakthrough release and expressed his impatience to read the sequel—an already planned book he indirectly disclosed as having insider knowledge on. Such updates can only further stir interest—if not inevitable kerfuffle—since the (albeit rare) publications about Goma expose, just as the author’s own novels did, the collaborationism under communism of certain established literati or public figures: an implication to which the latter usually retort with accusations of anti-semitism. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Slovakia, Belgium, and Puerto Rico!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a controversial book prize winner in Slovakia, a comic strip festival in Belgium, and a moving performance of a collection of short stories centered on gay life in Puerto Rico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Slovakia

Throughout June, ten writers longlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, presented their works online, at events in the capital, Bratislava, and the open-air summer festival Pohoda held at Trenčín airfield. However, much attention was paid to a major controversy surrounding one of the nominated books, Nicol Hochholczerová’s remarkable debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Can’t be Eaten Up), which depicts the relationship between a 12-year-old schoolgirl and her teacher, a man in his fifties. While there is universal agreement on the book‘s literary merits—it is among the five works on the award’s shortlist, announced on 7 September—the decision to also nominate it for the René Prize—a competition in which students of selected secondary schools choose a winner from five books—raised concerns that neither the 18-year-old students nor their teachers are equipped to handle  sensitive subject without specialist psychological support. Fearing the withdrawal of funding or even lawsuits by incensed parents, the jury decided to withdraw Hochholczerová’s book from the competition, offering instead to send the book to the schools on request. While the resulting turmoil was great for sales, it has caused a rift in the literary community, put the talented young writer under a huge amount of stress, and aroused some fear that it has sounded the death knell of the René Prize.

After two years of Covid-related disruptions, the Authors’ Reading Month (ARM), Europe’s largest literary festival, organized by the Brno-based publishing house Větrné mlýny in partnership with Slovakia’s Literárny klub, returned this summer. It was hosted by venues in five cities of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Lviv, which has hosted the festival in the past, was not on this year’s itinerary because of the war in Ukraine). With Icelandic literature as the focus of the twenty-third edition, some of the best-known Czech and Slovak writers were paired with thirty-one authors from Iceland, including Hallgrímur Helgason, Bragi Ólafsson, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, as well as Sjón, who also attended the Slovak premiere of The Northman, the American epic action thriller based on Viking myths whose script he co-wrote with the director Robert Eggers.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Catalonia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines!

Our team of editors from around the globe bring you the latest in literary news on the ground. Read on to find out about regional language promotion in Catalonia, author talks in Hong Kong, and translation awards in the Philippines!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Catalonia

The old part of the city of Barcelona is getting drowned in the infectious salsa and rumba rhythms of the Festa Major de Gràcia this week, with the burro’s alleys and pedestrian areas being taken over by local crafts and cuisine alongside decorations ranging from overhead wooden chairs to colourful balloons to giant dragons you can walk through. But another more discrete yet equally pervasive phenomenon is also underway. The fiesta’s versatile mobile app is indicative of the overwhelming digital initiatives in the city and across the province of Catalonia, which are more often than not closely tied with the region’s rich literature, arts, and assertive linguistic and cultural individuality.

The exhibition Nova Pantalla. El videojoc a Catalunya (New Screen: Videogames in Catalonia) at Palau Robert, for instance, boasts a wide range of on-site interactive pieces from both small/indie studios and major players committed to making Catalonian language and culture more present in the industry. As short of sixty percent of the sector’s output involves games and apps in the region’s language, the featured designers and programmers make clear statements about the creative multi-art poetics of their endeavors. Innovative technology is informed by traditional storytelling, visual arts, and text, resonating with other strong trends in present-day Catalonia.

A rich repository of Catalonian and transnational cultural data is represented by the free digital journalism platform VilaWeb, which claims the legacies of writers as diverse as Albert Camus and the thirteenth-century Catalan poet and Neoplatonic-Christian mystic Ramon Llull as inspirational for the development of the contemporary Catalan language. Another example of Catalonian culture in the digital space could be experienced in May of this year, when the festival Barcelona Poesia reemerging from the pandemic with a vigorous multilingual and cross-artform approach to poetry (as did the more avant-garde but less publicized Festival Alcools) substantially present in digital space and social media. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Book fairs, award shows, and passings from Hong Kong, Spain, and Iraq.

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.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Book fairs, Booker longlists, and magazine launches from Thailand, Puerto Rico, India, and Romania!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on the political undertones of a Bangkok book fair, new translations of Indian literature, new magazines out of Puerto Rico, and celebrations of Francophone literature in Romania. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Bookworms are back wheeling their suitcases around in the country’s biggest book fair. It is the place to get another year’s worth of kong dong (“pile of pickles”)—i.e., unread books. After a cancellation last year and a move online the year before, the twelve-day National Book Fair, organized by the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand is being held at the new rail transport hub, Bangsue Grand Station, until April 6. Many publishers, both major and independent, release new books in anticipation of this event, where they can get a bigger cut from sales and buyers have come to expect extra-special discounts. With over 200 publishers participating, author meet-and-greets, and predictable logistical complaints at the temporary new venue, we can perhaps sense a return to normalcy.

If one looks at this normalcy more closely, however, one can see an increasing trend of explicit politicization in the largely commercial enterprise. The calendar of main-stage events includes book launches by pro-democracy politicians from the Move Forward Party and the Progressive Movement (of the disbanded Future Forward Party). The names of four such politicians, all men, grace the official calendar—without the titles of their books, oddly enough. The Progressive Movement is also publishing its first translation: an illustrated children’s book, นี่แหละเผด็จการ (Así es la dictadura) by Equipo Plantel, first published in 1977 in post-Franco Spain. These examples provide quite a contrast to ostensibly political but effectively depoliticizing events led by, for lack of a better word, the literary establishment, like the panel discussion “Stepping into the Third Decade of the Phan Waen Fa Award: Political Literature for Democratic Development,” featuring three award committee members and a literary scholar.

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Mapping the Vast Landscape of Romanian Theatre

[T]he anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity . . .

Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021

In the pretentiously Francophone Bucharest of the late nineteenth century, Ion Luca Caragiale’s plays were met with harsh criticism for their alleged sexual innuendos and outrageous immorality—what one might nowadays call subversion. Caragiale, whose reputation has now grown into that of an unparalleled classic and a quintessential influence on a host of Romanian/international avant-garde luminaries, was in fact of mixed Balkan heritages. He spent his later years as an émigré in Berlin, thus proving himself an ambivalent maverick and avant-la-lettre transnational.

Almost 150 years on, Romanian drama boastfully continues this legacy of subversiveness, diversity, and transnationalism. In that respect, the best possible illustration of such variation is the recent anthology, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly. From the very introduction, Komporaly pertinently places contemporary Romanian theatre at the crossroads of the culture’s emergence from communism thirty years ago, and situates its ever increasing representation of minorities—particularly Roma—in a global context. The very rich and nuanced landscape that Komporaly aptly charts is further complicated by the dualism of state-funded (more traditional) and independent (more avant-garde) theaters, as well as formal genre-related features—both text-based and experiment/performance-informed. The picture is then rendered even murkier by companies specializing in minority drama and/or being run by representatives of minorities striving to gain state-funded status.

While informed therefore by a knowledgeable historical and cultural perspective, the anthology’s aim—as stated by Komporaly—is mainly to feature the country’s formal literary and cultural diversity by illustrating the common grounds of “burning concerns rooted in Romanian realities” and the experiments “push[ing] the boundaries of the genre.” And indeed, unconventional approaches are featured from the very opening play: a stage adaptation by Mihaela Panainte of Noble Prize winner Herta Müller’s short story collection, Lowlands (thus forging a connection to the German minority in Romania). Panainte’s staging of Müller’s fiction rivetingly captures the latter’s poetic fragmentariness through what Komporaly rightly calls textual modularity—just as the translator herself lithely renders that same combination of poetry and alert colloquialism alongside a more ponderous social grayness and a haunting sense of death’s ubiquity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Véronique Bergen

in the ocean of tattoos / sea urchins shaped like fully loaded syringes

In our first Translation Tuesday feature for the new year, revel in two outrightly explosive and psychedelic poems by the Belgian poet, novelist and philosopher Véronique Bergen. “I petal blue,” is how Bergen begins one of these poems and it is in this frenzied flowering of one’s subjectivity that we meet the speaker in their radiant and radical metamorphosis. Following her own warped and dynamic syntax, Bergen’s poems lay bare an “orgy of guns”: she construes a poetic world that riots our senses and, in her turbulent re-contextualisation of the technologies that engender this anarchy, refracts a history of global violence. Always, they combust with a frank and freakish sexuality. Translated by our very own Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, MARGENTO brings to our readers the spectrum of technicolour brilliance and virtuosic world-building that is Bergen’s verse. 

Suave Blue 

I petal blue
looking for the way out of my maze
safe behind the bat my effigy

I curaçao
at the bottom of a swimming pool
in search of Isabelle A. of a Gin Cloud
inhaling vapors
of methylene blue
to deoxidize my moths

In the hollow of my sex
my sunken Atlantis
the Amazon of Mytilene
rapes me Lesbos earthquake
a touch of futuristic pornography
to stifle
my desire to sink
among water lilies
where Opheliacs drift

My mission is
to bleed out my blue blood
daily autistic drip
at the time when the sun
deviates into indigo

Periwinkle-colored
death
will have Isabelle A.’s eyes
an amniotic liquid
released from a cosmic uterus
will flow over my wounds
Yves Klein’s patented Tuareg blues.

Dirty Banditry Hour 

Capital Execution
would you like it in black and white crystalline powder
or technicolor pills?
The syringe between your teeth
stereophonic host
for a reality check
who does what
who empties the septic tanks
shoots the rainbow

From the magazine to the barrel
the same current is flowing through the revolver
long cartridges slipped under the tongue
loaded with electromagnetic whisky

The boa girl, smoke lens glasses, bare shoulders
is going to blow up the world’s leadership
decapsulate the tragedy of the spheres
her chain necklace says “yes” to the finger squeezing the trigger
her naked flesh a trap
the new Salome shoots the way we love doing it
point-blank range
firing a life-giving bullet
in the backs of the heads of order apostles
a poppy bullet spouting out
lost weapons undergrowth

Never forget to say
to heaven and earth
yin and yang
who does what
what nerd gives him the heads-up
on the dum-dum bullet rain
on a hero-in shoot-
up white as a fucking shroud

Never forget
in strip poker
blue orgasm cards lose
chemical mutations in language
give birth to counter-letters READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest from Mexico, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Romania!

Though Asymptote is winding down with the year, literary events and going-ons continue to thrive around the globe. In Mexico, the Guadalajara International Book Fair presents its impressive line-up, and Polish female poets are celebrated in a new collection. In Bulgaria, the Christmas Book Fair returns to delight the locals. and in Romania, the Gaudeamus Book Fair features over one hundred exciting events. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

On December 10, Mexican editor, poet, and translator Isabel Zapata presented Dentro del bosque, an English-Spanish translation of the autobiographical essay Into the Woods by American author Emily Gould. The essay reflects on contemporary capitalist precarity through Gould’s personal experience as a young woman trying to make a living as a writer in New York City. Originally published in 2014, its translation into Spanish is part of the Editor’s Collection from Gris Tormenta, an independent publisher based in Querétaro, a rapidly growing state three hours north of Mexico City. Gris Tormenta has published several Asymptote contributors in the past, including Yuri Herrera, Tedi López Mills, and Thomas Bernhard.

On December 4, Mexican poet Rocío Cerón and Polish poet Marta Eloy Cichocka presented Luz que fue sombra, a Polish-Spanish bilingual collection of seventeen Polish female poets born between 1963 and 1981, translated by Abel Murcia and Gerardo Beltrán. The book was published in the Spanish independent press Vaso Roto, which has published Spanish translations of important authors such as Anne Carson, John Ashbery, and Ocean Vuong. It includes poems by Justyna Bargielska, Barbara Klicka, Krystyna Dąbrowska, and Urszula Zajączkowska. Julia Fiedorczuk, whose book Oxygen was reviewed for Asymptote by Elisa González, is one of the most renowned authors in the collection. The event took place in Talleres de Arte Contemporáneo (TACO), a cultural centre south of Mexico City dedicated to promoting and teaching contemporary art.

The 35th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair took place in Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities, between November 27 and December 5. It is considered one of the most important book festivals in Latin America. This year, the guest of honor was Peru, from where several important authors and artists travelled to Mexico to present their work, lead workshops, and host panels. Among them was Asymptote contributor Victoria Guerrero. Importantly, the events featuring Peru offered significant representation of literature written in indigenous languages, including books by Dina Ananco Ahuananchi, Gabriel Pacheco, Cha’ska Ninawaman, and Washington Córdova. The fair also featured both emerging and established authors from all over the world. Many of them have previously appeared in Asymptote, such as Ana Luísa Amaral, Georgi Gospodinov, Abdellah Taïa, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, and Alejandro Zambra.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Bulgaria has, for a long time now, been in the grips of mass paranoia, an all-encompassing misinformation campaign, and political turmoil. The health situation also not looking up; according to official statistics, the COVID-19 deaths are, sadly, approaching the chilling number of 30 000 since the beginning of the pandemic—a figure that definitely cannot be trivialised given the overall population. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in global literary news from Ukraine, Guatemala, and Belgium!

The naming of Abdulrazak Gurnah as our latest Nobel laureate in Literature is what’s topping headlines around the world this week, but there’s plenty more happening outside of the Swedish Academy. Our editors on the ground is bringing news of multi-media literary festivals, architecturally transformative contemporary art, Ukrainian translation forums, and the passing of a beloved Guatemalan writer. Read on to find out more.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brussels

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest was hardly over when another literature festival was announced in Europe’s capital: Les Voix en Ville (Voices in the City), organized by Lettres en Voix. This year’s edition featured mostly collaborative projects involving writers, musicians, and filmmakers presenting concerts, readings, workshops, and “cinematic poems.” The venues were as diverse as cathedrals, museums, theaters, pubs, and public squares, while the works presented were more often than not site-specific. Maud Vanhauwaert, for instance, after recently receiving ovations at Planetarium Poetry Fest, participated by reading an “Ode to the Socio-cultural Worker” at the legendary literary cafe La Fleur en Papier Doré. The poem culminated in a work that went beyond the text per se, resulting in a video of the reading which featured images of the venue and a music soundtrack—an illustration in and of itself of the many “workers” who had contributed from behind the scenes.

In the meantime, Brussels’ literary and arts scene is frantically resurfacing from the lockdown. Among the 300 exhibiting artists, 150 workshops, 100 animations, and “concerts, live, dance, street art, performance, and literature” events inundating Ixelles (the arts quarter of Brussels), there was also a “coup de coeur” (heartthrob, sudden crush) exhibition at the animated Demeuldre art gallery. Among the highlights was Bert Mertens, a senior artist with a fresh eye for estranging details and collaged panoramas who mesmerized the visitors from the moment they entered with the hyperrealist light radiating from his paintings. The diversity of forms and approaches of other artists—ranging from graphic art to photography to sculpture to installations to comic strips—also succeeding captivating one’s attention. Still, what really overwhelmed the audience and kept visitors wandering the upper floors and attic of the 19th-century china shop for hours on end was the Talk C.E.C. exhibition, which reunited dozens of artists from France, Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere in a joint project converting the place—its architecture, its interior and exterior walls, the literal holes in the walls, the cafe, kitchen, and even the bathrooms—into a powerful collective manifesto revisiting and fusing sacred traditions, unorthodox spiritualism, and transgressive eroticism from an urgently environmentalist and culturally inclusive perspective.

Kristina Tatarian, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Ukraine

As summer ended festively with the thirtieth annual Independence day in Ukraine, a succession of literary events showcased new national literatures and opened up conversations about the changing trends in translation. Not long ago, the Ukrainian Book Institute established Translate Ukraine, the first translation initiative of its kind to be sponsored by the government, and which has helped literary festivals turn their focus towards an international audience. As a result, a record number of Ukrainian titles were translated into English in the past five years. M any Ukrainian publishers have noted that international literary festivals are not the only places to showcase the wealth of contemporary literature available in the country, stressing the importance of supporting local literary forums to better promote Ukrainian letters globally. Earlier this year, the famous literary festival Kyiv Book Arsenal hosted publisher B2B meetings to facilitate international translation deals and pitch the best of Ukrainian literature to publishers. READ MORE…

Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest—A Unique Experience in the Heart of Europe

[T]he Planetarium’s technicians have in fact “translated” the poets’ “texts and recordings” into the projections.

Since 2014, the Brussels Planetarium has been host to a poetry festival that wrangles in the celestial forces to commune with language. The resulting event is a brilliant amalgam of performance, verse, and media, with the latest in immersion technology being applied to transport the audience into the land- and soundscape of the poet’s imagination. This year, our Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from the festival, giving us a close-up of the works that lent the city their magic, and the global consciousness a sense of poetry’s endless potentials in the technology age.

Whether in hangover or relapse, (post?)pandemic times seem to be bringing about a bruised euphoria of collectivity and in-person proximity. If not packed concert halls, then outdoor gigs; if not crowded pubs, then nicely scattered and still-animated patios. In the meantime, artists and writers seem even more eager to embrace collaboration or collective action in reinvigorated ways that are nevertheless pungently critical of (post)pandemic prospects of communal life and culture. This year’s edition of Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest intriguingly captured all of these trends while putting poetry, the arts, science, and, most urgently, the (post)human condition in perspective.

And I mean literally so. The unique venue of the Planetarium and its 3-D affordances can offer a unique experience and a “cosmic” medium poetry has perhaps always striven for, but has rarely had the opportunity to enjoy so palpably. And it is no coincidence that the festival itself has been organized there for eight annual editions (including in the midst of the pandemic in 2020). Indeed, it is not only that the name of the curator himself, Philip Meersman—poet and coordinator of the World Poetry Organization—aurally resonates with “immersion”; the concept has in fact been a long-standing preoccupation with the Belgian slammer, materializing in events such as Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest or the Inclusive World Poetry Slam Championship (and also a PhD project he is working on at KASK Antwerp on visual poetry as… immersive experience). In his prefatory note in the festival’s programme, Meersman places the theme of the festival—the possible “dialogue between science, religion, immaterial heritage. […] (de)colonization, and white masculinity”—naturally in a celestial context, as “stars guide our most intimate ceremonies” towards a question that he deems prophetic: “How will you remember me?”

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On both nights of the festival, therefore, the audience found themselves from the very beginning plunged into an enveloping dark and then instantly hurled into a 3D, 360-degree dome projection that “physically” took them on an overwhelming multidirectional voyage across the universe and among celestial bodies and meteorites. What was even more impressive was that these projections were not simply Planetarium material played as (random) backdrop to poetry acts, but a shrewdly planned and accomplished fusion of the two that involved visuals—contributed by the poets themselves—embedded into, dialoguing with, or even deconstructing the all-engulfing astronomical vistas. As the website puts it, the Planetarium’s technicians have in fact “translated” the poets’ “texts and recordings” into the projection, drawing on existing material but also “specially acquired images, 3D-projection models, photos, and results of scientific research” (my emphasis).  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Europe, Argentina, and Sri Lanka!

As the world slowly reopens to possibilities made anew by the subsiding of pandemic restrictions, our editors are bringing you the latest from a summer of potentialities. In Argentina, bookstores are spotlit for their role in creating cultural spaces and dialogues, and virtual stages take full opportunity of their wide reach. In Europe, a Belgian festival dedicated to avant-garde poetry is proceeding at full speed, and new and noteworthy publications are hitting the shelves. In Sri Lanka, annual literary forum New Ink debates the definitions and reach of their national literature. Our editors are here with the full scoop!

Allison Braden, assistant blog editor, reporting from Argentina

The Feria de Editores is now accepting entries for its Bookstore of the Year award; the organization, which will host its annual festival of independent publishers on October 1-3, seeks to recognize the work of booksellers throughout Argentina, acknowledging that their cultural and curatorial role goes far beyond merely selling books. The prize, open to all bookstores that have been open at least one year, will honor a shop whose leaders and employees have worked tirelessly to promote intercultural exchange both inside and outside its physical space. “Bookstores,” says the invitation to enter, “are a focal point for fostering local culture and connection to international thought.”

Bookstores in Argentina and beyond will soon stock commemorative editions of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, a book of profound influence on international thought about the legacy of exploitation in the region. Galeano, a journalist and novelist who hailed from across the Río de la Plata in Montevideo, Uruguay, published the work in 1971, when authoritarian regimes on the continent still held sway. The book was banned by some, and even Galeano eventually came to think of it as poorly researched and written, but it nevertheless became a leftist classic with enduring appeal: It’s been translated into more than a dozen languages and shot to number six on Amazon’s best-sellers list after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy to U.S. President Barack Obama. In Argentina, the book’s fiftieth anniversary has provoked reflection on the relevance of Galeano’s thesis today.

Fundación Andreani, an organization that promotes cultural and educational programs to improve quality of life, and Universidad Nacional de las Artes joined forces this month to launch Paraísos Artificiales. Antología de poesía en la web (Artificial Paradises. Online poetry anthology). The series celebrates the web’s potential for creative freedom and brings attention to digital poetry and “technopoetics.” The first season, released this month and inaugurated with a virtual presentation, consists of three episodes, which focus on artists with various approaches to visual poetry: Rafaël Rozendaal, Ana María Uribe, and Belén Gache. The series is fuel for the Feria de Editores claim that cultural influence, especially in the age of Zoom, goes far beyond bookstore walls. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Belgium, Sweden, and Japan!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Belgium, Sweden, and Japan. In Belgium, the 2020 SACD and Scam prizes were awarded; in Sweden, Littfest is kicking off with a special emphasis on Sámi voices; and in Japan, two new thrillers and science fiction short stories are being translated into English. Read on to find out more! 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Belgium

In the mix of despair and sarcastic humor surrounding the Covid vaccine tragicomedy—pocked by the persiflage at the abundance of excessively well-paid officials of a small nation with . . . six governments and nine health ministers—Belgian literary and artistic life seems to have found its own path. Breaking news: the 2020 SACD and Scam prizes were awarded yesterday within a pandemic-adapted in-person ceremony whose online video version is already attracting numerous social media viewers. The literary prize goes this year to young poet Charline Lambert, author of 4 collections of poetry and 2017 winner of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation prize for her debut book Chanvre et lierre. The 2021 special format involved rewarding writers and artists for their long-standing contributions rather than a specific work, and previous editions have highlighted established poet, novelist, philosopher, and literary critic Véronique Bergen and prolific writer and translator Emmanuèle Sandron.

The in-person-and-online combination seems to have gained ground on a larger scale across the nation as the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) is inviting visitors to enjoy a 600-year-old previously hidden treasure-trove (the library of the Dukes of Burgundy) while substantially boosting its collection digitizing and digital culture related initiatives. Among the latter, most notably, the cutting-edge Digital Research Lab facilitates text and data mining research on KBR’s diverse, multilingual digitised and born-digital collections, and co-organizes together with Camille and two universities—Université libre de Bruxelles and Ghent University—a widely mediatized Digital Heritage Seminar series. The library’s collaboration with Belgian universities goes in the field of literary translation as well, as a newly launched research initiative run jointly with KU Leuven and UCLouvain (BELTRANS) undertakes to tell the untold history of “literary translation flows” in Belgium between French and Dutch in the period 1970-2020. However gigantically active, KBR is still not the only cultural hub digitally adjusting to the ‘new normal’. PILEn (the book and digital publishing inter-professional partnership) has recently launched an online tool for browsing Belgian Francophone presses by subject and genre, and continues its long-standing hybrid writing series featuring cross-artform projects and multi-support poetry. READ MORE…