Language: Arabic

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 23, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Japan, Egypt, and Kenya!

This week, our team from around the world brings news of literary award shortlists and winners! From the launch of the inaugural issue of Debunk Quarterly, to the winners of the Sawiris Cultural Awards, to the recent closure of a historical bookstore in Tokyo, read on to learn more!

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Where are Japan’s bookstores going? In the last two decades, the number of bookstores in Japan has nearly halved, dropping to only 11,495 in 2023. The figure speaks to the many locally-owned bookstores that have had to close over the years, unable to keep customers in a rapidly digitizing era. Some of these closures have garnered international and domestic attention, the latest of which was the historical “Bookshop 書楽” (Shogaku) in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. 

Owned by Mitsuru Ishida, Bookshop Shogaku has a long history in its small corner of Tokyo, located just outside of Asagaya Station for the past 43 years. The area of Asagaya itself—dubbed 文士の街, or “Literati Town”—has been a hub for creatives for well over a century, lined with jazz clubs, Showa-era coffee shops, and of course, bookstores. While famous literary figures such as Dazai Osamu and Masuji Ibuse once frequented the street and its many shelves, playing shogi and drinking as the “Asagaya Club,” over time Bookshop Shogaku became the last bookstore selling new titles in the area, until it closed as well. 

READ MORE…

Visual Spotlight: Mounira Al Solh on War, Refugees, and the Scatter

February 15, 2024  |  in Visual Art  |  by Mounira Al Solh

My work is a collection of hundreds of encounters, captured by writing and by drawing the moments with each individual and family I met. . .

The liquid condition of being stateless—whether as a refugee, a migrant, or a individual living on occupied territories—means that one’s life begins to revolve around questions: questions of where to go, how to act, what to claim, who the opposition is, who oneself is. In Lebanese-Dutch artist Mounira Al Solh‘s work, these inquiries are given vivid sonic and visual resonances, in the dizzying and hypnotic shot of a boat swaying back and forth, in the slow panning over an animal’s exposed ribcage, in a man that continually raises a foot to step forward or backward, before returning it to its place. Working with her own narrative of migrating from Beirut to Damascus as a child, and overlaying it with a contemplative blend of cultural archive, enactment, and linguistic sensitivity, Al Solh places a beating heart in the centre of displacement’s immense, abstracted web, illustrating not only origins or destinations, but the individual in the middle of becoming.

In any case, in the year 2006, as I was finishing my studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, I made a video piece, Rawane’s Song, in which I stated that “I have nothing to say about the war,” meaning the Lebanese civil war. At that time, everyone expected Lebanese artists to speak about that war. It was also generational, as people who grew up during the Lebanese civil war found the only way to survive was by not speaking about the war, but about survival instead. When I was a young teen, I had the privilege to live the changes that occurred on the ground in Lebanon, the abrupt and absurd end of fifteen years of civil war, and the shift to a postwar time (or perhaps to a suspended civil cold war, as some people called it).

Ironically, when I had finished making Rawane’s Song there was a war again in the summer, when Israel invaded Lebanon and bombed its bridges in a fight against Hezbollah, who had kidnapped a couple of soldiers to tease and provoke Israel. After this war, fighting factions would strengthen and become more popular. Anyway, at that time, I did not refrain from showing Rawane’s Song, and I did not refrain from taking a highly ironical position towards “speaking about the war,” even though we were being bombed and the country was devastated. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2024

February 12, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Christina Chatzitheodorou, and René Esaú Sánchez

New writing from Etel Adnan, Satish Alekar, and Djamila Morani!

This month, our selected titles of new publications carry wisdom, mystery, and humour. Below, find reviews of plays by one of India’s most accomplished and innovative playwrights; a compilation of interview with the inimitable Etel Adnan, conducted by Laure Adler; and a PEN Translates Award-winning novel of revenge and self-discovery, set in the Abbasid period.

alekar

Two Plays: The Grand Exit and A Conversation with Dolly by Satish Alekar, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Seagull Books, 2024

 Review by Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

This nifty volume of plays collects two of Alekar’s works, “Mahanirvan” and “Thakishi Samvad”, written forty-six years apart—Born in 1949, Satish Vasant Alekar is a Marathi playwright, actor, theatre director. He was a founding member of the Theatre Academy of Pune and is well-known plays such as for Mahapoor, Begum Barve, Atirekee, and Pidhijat. He is considered among the most significant playwrights in modern Marathi and Indian theatre, along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vijay Tendulkar, and lately, he has come to be recognised for his acting in Marathi and Hindi feature films.

“Mahanirvan” or “The Grand Exit” was first performed in 1974, and is a play where a dead man has more dialogue than any living character. The description on the cover is not wrong to equate the character with Sophocles’ Antigone, for he also strongly insists on the method of his last rites; Bhaurao wants to be traditionally cremated at the shamshan ghat, but the cremation ground is in the process of being privatised. Thus, the dead—or rather their relatives—are now being redirected to a new facility which uses electrical incineration.

So Bhaurao lingers around as his body malingers, rotting and fly-infested, while his wife Ramaa grieves intensely, coming to terms with the sudden loss, and his son, Nana, tries to convince him to just go ahead with the cremation, and pass on. While working on the play, Alekar had realised that a dead man cannot speak prose, so Bhau’s dialogues instead take the poetic form—one resembling keertans (religious recitations). READ MORE…

Sounds Like Fiction: Traversing Minor Detail Again, in the Time of Genocide

February 5, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Amidst the ruins, I want to read Shibli's writing ... as a pedagogy of hope, of waiting, and of revolutionary becoming.

After the shameful decision to cancel Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s LiBeraturpreis award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, everyone in the Global North flocked to read Minor Detail (translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette), as thousands of writers, intellectuals, editors, and others in the literary ecosystem rightly condemned the cancellation. It was a symptom not only of Europe’s routine silencing of Palestinian voices but, more perniciously, of Germany’s particular brand of virulent anti-antisemitism, its Holocaust memory culture metastasised into a total interdiction on critiques of Israel.

Adania Shibli cites Samira Azzam—a writer whose seemingly unthreatening short stories describing everyday life in Palestine managed to pass the censorship bureau’s checks—as a formative influence. Azzam “contributed to shaping my consciousness regarding Palestine as no other text I have ever read has done”, Shibli writes, for it cultivated in her “a deep yearning for all that had been, including the normal, the banal, and the tragic”. For many of us, grappling with what solidarity and hope can mean in the light of Israel’s ongoing genocidal violence against Gaza, Minor Detail might be such an essential touchstone. How might we (re)read Shibli’s work today, not only as a prescient source of information about Palestine but also as a text that theorises and maps its own aesthetic possibility? With what voice does it continue to address us, reverberating through silence and the distortions of language?

One day, a splotch of black ink bloomed on my well-thumbed copy of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I didn’t know where it came from. The blemish, to my consternation, appeared in the light-grey region of the cover, which depicts an undulating terrain. Misted waves, perhaps, or the volatile sands of a desert. Obsessed with keeping my books as pristine as possible, I took an alcohol swab and wiped the black dot right off.

The smudge was dispatched as swiftly as it had arrived. Days later, I noticed the alcohol had also dissolved the matte surface of the cover where I had rubbed it. A tiny glossy archipelago emerged, its lustre and its jagged edges visible only at an angle, under the light.

Now the sheen reproaches me for thinking I could make something disappear with no trace.

*

Desert / الصحراء

 I want to juxtapose without asserting equivalence; the unnamed Israeli military commander in Minor Detail, too, believes in the seamlessness of disappearance. In the novel’s first half, he helms a Zionist platoon in a mission to conquer the Negev desert. This ruthless assertion of sovereignty takes place in 1949, a year after the traumatic Nakba dispossessed most Palestinians of their homeland. It is also a rearguard response to Egypt’s invasion of an Israeli kibbutz a year prior.

Charged with purging the land of “infiltrators”, the Zionist soldiers massacre a band of Arabs. They capture a Bedouin girl, humiliating, gang-raping, and murdering her. The horror of these bloodthirsty actions is continually evaded: “Then came the sound of heavy gunfire.” The narrative camera, as it were, turns its back on the moment of life’s desecration. Landscape itself seems to consent to these crimes. The desert, an aggressive mouth, collaborates in the erasure of evidence, each occasion with a different attitude: “languidly”, “greedily”, “steadily”, the sand sucks blood, moisture, substance into its depths. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 2, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed, and Miranda Mazariegos

Literary news from Palestine, Egypt, and Latin America!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news of a “literary cartography” of Palestine, the most recent literary fairs and festivals in Egypt, and censorship of Latin American authors in Florida. Read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Despite the burgeoning array of literary endeavors in support of Gaza, this dispatch aims to shed light on a profoundly comprehensive initiative. Back in July 2023, when we unveiled our coverage of the podcast entitled “Country of Words,” conceived and orchestrated by Refqa Abu-Remaileh, little did we fathom the vastness of Refqa’s overarching vision under the same title.

“Country or Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature” was inaugurated by Stanford University in the last weeks of 2023. Rooted in the constellation paradigm within literature, this digital-born project aspires to retrace and remap the global narrative of Palestinian literature throughout the twentieth century, traversing the Arab world, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestled at the confluence of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, “Country of Words” establishes a networked locus for the data and narrative fragments of a literature in constant motion, harmonizing porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into a resilient, open-ended literary chronicle.

READ MORE…

Winter 2024: Highlights from the Team

January 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Anna Rumsby, Bridget Peak, Ellen Elias-Bursać, José García Escobar, Julie Shi, Mia Manns, and Michelle Chan Schmidt

Get excited to dip into our Winter 2024 issue with these highlights from our team!

Ilya Kaminsky’s “Reading Dante in Ukraine” makes an impassioned case for the crucial role of art amid the horrors of war. What we need, as Dante’s journey shows us, is to defend ourselves with it: a tune to walk to, even in the underworld, as long as one still walks. In Miklós Vámos’s “Electric Train,”  translated by Ági Bori‚ the question-answer format gives the piece levity and rhythm, and the counterpoint of the humor interplaying with the troubled relationships brings it powerful depth. I found wisdom in the wry humor of Jaime Barrios Carrillo’s poems in David Unger’s translation. I love the image of angels spending the evening in their hotel rooms, ironing their enormous white wings.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

The masterful language in Ági Bori’s translation, as though hand-holding the reader through a children’s story, and the simple act of gifting a present in the story belie the depth and complexity of emotional turmoil that wash over Miklós Vámos’s characters in “Electric Train,” a turmoil that seemingly hits out of nowhere like a wave yet in fact stems from a deep brewing well of built up memories and tensions. The contrast highlights all the more the challenges, and perhaps even limits, of recognizing and understanding another’s intentions, experiences, and feelings.

Rage, sorrow, resilience, helplessness, hope, a hunger for life and love and connection, grief, a numbing screaming despair: it is difficult to put into words the sensations that ran through me as I read Samer Abu Hawwash’s “My People” in Huda J. Fakhreddine’s translation. It cannot possibly compare to the feelings and thoughts of Samer Abu Hawwash and the Palestinian people, to the reality of having each day and moment narrow down to dried bread and tear tracks.

I was intrigued by Laura Garmeson’s discussion, in her review of Brazilian author Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow, of the tongue as “both creator and destroyer. It has the power to make and unmake worlds.” It is a through line in Crooked Plow that reminds us of the power and possibilities of language and story to shape our lives. Garmeson’s review, in a way, is also a fire that kindles awareness of Itamar Vieira Junior’s work and the legacies, realities, and possible futures for Afro-Brazilian communities. The tongue as symbol also feels like a through line between these pieces in their rumination on what is gained and lost and pushed aside in the choices we make of what, how, and when we say (or write) things, or not.

—Julie Shi, Senior Executive Assistant

READ MORE…

Our Milestone 50th Issue Has Landed!

January 18, 2024  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Emily Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Michael Cronin, Nam Le, and Samer Abu Hawwash alongside new work from 35 countries!

Living today is a feat of coexistence. In Me | You | Us, our Winter 2024 edition—Asymptote’s landmark fiftieth!—people seek ways to equably share a world of jostling values, languages, and stories. Embracing the rare spotlight in mainstream English media almost never afforded translators, Emily Wilson discusses her groundbreaking translation of Homer and its place in the constellation of existing English Odyssies. Public intellectual Michael Cronin makes the case for translation’s centrality in the construction of new narratives necessary for the continued survival of our species amid other species. Headlining our Special Feature themed on coexistence, Nam Le’s frenzied poems are just as preoccupied with Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy in the original Latin as they are driven to distraction by the insufficiency of that same scanty alphabet against the tonal splendor of Vietnamese. In Ilya Kaminsky’s Brave New World Literature contribution, truckloads of Dante’s Inferno being delivered to a besieged Kharkiv speak to a different, tenuous, and moving, coexistence. As support for Ukraine wavers in the US, we at Asymptote have kept up our coverage of the region also through Elina Sventsytska’s devastating poetry, a review of Oksana Lutsyshyna’s latest award-winning novel in English translation, and a dispatch about the chilling aftermath of a Russian dissident’s self-immolation. Alongside these, I invite you to discover the Mexican pioneer of magical realism Elena Garro, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash, Cuban artist Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva, and Romanian playwright Edith Negulici amid never-before-published work from a whopping thirty-five countries. All of it is illustrated by the Netherlands-based guest artist Ehud Neuhaus.

Winter-2024-v9
If, as Taiwanese author Lin Yaode put it, “literature’s history is really a history of readers of literature,” the history of Asymptote might also be in part a tale of its readers. But why should it stop there? To all collaborators and supporters, past and present, I say gratefully: this one is for you! As hinted at by last year’s closures of The White Review and Freeman’s—both similarly prestigious journals with a focus on world literature—existence (by which I mean mere survival) has not been easy. We made it to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . and to our 50th edition because of you.

If you are an avid reader of the magazine and haven’t yet signed up, we hope you’ll consider becoming an official sustaining or masthead member today for as little as USD5 a month in addition to subscribing to our socials (Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads) and our monthly Book Club. If you represent an institution advocating for a country’s literature, check out this (slightly outdated) slideshow and get in touch to sponsor a country-themed Special Feature, as FarLit has recently done. (The deadline to submit to our paid Faroese Special Feature is February 15th, 2024; the guidelines and a new call for reviewers to contribute to our monthly What’s New in Translation column can be found here). If you work for a translation program, prize, or residency, consider advertising through our myriad platforms, including our newly launched “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation” column. And, finally, if you’d like to join us behind the scenes in advocating for a more inclusive world literature, we just announced our very first recruitment drive of the year (deadline to apply: February 1st, 2024). Thank you for your readership and your support. We can’t wait to hear from you!

From Palestine to Greece: A Translated Struggle 

January 10, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

. . . utopias are not solely objects of fantasy but are objectives to be built and lived . . . at the intersection of art and revolution.

Palestine and Greece have long enjoyed a strong relationship of solidarity and friendship, fortified by mutual assistance during political tumults, expressions of recognition, and profound demonstrations towards peace and independence. In this essay, Christina Chatzitheodorou takes us through the literature that has continually followed along the history of this connection, and how translations from Arabic to Greek has advocated and enlivened the Palestinian cause in the Hellenic Republic.

Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was forced to leave the city. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, then fled Beirut for Tunisia, and, in fear of being captured or assassinated by Israel, he asked his Greek friend Andreas Papandreou for cover. The two had previously joined forces during the dictatorial regime in Greece known as Junta or the Regime of the Colonels, in which Arafat supported the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleutherotiko Kinima/PAK) founded by Papandreou, and had also offered training in Middle Eastern camps to the movement’s young resistance fighters. 

Arafat arrived then from war-torn Beirut to Faliron, in the south of Athens. He received a warm dockside reception by the then-Prime Minister Papandreou and other top government officials, as well as a small crowd consisting mostly of Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) members and Greece-based Palestinians, who stood by chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. Papandreou called Arafat’s arrival in Athens a “historic moment” and assured him of Greece’s full support in the Palestinians’ struggle; after all, while Arafat was coming to Athens, accompanied by Greek ships, pro-Palestinian protests were taking place around the country almost every other day. 

Although our support and solidarity with the Palestinian cause neither began nor stopped there, that day remains a powerful reminder of the traditional ties and friendship between Greek and Palestinian people. But more importantly, it comes in total contrast with the position of the current Greek government. Now, despite the short memories of politicians, it is the literature and translations of Palestinian works which continue to remind us of Greece’s historical solidarity to Palestine, particularly from left-wing and libertarian circles. 

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 5, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sofija Popovska

Literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Palestine!

This week, our editors around the world bring news as to how different literary initiatives and publications are help shaping the present. From writers who embody multiculturalism and unity, to works of solidarity and hope, read on to see how writers, readers, and artists are working to shed light on what matters.

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

“Rarely has any Macedonian poet attracted as much attention among theorists, literary historians, and philologists as [Kočo] Racin. Racin was . . . a pioneer in the artistic expression of the mother tongue, . . . an example of an ideal revolutionary and, in the end, a victim. He was the most honorable and most honored thing that the Macedonians had in the period between the two wars,” writes Goran Kalogjera, a prominent Croatian comparatist and scholar of Macedonian studies in his book, Pogled otstrana. Racin (1908 – 1943) (Side view. Racin (1908 – 1943)). Recently, this important biography was translated into Macedonian by Slavčo Koviloski, and published by Makedonika Litera Press.

Kosta Apostolov Solev is a canonical figure in Macedonian literature, hailed by some as the founder of modern Macedonian poetry. He is best known under his penname, Kočo Racin, which was derived from the name of his lover, Rahilka Firfova-Raca—a gesture indicative of his support for the socialist women’s movement. He himself was a political activist, participating in the translation of the Communist Manifesto into Macedonian, and acting as editor for several communist magazines. His political leanings had contributed to his mysterious and untimely death; mortally shot by a printing-house entrance guard in June 1943, some speculate that Racin had been purposefully targeted by the communist party, having fallen out of favor with them around 1940. However, his activism effectuated his ties to other cultures, enriching his literary oeuvre. Aside from his mother tongue, he wrote texts in Bulgarian and Serbian, and was published all over the Balkans. Kalogjera stresses this multilingual, multicultural aspect of Racin’s output in Pogled otstrana, noting his importance to Croatian culture. READ MORE…

Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

December 18, 2023  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

For our final post of the year, we decided to compile a list of opportunities for all you translators out there to apply to. Onward and upward!

Opportunities abound for the emerging translator!  Just in time for the year-end break—this will be our final post of the year—we sifted through the latest ones and compiled the best and timeliest for our new one-stop hub, “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation.” See you on the other side of the New Year!

AWARDS

SARAH MAGUIRE PRIZE

The 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation is now open for submissions. This international prize is awarded every two years to a translated book of poetry by a “poet living beyond Europe”. The winners will receive £3000, to be divided between the poet and their translator, and will be included in a Poetry Book Society promotion alongside up to seven other shortlisted titles. Past winners include Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and Chinese poet Yang Lian.

Founded in 2020, the Prize commemorates the Poetry Translation Center’s founder, renowned poet Sarah Maguire, and seeks to celebrate the art of poetry in translation, which the PTC calls “the lifeblood of poetry”. Applications close on Monday, January 1st, 2024.

Apply here.

WORLD LITERATURE  TODAY – STUDENT TRANSLATION PRIZE

World Literature Today offers an annual competition for students enrolled in translation studies programs worldwide, and applications are open! Consistent with WLT’s commitment to serving international and university communities alike, the Student Translation Prize seeks to recognize the work of emerging translators from anywhere in the world.

Entries should include a piece of translated prose (up to 1,000 words) or three pieces of poetry, along with a cover letter. $200 will be awarded to one prose translation and one poetry translation. Both will also be published online in the summer.

Applications are due January 11th, 2024.

Apply here.

MO HABIB TRANSLATION PRIZE IN PERSIAN LITERATURE

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UW is thrilled to announce that the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature is open for submissions for its second cycle. In partnership with the Mo Habib Memorial Foundation and Deep Vellum Publishing, this prize aims to commemorate the life of Mohammed Habib through the celebration of Persian literary works.

This cycle will focus on Persian poetry from the 10th century CE to the present day. Bi- or multilingual projects are more than welcome, as are collections of poems from more than one author. Applicants should submit a cover letter, a CV, and a sample of the proposed translation by March 1st, 2024. The winning translation will be awarded $10,000 and will be published by Deep Vellum.

Apply here. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 15, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed

The latest literary news from Bulgaria and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from Bulgaria and Egypt, taking us to book fairs and prize ceremonies. From the passing of a giant of Egyptian children’s literature to the arrival of literary stars in Bulgaria, read on to find out more!

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

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Sofia International Book Fair graced the beginning of December. It took place over five days in the National Palace of Culture and saw the participation of approximately 160 publishing houses. Its motto was, quite fittingly, “We create stories. We create history.”

In an interview for the Nova News channel, Veselin Todorov, former longtime chairman of the Bulgarian Book Association revealed some intriguing details about the fair’s conception: “We began this tradition fifty-five years ago. However, we are celebrating our golden jubilee only now because on several occasions during socialist times, it was decided for the fair to be held every other year instead of every year. It all started back in 1968, in the Universiada Hall. Todor Zhivkov [former de facto leader of Bulgaria] inaugurated the event—a pompous and noisy affair. He even claimed it was one of the biggest such fairs in Eastern Europe.”

Literary critic Amelia Licheva also commented on the festival in her opening-day interview for the independent media platform Toest: “The boldest ambition of the team in charge of the cultural program (both Daria Karapetkova and I are part of it this year) is to attract real stars. Bulgaria is a small market with a bad image abroad and it is rather difficult, but we do not give up easily. Actually, our efforts finally paid off. The Bulgarian public will be able to meet with Franco Moretti, Leïla Slimani, Dacia Maraini, Stefan Hertmans, Ia Genberg, and Agustina Bazterrica. We are hoping to cultivate a taste in the audience for the issues of global importance and get more people to attend these discussions. This would mean a success not only for the festival but also for the role of literature in the present day.”

What better way to end 2023 than with hope for the literary future of 2024?

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt READ MORE…

Seas Otherwise Too Treacherous To Navigate: Mario Aquilina on the European Essay and Its Planetary Histories

December 4, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

. . . the essay sustains a tension between experience and the attempt . . . to derive ideas or abstractions from experience . . .

In The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form (2021), Mario Aquilina, a Maltese literary historian and scholar, probes through the philosophies and ethos of the genre’s figureheads—from Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and considers the “paradox at the heart” of the essay: “the more resistant to genre an essay is, the more properly an essay it is.” The foundations of the ever-expansive, proliferating possibilities of the essay as a genre, form, and mode can be found in its pre-Montaignean roots from Azwinaki Tshipala of 315 CE South Africa, al-Jahiz of 8th-century southeastern Iraq, and Heian Japan’s Nikki bungaku (diary literature) comprising of court ladies Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu, Lady Sarashina, and others, to the Graeco-Roman philosophers Plutarch, Seneca the Younger, St Augustine of Hippo, and Marcus Aurelius.

In the contemporary era, this obscured historico-aesthetic timeline courses through the genre, from the New Journalism movement of the 60s (Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) to ‘memoir craze’ of the 90s (David Sedaris, Mary Karr, Frank McCourt), from the British life-writing movement and its American counterpart, creative nonfiction, to its present-day extra-textual permutations: essay films, graphic memoir, the imagessay, and video essays. But what of this “memoirization of the essay” and “essayification of the memoir”—to quote from David Lazar? “If we think of the ‘I’ of the essayist as collaborative, then we understand that the essay does not have to be as narcissistic a genre as it has sometimes been presented. Its value—literary or communicative—not simply expressive,” writes Aquilina for The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022). 

In this interview, I spoke with Prof. Aquilina on, among other topics, the histories of the essay within and beyond the Western literary imaginary, his thoughts on Montaigne and Montaigne’s Euro-American stalwarts Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Phillip Lopate, and John D’Agata, and the genre’s recalcitrant relationship with categorisation, alterity, and selfhoods. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I would like to begin this interview with your opinion on John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) which was part of his trailblazing yet contentious trilogy. D’Agata follows the essay to its genesis in ancient cultures of Sumer, Greece, Babylonia, South Africa, and China: miscellanies of Ziusudra, dialogues of Ennatum, self-interviews of Azwinaki Tshipala, and biographies of T’ao Ch’ien. 

Mario Aquilina (MA): Editing an anthology is always a contentious act. Literary anthologies are political in the sense that they organise a body of knowledge in specific ways, bringing to our attention that which we might otherwise not see or something hiding from us that we should see. Anthologies establish or disrupt hierarchies of value and relevance, and they influence in decisive ways what is preserved and circulated as well as what is lost. Anthologising is inseparable from canonisation, archivisation, but also representation and social relations as shown in the well-known debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books around The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011). 

John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) is provocative in the sense that, unlike some other accounts of the history of the essay, it does not begin with Michel de Montaigne. It also casts its net beyond the Western Canon. It thus stretches both the temporality and geographical positioning of the story of the essay that we often tell ourselves. It forces us to consider the possibility that the essay is not necessarily a fundamentally modern form (Jacques Rancière calls Montaigne the ‘first modern man’) and not necessarily tied to the rise of humanism and a human-centred perception of the world. However, what is perhaps even more contentious for some is that, through this alternative history of the essay, D’Agata also makes an intervention in the present by shifting the parameters within which one might think of the essay as a genre. D’Agata’s instinct in this anthology is to open the genre, to find it in places and times in which we did not see it before. The consequence of this is that as readers we are fascinated by the extent of the potential of the essay but also possibly confused by being presented with a form that is so stretched that it almost starts to incorporate everything. I personally think that D’Agata’s book does important work and I consider it to be a valuable contribution to not only studies of the history of the essay but also to its theory. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 1, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Christina Chatzitheodorou, Georgina Fooks, and Marina García Pardavila

Literary updates from Greece, Palestine, the UK, and Spain!

The week, we bring more updates from writers around the globe as they continue to commemorate, resist, show solidarity, and contemplate our present moment. In Greece, the literary world remembers the historic Athens Polytechnic Uprising; in the UK, the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is awarded; in Spain, an exciting young literary festival brings together some of the best names in Spanish-language writing today, to talk about that eternal subject—time; and lastly, our editor from Palestine expresses gratitude for those around the world who have continued to stand up and show support.

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Greece

The book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was recently translated from English into Greek by Dimitris Koufontinas and published by Monopati Editions. In the collection, editors Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana have gathered and selected stories from Palestine that best exemplify the Palestinian Arab folk oral tradition, and the translation represents an important addition for Palestinian and Arab literature in the Greek language.

Recently, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (1973), Giorgos Perantonakis wrote an article for Book Press, highlighting the continual legacy that this demonstration—and the dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), that it protested—has left on Greek literature, citing important works from poetry and novels to personal memoirs. However, Perantonakis omitted one of the most important anti-dictatorial titles: Ta Dekaokto Kimena (The Eighteen Texts), a collective volume of eighteen writers (including Georgios Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Stratis Tsirkas) and their political works, which was published in July 1970 by Kedros Publications. READ MORE…