Language: English

Mid-autumn News from the Asymptote Team

November 3, 2016  |  in News  |  by Theophilus Kwek

From poetry to graph theory to dance, we've been keeping busy.

Poetry Editor Aditi Machado‘s poem ‘Route: Desert’ was recently published in Poor Claudia.

Drama Editor Caridad Svich‘s new play, Archipelago, premieres in the UK on 24th November at the Lighthouse in Poole, directed by Stephen Wrentmore. Her essay, ‘Six Hundred and Ninety-Two Million: On Art, Ethics and Activism’ recently appeared on Howlround.

Romania and Moldova Editor-at-Large Chris Tanasescu, aka MARGENTO, co-authored an academic article on artificial intelligence with Bryan Paget and Diana Inkpen that has recently been published in the Journal of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. This is part of an ongoing research project, The Graph Poem, led by MARGENTO that applies graph theory to poetry computational analysis and poetry composition or generation.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac‘s translation of Hotel Tito by Ivana Bodrožić will be published by Seven Stories Press. Read an exclusive excerpt in Asymptote‘s Spring Issue! She has also just been elected Vice-President of the American Literary Translators’ Association.

Assistant Editor K.T. Billey, who also edited Asymptote‘s recent Special Feature on Canadian Poetry, has three new poems in the latest issue of the Denver Quarterly. 

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Ask a Translator with Daniel Hahn

November 2, 2016  |  in Ask a Translator, Interviews  |  by Daniel Hahn

We look for what works as a piece of excellent English writing on its own terms

Acclaimed author, editor, and translator Daniel Hahn is back again with an insider’s perspective on all things related to translation. This week, he responds to a question from Belgian reader Karel Caals and reveals the inner workings of judging translation contests, grants, and prizes. 

Have you ever judged a translation for a contest or a grant? If so, what was the process like; what do you look for, especially, to separate the wheat from the chaff?

One day I’m going to write one of these columns that won’t just say, essentially, “it depends”.

But since you ask: It depends.

Yes, I’ve been on judging panels for translated fiction (such as the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for adult fiction, the Marsh Award for children’s); or for fiction in English for which translations are eligible alongside originally Anglophone work (the IMPAC Dublin Award for adults, the UKLA Book Awards for children); as well as grant-making committees for organisations like English PEN, which for some years has supported the translation of international literature and the promotion of translated work in the UK. And, yes, each is looking for something subtly or drastically different, and each has quite distinct criteria, and so it depends.

In most cases, the aim is to find a really good translation (I’ll pretend for a moment that we’d all agree what that is), though not infrequently the translations are judged in such a way that the act of translation per se, and the translator her/himself, aren’t mentioned in the evaluation process at all.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Philippe Beck

November 1, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Nicola Marae Allain

Space creates grammar. (And in itself creates is said in space.)

Complex, haunting, and profoundly literary, Didactic Poetries is French poet Philippe Beck’s response to Schiller’s statement: “We are still waiting for a didactic poem where thought itself would be and would remain poetic.” In recognition of his entire oeuvre, Beck was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix de Poésie [Grand Poetry Prize] in 2015. We present two poems from his debut publication in English, released by Univocal Publishing today.

 

Liminal Poem

If an I does not begin,
it is because of the sum
of strong concerns
that make and unmake
someone’s history
in the history of some ones
in the history of many
and not in everyone’s.
For a someone differs
in the sum of possible exchanges
with everyone
(the big I is also
theoretically absent, and
the ordinary you and I
strive to become a You
before the imagined arrival
of the big I
that does not exist);
discussions begin
because of discussions.
What must be said
is not already spoken
in the individual’s brain,
nor in the Collective,
but it is said
because of the conversation
which creates necessity
all around brains
and hearts.
And the world is not everyone’s
negative rough draft.

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Indigenous Languages, Migration, and Multilingualism in Fall 2016 Canadian Poetry Special Feature

October 31, 2016  |  in News  |  by K.T. Billey

A country that takes pride in a mosaic model of multiculturalism becomes home to an abundance of languages

In “Verisimilitude,” the Fall 2016 issue of Asymptote, Assistant Editor K.T. Billey edited a stellar special feature on Canadian Poetry. Reaching far beyond the exchange between French and English, this section presents a diverse group of authors and translators that reflects a multitude of cultural and historical intersections and conflicts. Now, Billey situates and introduces the poets and translators. Delve into the special feature here.

Global readers likely are aware of Canada’s official French/English bilingualism. What the literary world may not know about—and what Asymptote is delighted to spotlight in our Fall 2016 issue—is the range of Aboriginal and First Nations voices that are fundamental to Canada’s evolving identity. The Special Feature on Canadian Poetry introduces readers to three of the approximately sixty distinct Indigenous languages spoken in Canada.

Multilingual poems by acclaimed poet Duncan Mercredi are a crystalline example of the verisimilarity that unites the Fall issue. Duncan’s brother Joe translated the English portions of Duncan’s poems into their native Cree, a language whose dialects nearly span the entire North American continent. Joe’s line-by-line translations became, and are recognized as, part of the poems rather than separate works. The poems are unified though their dual-linguistic nature, exacerbating and expressing the ambivalence of a First Nations poet writing in English.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 28, 2016  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alice Inggs, Marc Charron, and Nina Sparling

The latest in literary news from Africa and North America

As the week comes to a close, we’ve been busy reading and re-reading the Fall 2016 issue of Asymptote, while trying to escape the fact that November is nearly upon us. This week, we hear from Alice Inggs, Editor-at-Large based in South Africa, who shares the details of the literary awards season from across the continent. We visit Editor-at-Large Marc Charron in Canada next, before heading south to catch up with Blog Editor Nina Sparling in New York City. 

Alice Inggs, Editor-at-Large in South Africa, sets us afloat with a whirlwind literary tour of the continent:

After peaking in the polls but missing out on the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, author of Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature and In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir, was subsequently awarded the prestigious Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award by the South Korean Toji Cultural Foundation. Thiong’o, a champion of African literature(s), has produced novels, plays, short stories, and essays, publishing primarily in the Gikuyu language.

In West Africa, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim won the Nigeria Prize for Literature for Season of Crimson Blossoms, which explores sexuality, loss, and community through an affair between a twenty-five-year-old street gang leader and a devout widow and grandmother. Shortlisted candidates included Elnathan John (Born on a Tuesday) and Asymptote-featured writer Chika Unigwe (Night Dancer).

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Stephen Henighan on Globalization, Translation, and The Avant-garde

October 27, 2016  |  in Interviews, Publisher Profile  |  by Sarah Moses

Translation started not as a way of nourishing the avant-garde—it started as a way of bolstering national identity.

This interview marks the launch of a new series here at the Asymptote blog: “Meet the Publisher.” Every month, we will bring you an insider’s look at the world via in-depth, intimate conversations with publishers of literature in translation from around the globe. This week, contributor Sarah Moses brings us an interview with editor Stephen Henighan of Biblioasis in Ontario, Canada, on the process, politics, and passion of publishing translations.

Sarah Moses says: “Biblioasis started out as a bookshop in Windsor, Ontario in the late 1990s. In 2003, founder and owner Daniel Wells took an interest in publishing and, alongside editor John Metcalf, began to acquire, edit, and launch the press’s first titles. Biblioasis now publishes between twenty-two and twenty-five books a year divided between new literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, alongside reprints and regional-interest books. Biblioasis’s head office still includes a bookstore, and the press also runs a quarterly magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries. The Biblioasis International Translation Series, which accounts for four titles a year, includes works from French Canada and around the world, as well as books written in Canada in languages other than French or English. I sat down with series editor Stephen Henighan to chat about the press and literary translation in Canada.”                                                                                                                                    

Sarah Moses (SM): I’d like to begin by asking you about literary translation in Canada. How would you say it differs from other countries?

 Stephen Henighan (SH): In other cultures—and Buenos Aires, where you’ve just come from, is a good example, if you think back to Jorge Luis Borges and his friends in the early part of their careers, but also in New York or London or Paris—translation was an avant-garde activity. It was an activity that might nourish national literary debate, but above all it was there to give you aesthetic relief from the national context.

I think what happened in Canada is that, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the literary elite was nationalist and therefore wasn’t all that interested in translation. There had been odd translations from French-Canadian literature to English-Canadian literature, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, but the real translation culture begins in the late 1960s in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where in the village of North Hatley writers of English and French were living side by side. That’s where Sheila Fischman, who has gone on to translate more than one hundred and fifty books, got her start.

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Dig Deeper into Our Fall 2016 Issue

October 26, 2016  |  in News, Reviews  |  by Aditi Machado, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, and Lee Yew Leong

Selected highlights in the new issue from Asymptote section editors!

Last week, we launched “Verisimilitude,” our star-studded Fall 2016 edition. Since then, we’ve been overwhelmed by the critical reception: A Public Space called the issue “a gold mine of work from 31 countries” while The Chicago Review of Books proclaimed it “f**ing gorgeous.” Among the never-before-published work by both well known and emerging translators, writers, and visual artists we presented in this quarterly issue, Anita Raja’s essay on translation made The Literary Hub‘s Best of the Week roundup. Thank you so much and do please keep spreading the word so we can connect our authors with even more readers! This week, to guide your exploration of the new issue, some of our editors contribute highlights from their respective sections. Follow them from Ireland to Iraq to Mexico to Korea and back again.

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Tactile Translations, Stefana McClure. Review: Eva Heisler, Visual Editor.

Using sources as various as a Japanese translation of The Little Prince, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, or a U.S. government redacted report on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” artist Stefana McClure slivers printed matter and re-employs it as material with which to construct her enigmatic objects: stones wrapped in paper; a ball wound of the paper shreds of a novel; a nearly black “drawing” knit from redacted texts. Carmen Hermo’s conversation with McClure delves into the thinking and process behind the artist’s “tactile translations.”

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Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Everything There Was” by Hanna Bervoets

October 25, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Florian Duijsens

We started craving other things. Things that were there. Though they were becoming scarcer by the day.

Today we present a haunting extract from a newly translated novel by critically acclaimed Dutch writer, columnist, and journalist Hanna Bervoets. Stranded in a school building after a catastrophic event leaves the outside world uninhabitable, a TV crew and the subjects of their documentary struggle to survive in Bervoets’s post-apocalyptic universe. From the scattered diary pages of the crew’s researcher, we learn the troubling story of everything there was, and the little there was left.

We haven’t turned on the computers in a long time. The last time we turned them off again, there still wasn’t any internet. Until then we still opened the browsers every day. Though perhaps that was just habit, like in the old situation, tearing a page off my calendar every morning, even though I already knew full well what day of the week it was, or what date. But the more often you do something, the stranger it is not to do it. So I can’t say whether we still believed the internet would come back. Just that we kept hoping it would.

It is perhaps hard for you to imagine how important the internet once was. I also find it hard to imagine. Perhaps it really wasn’t all that important.

But I think it was.

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Hwang Jungeun on Seoul, noodles, and gentrification

October 24, 2016  |  in Interviews, Translations  |  by M. René Bradshaw

In South Korea, things don't get verbalised properly or are distorted linguistically.

One Hundred Shadows, the debut novel of Hwang Jungeun, is a tilt toward the borderlines of society, where the disconnected and the dispossessed attempt to make a home; it is a ferroconcrete dream version of Seoul with a wistful languor, desperate to prove that even in the murkiest crannies of the city, there are surges of fellow-feeling, or snatches of shared joy, that can suddenly break through the hard-bitten top layers and bloom.

Working as an assistant at a repair shop in a sprawling, cavernous electronics market, Eungyo finds herself drawn into an idiosyncratic community of Seoul’s twilight periphery. There is Mr. Yeo, her boss, who works until the crack of dawn and adores sweet red beans with shaved ice; there is the itinerant and rambling Yugon, who puts his faith in the lottery rather than in other people; and there is Mujae, who, like Eungyo, abandoned his formal education and also works as an assistant. Eungyo and Mujae meet occasionally to eat noodles and drink beer, and as the demolition of the electronics market looms alongside the regeneration of the neighborhood surrounding it, the two come to develop a timid intimacy which leans clumsily into a love formed from the outside looking in, and they discovered themselves synced into one orbit—and on the edges of observing their shadows rise.

Ahead of her UK tour, Hwang Jungeun sat down with Asymptote to discuss One Hundred Shadows, which was translated from the Korean by Jung Yewon and published by Tilted Axis Press on 3 October.

Hwang Jungeun’s replies appear below both in the Korean and in English translation by Deborah Smith.

Read an excerpt of the book here.

M. René Bradshaw (MRB): One Hundred Shadows takes place largely in an electronics market in central Seoul—an impoverished area targeted by rapid regeneration efforts. Which specific locations of the city inspired the novel’s settings? The electronics market is so pervasive, its function and internal dynamics so important to the main characters’ lives, that it almost acts as a character itself within the story. Is there a personal anecdote attached to a similar electronics market?

Hwang Jungeun (HJ): There are two locations which form the background to the electronics market which appears in this novel. One is a large electronics market in Yongsan, an area in central Seoul. In the process of this area’s redevelopment, there was an incident in which five evicted residents and one armed policeman were killed. This happened on the morning of January 20, 2009. The conglomerate that was heading the redevelopment construction employed civilians known as ‘construction thugs’. They entered the building earmarked for demolition, whose residents had been protesting their eviction, en masse. While the residents were trapped on the roof, they lit a fire on the ground floor and fired water cannons. Though the police of the South Korean government were there in the hundreds, they protected the ‘thugs’, and actively encouraged the illegal actions committed by them. In the final moments, they implemented something known as the ‘Trojan horse operation’, used to suppress protests. It was an operation which used a crane and container to demolish the lookout tower which the residents had constructed on the roof. The moment armed police swarmed onto the roof, a huge conflagration broke out in the tower. Six people who were unable to escape from the tower died. This was all broadcast on the news and many people witnessed the moment of the fire breaking out in real time. I was one of them.

After the incident, the place became known as Namildang. I wrote this novel from summer to autumn 2009. I wrote before the sun went down, then around sunset I went and held a protest in front of Namildang. After the fire, the bereaved families gathered at the building and almost every day a violent altercation occurred due to the use of police force. That place, and the things that happened there, were so miserable, I wanted to make something warm. I thought that it was the only thing I could do. And so I wrote this.

Secondly, there is a place called Sewoon Electronics Market in Jongno, which is both the old and current centre of Seoul. Its eight long buildings were completed in 1968, and stretch from Jongno to Toegye-ro, and the first of these buildings, which is the modern market, was demolished in 2008. Even when the disaster occurred in Yongsan in 2009, demolition was still going on. My father has been repairing audio equipment for forty years in the second of Sewoon Market’s buildings. The setting around the electronics market which appears in the novel, including Mr Oh’s repair shop, Omusa, and the transformer workshop where Mujae works, are all descriptions of places that were there or still are.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 21, 2016  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alma Beck, Hanna Heiskanen, and Julia Sherwood

This week's literary news from the Nordic countries, the UK and Israel.

The week is nearly over, which not only means it’s the weekend but also that it’s time for our literary catch-up! For this edition, Blog Editor Hanna Heiskanen shares updates on the upcoming awards season, among other news from Scandinavia. Editor-at-Large Julia Sherwood then reports on literary happenings from the UK. Rounding it all up is our correspondent for Israel, Alma Beck, currently residing in New Orleans, where she teaches philosophy for children.

Obligatory reminder: After you’ve caught up with all the news, head over to our just-launched Fall 2016 issue here!

First up, Blog Editor Hanna Heiskanen has the latest from the Nordic countries:

Lars Huldén, the Swedish-speaking Finn poet, has passed away at the age of 90. Born in Pietarsaari, Finland, Huldén was a much loved and highly regarded writer, scholar, translator, and recipient of the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize in 2000. He grew up among a tradition of oral storytelling in the local Swedish dialect and worked tirelessly throughout his adult life, publishing a large collection of poetry, prose, plays, and sonnets, among other works. He also produced Swedish translations of Finnish and English classics, such as the Finns’ national epic, Kalevala, and Shakespearean texts.

Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) is accepting applications for grants until November 1. If you are a publisher, translator, author, or event organizer interested in working with Finnish literature, FILI has a handy guide on their site to guide you through the options. FILI, founded in 1977, hands out approximately 700,000€ worth of grants annually, in addition to hosting translator residencies and maintaining a database of translations of Finnish literature.

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Calling All Translators of Indian Literature

October 19, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Poorna Swami

Asymptote celebrates the diversity and dissent within Indian writing

Only two weeks left to submit to Asymptote’s first-ever Special Feature on Contemporary Indian Language Literature in English Translation!

Since we first announced the Feature in August, we have received some very exciting work from all across the Indian map. And we can’t wait to find more voices, because in a country so large, we know there are more out there.

Take advantage of these last two weeks to revise your best translations and send them in!

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Translation Tuesday: A selection from “Written in the Dark,” a new anthology of Russian poets from Ugly Duckling Presse

October 18, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Ainsley Morse, Ben Felker-Quinn, Charles Swank, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Matvei Yankelevich

With plaintive, ardent reverie, / We drink these soundless words.

Fresh from launching our Fall 2016 issue yesterday, featuring exclusive writing from 31 countries, by such authors as Stefan Zweig, László Krasznahorkai, and Anita Raja, we present a selection from “Written in the Dark,” a new, groundbreaking anthology out from Ugly Duckling Presse. The poems gathered therein were written in 1942, during the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, in which one million people perished. Charles Bernstein compares these poems to “the sparks from two sticks of wood, creating a fire that warms even in an apocalypse.”

 

. . .

The creek sick of speech
Told water it took no side.
The water sick of silence
At once began again to shriek.

—Gennady Gor

translated from the Russian by Ben Felker-Quinn, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Matvei Yankelevich

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In Conversation with Ferrez, the Father of Literatura Marginal

October 17, 2016  |  in Interviews  |  by Kathleen McCaul Moura

We don't wait for writers to come to the periphery, we create our own kind of art.

Brazil’s São Paulo is the largest city in Latin America, with a population of around 20 million people. Where Rio de Janeiro, a few hours up the coast, delights tourists with its beautiful scenery and relaxed beach lifestyle, São Paulo often horrifies visitors. Dubbed ‘blade-runner in the tropics’ by the Serbian-born musician DJ Suba, who was one of Brazil’s most important producers, the city can seem, at first, like a dystopic mess of concrete towers and roads which continue endlessly into a shimmering grey horizon.

What makes the city so vast is the miles and miles of densely packed poor neighbourhoods that border the city. Locals call this a peripheria—the periphery—or as margins—the margins. This border was built over the last few decades by immigrants to the city. Finding jobs but nowhere to live they began building their own homes on the outskirts of São Paulo. Poorly constructed houses and unplanned streets with very few amenities, the periphery has been described as medieval by some local commentators. Life here is often characterised by violence, crime and isolation. Locals with low-paid service jobs in the centre of the city often commute four or five hours a day to get to work because of problems with roads, transport, and traffic.

All of this makes the fact that the São Paulo periphery is home to one of the most popular Brazilian literary movements in recent years all the more surprising. Poetry salons, called Saraus, happen all around the periphery every day of the week, where writers and poets recite compositions detailing life in their neighbourhoods. The best of these events are packed with people of all ages and from all backgrounds. There are very few established writers who have not made the pilgrimage to a periphery Sarau. The movement even has its very own bookshop, devoted to all that is marginal, located in the centre of the city.

The author Ferrez is known as the father of the Literatura Marginal movement. His novel, Capão Pecado, published in 2000, was one of the first contemporary accounts of life in the periphery by an author who grew up there. Its descriptions of violence, use of city and hip-hop influenced slang, and characters who often seem to have no future made the book a classic and Ferrez himself a household name. When he coined the phrase Literatura Marginal, he became a symbolic role model for a generation of marginal writers.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

October 14, 2016  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Janani Ganesan, Julia Leverone, Naheed Patel, and Omar El Adl

This week's literary news from Egypt, Bangladesh, the ALTA conference and on the recent Nobel Prize list.

Welcome to this edition of Asymptote’s weekly update, a hop, step, and jump tour de force bringing you the latest from three continents of literature in translation. To kick off, our Egyptian Editor-at-Large Omar El Adi sends us his bulletin, including news on literary prizes and an upcoming event in London. We then zoom in on Bangladesh, where Editor-at-Large for India Naheed Patel reports on recent festivals and the passing of Bangla authors. Also, US-based Assistant Editor Julia Leverone visited the ALTA conference so you didn’t have to. And finally Assistant Managing Editor Janani Ganesan gives us the round-up from the literary world on the Nobel Prize in Literature being awarded to Bob Dylan. 

Editor-at Large Omar El Adi has the latest literary news from Egypt:

The inaugural annual lecture of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be given by Palestinian author Anton Shammas at the British Library in London on 14 October. The jury for this year’s prize includes last year’s winning translator Paul Starkey, professor of Arabic Zahia Smail Salhi, writer and journalist Lucy Popescu, and literary consultant and publisher Bill Swainson. Paul Starkey’s 2015 win came for his translation of Youssef Rakha’s The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars (2014). An excerpt of Rakha’s third book Paulo (forthcoming in English) was featured in the Spring 2016 issue of Asymptote. The winner of the prize will be announced this December.

In Alexandria, Tara Al-Bahr, an interactive online platform, is launching its second print edition with original essays as well as translations into Arabic on the topics of cultural and artistic practices and urban change in contemporary Alexandria. Tara Al-Bahr launched in May this year, and its second printed edition came out on Thursday, 6 October.

The Facebook group Alexandria Scholars is commencing a series of talks, titled “The City Dialogue Series”, with the support of the Swedish Institute in Alexandria, and curated by the sociologist Amro Ali. The first lecture, “Alexandria and the search for meaning”, was on 10 October and explored solutions to the city’s problems “through the terrain of historical, urban, and philosophical analysis”. Future events involving writers, academics, political figures, and researchers have already been planned for November and December.

In publishing news, Mohamed Rabie’s Otared (2016) was released in English translation in September by AUC Press. The novel was shortlisted for the International Prize in Arabic Fiction in 2016 and is set in a dystopian post-revolutionary Egypt. An excerpt is available here.

Halal If You Hear Me, a forthcoming anthology of writings by Muslims who are queer, women, gender nonconforming or transgender, is calling for submissions. Editors Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo are looking for submissions of up to five poems or two essays, including a cover letter with contact info and a short bio. Those interested should email halalifyouhearme@gmail.com before 1 December, 2016.

Editor-at-Large for India Naheed Patel shares some stories from the neighbouring Bangladesh:

Next month sees Bangladesh’s capital revving up for the annual Dhaka Literary Festival, which runs from November 17-19.  The festival has been held at the historic Bangla Academy since 2012, and is directed and produced by Sadaf Saaz, Ahsan Akbar, and K. Anis Ahmed. In the face of numerous recent Freedom of Expression violations in Bangladesh, the festival marks a resurgence of Bangladeshi literary culture, reaching across a number of different disciplines and genres: from fiction and literary non-fiction to history, politics and society; from poetry and translations to science, mathematics, philosophy and religion. The festival has more than 20,000 attendees and past contributors include Vikram Seth, Tariq Ali, Rosie Boycott, William Dalrymple, Ahdaf Soueif, Shashi Tharoor, Jung Chang, and Pankaj Mishra as well famous writers of Bangla literature like Hasan Azizul Huq, Selina Hossain, Debesh Roy, and Nirmalendu Goon.

In August and September Bangladesh mourned the passing of two prominent Bangla poets. Author, poet, and playwright Syed Shamsul Haq died at the age of 81 in Dhaka on September 27, 2016, and renowned Bangladeshi poet Shaheed Quaderi passed away in New York at the age of 74 on August 28, 2016. Haq was given the Bangla Academy Award in 1966 and the Ekushey Padak, the highest national award of Bangladesh, in 1984. He was also honored with a Swadhinata Padak in 2000 for his contribution to Bangla Literature. Payer Awaj Paoa Jay’ [We Hear the Footsteps] and Nuruldiner Sara Jibon [The Entire Life of Nuruldin], his most popular plays, are considered to be cornerstones of Bangladeshi theatre. Shaheed Quaderi received the Ekushey Padak in the category of Language and Literature in 2011 and was previously awarded the Bangla Academy Award in 1973. Prominent Bengali scholars such as Kabir Chowdhury, Kaiser Haq, and Farida Majid have translated his poems into English.

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