Place: Bulgaria

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 2, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary news from Palestine, Bulgaria, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and the Philippines! From a major award win to exciting literary festivals, read on to find out more!

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

On Wednesday, May 24, most Bulgarians woke up later than usual. After all, the country was commemorating its Alphabet, Enlightenment, and Culture Day, and the festivities would not begin before noon. The night owls, however, had already started celebrating much earlier as media outlets from all over the globe notified them that, at a ceremony in Central London, writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel had been awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022) whose primary focus is the “weaponization of nostalgia.” The duo, whom Asymptote has previously highlighted, gave a heartfelt speech about the stories that keep us alive and resist evil.

Later the same day, Gospodinov posted on his official Facebook page: “Blessed holiday! Blessed miracle of language! I was lucky enough to say these words in Bulgarian last night at the Booker Prize ceremony in the heart of London! On the eve of the most beautiful holiday! I wrote this book with the thirty letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I am grateful to everyone who believed in it! To my readers with whom we have been together for years. It was and still is a long road. To the writers before me from whom I have learned! To the Bulgarian writers for all they have suffered and written. I am grateful for the joy I saw in Bulgaria after the announcement of the award last night. Joy because of a book is pure joy. Thank you! It is possible! May it open the door to Bulgarian culture and give us courage.”

Courage, if I may add, to remain sensitive to life’s delicate intricacies. Courage to be mindful of the past in our eternal battle for the future. Courage to translate even the “unspoken speeches for all unreceived awards.”

And the rest is history. READ MORE…

The 2023 PEN/Heim Grantees Talk Translation: Part II

May 29, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Joaquín Gavilano, Stine An, and Stoyan Tchaprazov

I still remember the joy and hope in learning new words and how that does expand, if not the world, a word.

In this three-part series, Asymptote has asked the 2023 PEN/Heim grantees to talk about their work in progress; their responses, brimming with excitement, conviction, and connection, are a testament to how much translators put themselves into their labor. Through the varied approaches and languages, they share the important commonality of surety: that the work they’ve been entrusted with has an immense potential to illuminate our reality, enlarge our world, and enrich our experiences of literature.

Here, Stine An grows the vocabulary of her world; Stoyan Tchaprazov wrestles with a complex, multilingual diction; and Joaquín Gavilano translates his way back home.   

Stine An on Yoo Heekyung:

I was initially drawn to Yoo Heekyung’s work because of both his poetic lineage and breadth of contributions as a cultural worker. Having studied poetry with Kim Hyesoon, Yoo is most known for his poetry; however, he also writes plays and essays and frequently collaborates with other poets and artists on video content, podcasts, and events. Additionally, he runs wit n cynical, a one-of-a-kind poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. I started translating his poems back in 2019 for a literary translation workshop with Sawako Nakayasu during my final year of MFA studies at Brown University; there, she not only inspired me to explore literary translation as a meaningful way to connect with my Korean heritage as a poet, but also as an exciting and potentially life-changing activity. I take invitations to change my life seriously. I started writing poetry because I wanted to change my life, and it’s for the same reason that I continue my work as a translator. The possibility to change my life. How exciting is that? What does it mean to grow the vocabulary of your world?

Sawako introduced me to the poet and translator Don Mee Choi, who in turn introduced me to Yoo’s work. One of the earliest pieces of feedback I received from Don Mee and other early readers for my translations was that I had nailed the tone for Yoo’s work, so I took that as a sign to continue. During my ALTA translation mentorship with Joyelle McSweeney, she invited me to reflect on my relationship to tone, and I realized that tone was something I deeply cared about in my own work—both as a poet and a stand-up comedian. So, I’ve been prioritizing tone, mood, and voice when translating Yoo’s poems. For inspiration, I’ve been revisiting Joachim Neugroschel’s translations of Franz Kafka’s short stories and aphorisms; I remember being utterly bewildered and enchanted by Kafka’s words through those translations—the humor, grief and wonder.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 5, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest in literary news from China, the Philippines, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors are rounding up some exciting new developments in the word of language, from the annual edition of one of China’s most noteworthy literary awards, to cinematic adaptations of Filipino writing, to an urban festival digging into the intersections of literature and science in Bulgaria. Read on to find out more!

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

In one of the stories from her collection, Ba bu ban (Eight-and-a-Half), Huang Yuning writes about the private, sometimes-sacred communion that a sharing of language initiates, as with two tourists sitting together in a Frankfurt subway: “There’s at least one good thing about two Chinese people riding the subway together in a foreign country: the walls are ready-made, and language is the thing that builds a transparent cubicle all around you.”

Huang’s stories won the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize in 2019, and this year, the prestigious award is again taking in submissions to find the next powerful young writer of Chinese-language fiction. Held jointly by the Beijing publishing house Imaginist and the Swiss brand Blancpain, the annual competition is known for seeking out original voices with an intricate attention to language, profoundly developed themes, and an outstanding voice and style that embodies the unique adventure of Chinese writing. Open to writers under the age of forty-five who have published a book between April 2022 and 2023, the winner receives a cash prize of 300,000 yuan to help develop their work. The theme of this years prize is “The Necessity of Complexity”, and in the submissions call, the prize committee asserted the essentiality of literature that addresses the present moment with a fine eye on the past and a rejection of overloaded media narratives. As they state, there is a role in writing that aims always towards truth and its complexity: “. . . because complexity is the point of origin of everything new and the commencement of everything we call the future.” Literature has the role of paying close attention to the strange, the unspoken, and the vast depths of internality; the jury aims to find a work of Chinese fiction that speaks to this task. Since the prize’s inauguration in 2018, I’ve found its selections well deserving of accolade, celebrating work from some of the most bold and talented writers working today, and like many readers of the Chinese language, I am greatly looking forward to see which titles will be spotlit this year.

The jury includes lauded Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who interestingly has gone the way of Nabokov to “renounce [her] mother tongue”, writing and publishing only in English. The writers who have chosen to taken such a path usually speak of a feeling of entrapment within their native language, and Li explained her choice by stating that English is her “private language”—she has to actively think her way towards every word. Now that she has become a crucial element in deciding who is to be awarded this esteemed award of Chinese-language literature, it’s tempting to note that reading fiction is not only a way to explore the world through narratives and characters, but through the innate imaginations and freedoms that exist when words are put together in new and regenerative configurations. That is the liberation that style—evidence of that actively thinking mind behind the page—gifts to us: an encouragement to think again about tired words, those beleaguered little artifacts of human history. I think often about the writers of China, all the individuals that are constantly reaching out to embroider, reweave, and patch the fabric of that wonderful, ancient, fraught language, and I remember that words are alive. That they are always in the process of making something new, and that they are protectors and safeboxes for our wildnesses, our freedoms, and all the things that one dreams might be spoken, one day. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

March 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Julia Sherwood, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary news from Slovakia, Czechia, Kenya, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors are providing coverage of headlining events featuring intercultural dialogues, book launches of groundbreaking texts, and political corruption. In Slovakia and Czechia, the two countries discuss the ramifications of Czechoslovakia’s breakup on the two nations’ respective literatures. In Kenya, a collection featuring the stories of women hawkers—a burgeoning national economy—is released to the public. And in Bulgaria, a beloved theatre director takes aim at the National Theatre’s “moral degradation.” Read on to find out more!

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

The thirtieth anniversary of the breakup of Czechoslovakia prompted reflections in both the Slovak and the Czech press on the legacy of the common state, and how the cultural links between the two nations have evolved since the countries went their separate ways. Summing up the literary developments in a recent episode of Knižná revue, an excellent podcast produced by the Slovak Literature Centre, the Czech literature scholar and translator of Slovak literature Lubomír Machala suggested that there are now more differences than parallels between the two literatures—although what has not changed is that the Czech reading public shows less interest in Slovak literature than vice versa. The Slovak literature scholar Magdalena Bystrzak also sees this relationship as asymmetrical, as does her colleague Radoslav Passia, who points out that the ties between the two literatures are, nevertheless, much stronger than those between either nation and any other literature, as reflected in numerous bilateral literary projects, such as a Czech/Slovak poetry competition, or the Month of Authors’ Readings.

The end of January marked the 105th birthday of Leopold Lahola (1918-1968): playwright, film director, screenwriter, poet, and essayist, whose short stories reflect his harrowing wartime experiences. Lahola’s promising postwar literary career was cut short when his plays were denounced as “existentialist” in 1948, upon which he emigrated to Israel, where he helped to launch the country’s burgeoning  film industry, before moving to Austria and Germany. Although he spent nearly half of his life in exile, Lahola never stopped writing in Slovak. In the late 1960s, Lahola began to visit his native country again but, sadly, died of a heart attack in January 1968, shortly before his fiftieth birthday. It is a pity that so far, only one of his short stories is available in English.

The 2022 recipients of one of Slovakia’s major awards, the Tatra Banka Foundation’s Arts Prize, were announced at the end of January. The prize for a debut work of literature went to Nicol Hochholczerová for Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room is Too Much to Swallow, as reported here) and the poet Mila Haugová added to her many previous accolades the main prize for literature, for her collection Z rastlinstva (From Flora). And although not strictly speaking a literary prize, it is  worth mentioning  the bank’s Special Prize, awarded to Gabriela Garlatyová for her monograph on the extraordinary visual Slovak artist Mária Bartuszová. Garlatyová was a consultant on a major exhibition of Bartuszová’s work at London’s Tate Modern, which has just been extended to June 25, and which I urge everyone to visit. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

December 16, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Andriana Hamas, and Areeb Ahmad

The latest from Bulgaria, India, and the United States!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large bring us news on literary festivals, award-winning works, and poetry open-mics in Bulgaria, India, and the United States! From discussions of disinformation and machine translation at the Sofia International Literary Festival, to a poem performed in the Metaverse, to double-Booker wins in South Asia, read on to learn more!

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

Writers are powerful creatures. They think up imaginary worlds that sometimes appear more tangible than the mundane reality most of us face on a daily basis. What happens, however, when malicious groups deliberately blur the line between illusion and fact in an attempt to sway public opinion in a specific direction? How does one fight disinformation, and can literature teach us to differentiate between the plausible and the ridiculous? These are only some of the questions the 2022 edition of the Sofia International Literary Festival, held December 6–11 during the Sofia International Book Fair, endeavored to answer.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Killer in Compartment Number 8” by Ivanka Mogilska

November 29, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Lora Petrova

[It] turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author.

This Translation Tuesday, a literary murder mystery aboard a train carriage reveals the intricacies of expressing a woman’s inner life. Briefly sketched yet drawn with a rich interiority, the Bulgarian writer Ivanka Mogilska’s short fiction is translated by Lora Petrova. Step right onto the crime scene now and find out who’s guilty!

If the cricket that lived in Emilia’s left ear had been less insistent, she would surely have learned the killer’s identity earlier. But he almost never stopped. Most times it was singing with a quiet monotone, making her feel as if she was drifting through a cloud, with a head stuffed full of cotton. The train was wriggling through the valley. The fog was hiding the warning signs on trees about the coming fall. Today, the cricket’s song was especially anxious and Emilia would often have to read the same page twice. 

Soon after departure, the frivolous young man in the group of guests staying at Waterby Manor found the hostess dead in front of an old cabinet in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Police arrived quickly and asked the guests to retire to their rooms. The officers inspected the crime scene.

The cricket in Emilia’s ear hit a high note when it turned out that the body was surrounded by poems of an unknown author and the cabinet had hundreds more pages written in the same hand. Poems, poems, poems. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 28, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, and Andriana Hamas

The latest in literary developments from the Philippines, the Hispanophone US, and Bulgaria!

This week, our editors report on the state of regional, multilingual literature from the Philippines, the Feria internacional del libro de Nueva York, and the Frankfurt Book Fair and its presentation of Bulgarian writing. Read on to find out more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

Panel discussions on publishing and writing served as pre-workshop events to the forthcoming Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop (CCWW). Dubbed Hobwal, book talks were co-presented by indie presses Milflores Publishing, Baguio Writers Group, and multilingual children’s book publisher Aklat Alamid. Ryan Guinaran, Dumay Solinggay, Richard Kinnud, and Sherma Benosa, writers working in Ibaloy, Kankanaey, Ifugao, and Ilokano respectively, spotlighted the panel on writing in the mother tongue. Last year’s workshop instalment featured panelists like Genevieve L Asenjo, International Writing Programme alumna and De La Salle University-MFA Creative Writing program faculty, known for her writings in/translation from the Kinaray-a and Hiligaynon. Other discussions centred on pandemic writings, Baguio City’s literary cartography, and climate fiction.

The University of the Philippines-Baguio’s College of Arts & Communication, and Cordillera Studies Center grant CCWW fellowships to emerging poets, fictionists, and essayists writing in 15 northern Luzon languages—from Bontoc to Ivatan, Kalinga to Gaddang, and major languages Kapampangan, Ilokano, Pangasinan, Filipino, and English. In a country where national writing workshops, awards, prizes, and festivals put premium to English and Filipino, so-called regional endeavours like the CCWW have epitomised what it means to be multilingual, thus sincerely national. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

September 23, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Carol Khoury

Literary dispatches from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report on the loss of a pivotal figure in the indigenous literature of the Philippines, the Palestinian Book Fair held amidst the politics of occupation, and the Autumn Salon of the Arts in Plovdiv. Read on to find out more.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

The Philippine literary community mourns the passing of Higaonon Manobo novelist, poet, and translator Telesforo S ‘T.S.’ Sungkit, Jr. Sir Jun, as we fondly call him, also wrote as Anijun Mudan Udan, and his work represented the voice of the Higaonon, one of the eighteen ethnolinguistic indigenous peoples groups collectively known as Lumad, original inhabitants of the southern Philippine supraregional island Mindanao.

Writing in and translating from four languages, Higaonon (sometimes referred to as Binukid), Cebuano Binisayâ, (Tagalog-based) Filipino, and English, Sir Jun received fellowships from the 2005 IYAS National Writers Workshop (De La Salle University—Bienvenido N Santos Creative Writing Centre) and the 12th Iligan National Writers Workshop (Mindanao State University-IIT and Mindanao Creative Writers Group). His first novel, Batbat hi Udan [Story of Udan], came out in 2009 and was considered as the first epic novel from Bukidnon, his home province. In 2007, he won the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for another novel Mga Gapnod sa Kamad-an [Driftwood on Dry Land] first serialised in Bisaya Magasin and later, self-translated into the English under the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2013. Just this year, a translation of this novel from the Binisayâ into the Filipino secured the Rolando Tinio Translators Prize for the novel category.

Sir Jun’s third novel Ang Agalon sa mga Balod [The Lord of the Waves] bagged another NCCA Writers Prize in 2013, and is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press as Panginoon ng mga Alon—self-translated into the Filipino. (An excerpt is available from Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.) In 2014, another novel Mga Tigmo sa Balagbatbat [Balagbatbat’s Riddles] received a National Book Development Board grant. In most of his short stories and novels, the structure veers away from the generic Western plot, being instead influenced by the nanangen oral storytelling ingrained to the Higaonon people and other Lumad. Other works of his can be read in Kabisdak: Cebuano Literary Lighthouse and BukidnonNews.net, where he once served as literary editor. (You can read his well-anthologised poem “I, Higaonon” from Australia-based Cordite Poetry Review here.) READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 12, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, José García Escobar, and Josefina Massot

Literary news from Argentina, Central America, and Bulgaria!

The latest in literary news from around the world, brought to you by our team on the ground. Read on to find out what fellow lovers of letters are up across the globe, from festivals to new publications.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

In just under a decade since its inception, Argentina’s annual Feria de Editores has become a literary staple. Last weekend, defying the country’s dire economic situation, a record-breaking 18,000 readers packed the halls of Chacarita’s Art Media Complex to purchase titles from over 250 local indie presses, as well as a few dozen others from all corners of the Spanish-speaking world. This year, works in translation featured heavily among the fair’s bestsellers; they included Alejandra Pizarnik’s rendition of Marguerite Duras’s La vie tranquille for Mardulce, Canadian-American Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Todo el mundo sabe que tu madre es una bruja) for Fiordo, American Kelly Link’s fiction in Tomás Downey’s translation for Evaristo, and Italian Davide Sisto’s Posteridades digitales for Katz. Local writers in attendance featured Claudia Piñero, Martín Kohan, Marina Yuszczuk, Hernán Ronsino, and Yamila Bêgné, among many others. Meanwhile, author Margo Glantz traveled all the way from her native Mexico to chat with journalist Demian Paredes on Sunday night, thus wrapping up one of the fair’s most successful editions yet.

Right as one literary feast came to an end, another one kicked off: now in its second edition, the Festival Borges has been hosting talks by major “Georgie geeks” throughout the week. On Monday, writer and physicist Alberto Rojo discussed the relationship between some of Borges’s fictions and quantum theory. Yesterday, academic Lucas Adur tackled Borges’s proximity to pop culture, challenging the perception that he was a solemn writer; Federico Favelli posited some bold parallelisms between the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and some musical pieces from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Later today, renowned critic Beatriz Sarlo will discuss Borges’s hybrid nature as a worldly and peripheral figure —one steeped in the Western canon while also writing from (and about) marginal South America. One thing is clear: despite decades of avid exploration, the Borgesian cosmos remains as vast as ever.

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

The recent heat wave that distorted daily life for many people around the globe didn’t fail to reach Bulgaria as well. The lucky ones, however, had already traveled to the seaside, where the locals usually prefer to spend the scorching summers. For them, the past two weeks at the shores of the Black Sea turned out to be not only a relief but also an opportunity to catch up on some reading, as the city of Varna hosted the much anticipated thirteenth edition of The Book Alley festival, organized by the Bulgarian Book Association. The event welcomed more than sixty publishers who, in addition to offering a wide selection of titles, engaged the public in a few charming initiatives. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 8, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Charlie Ng

Literary festivals and publications from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the world report on literary celebrations in Bulgaria and historical archives of Chinese literature in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

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

Plovdiv, one of Bulgaria’s oldest cities and the European Capital of Culture for 2019, recently hosted the twentieth anniversary edition of its renowned literary festival: Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”). For twenty years, the month of June has seen both established and up-and-coming authors sit side by side, trying to unravel the mysteries of the written word. Among the most notable participants this year were Zdravka Evtimova, winner of the Chudomir National Award; the writer and translator Chavdar Tsvenov; the literary historian Cleo Protohristova; the critic Boris Minkov, known for his masterful editorial skills; the publisher Svetlozar Zhelev, who takes pleasure in mediating literary friendships; and the experimental writer Rene Karabash.

Over the course of approximately two weeks, the various hosts and their audiences reviewed some of the best that contemporary Bulgarian fiction has to offer. However, the festivities weren’t restricted to the local literary stars, but also included prominent international guests such as the Ukrainian novelist Haska Shyyan—who commented on her new book in light of the dreadful developments in Ukraine that have shaken the world over the past few months. Another event of note was the special talk devoted to the twentieth-century Bulgarian poet and translator Atanas Dalchev, and the relatively unfamiliar circumstances surrounding his life in Thessaloniki and Istanbul.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 10, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Josefina Massot, and Suhasini Patni

Dispatches from Argentina, India, and Bulgaria!

Literary calendars over the last week have been packed with festivals, prize announcements, and new publications. In Argentina, FILBA and the Feria del Libra de la Plata present a full roster of events; in India, Geetanjali Shree’s fresh Booker win continues to drive hopes for the country’s writings; and from Bulgaria, an award-winning work by Georgi Gospodinov is released to the Anglophone.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

If you thought a record-smashing, three-week-long book fair could just about sate Argentines after years of pandemic famine, you’ve sorely downplayed their literary appetite: just days after the Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires came to a close, not one but two other major events followed suit.

From May 26 to May 28, the beach town of Mar del Plata hosted the eleventh FILBA, a literary festival featuring workshops, panels, and shows. Bestselling authors Guillermo Martínez and Tamara Tenenbaum talked about the complicated ties between happiness and fiction. Authors—and close friends—Hernán Ronsino and Ricardo Romero discussed other literary friendships, from Alfonsina Storni and Horacio Quiroga to Victoria Ocampo and Gabriela Mistral or Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. A group of authors led a tour of Villa Ocampo, Victoria Ocampo’s summer home in Mar del Plata and one of the city’s most iconic landmarks.

Meanwhile, on June 3, the Feria del Libro de la Plata officially kicked off; it will be held through Sunday in the eponymous city, a cultural center in its own right. The fair features over two hundred and fifty publishing houses distributed across some one hudnred stands; among them are Planeta, Random House Penguin, De las Luces, Dos editores, Maipue, Blason, Libertador, Siglo XXI, Grupo Editorial Sur, and Del Naranjo. hundred stands; among them are Planeta, Random House Penguin, De las Luces, Dos editores, Maipue, Blason, Libertador, Siglo XXI, Grupo Editorial Sur, and Del Naranjo.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

May 20, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Josefina Massot

Bringing news from Argentina, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and Sweden!

Book fairs, festivals, competitions, new publications—the literary world this week is filled with a flurry of events and announcements. From the ongoing debate between culture and commerce in Bueno Aires, to new releases from Hong Kong icons Dung Kai-Cheung and Xi Xi, to a celebration of poetry debuts in Haskovo, to a renewal of a beloved book festival in Karlskrona, the world of letters has no shortage of things to offer.

Josefina Massot, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Buenos Aires

In his opening speech at the 46th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, author Guillermo Saccomanno issued a complaint: “When we talk about a fair,” he declared, “we’re talking about commerce. This is a trade fair rather than a cultural one, even if it claims to be the latter. At any rate, it represents an understanding of culture as commerce.” What’s more, he added, the country’s dire economic situation does not bode well for the Spanish-speaking world’s largest industry event.

Saccomanno was both right and wrong: right that the Fair’s pursuits are largely commercial, wrong that they’d be somewhat of a bust this time around. Perhaps to make up for two years of pandemic torpor, over 1.3 million visitors crowded La Rural’s sprawling halls in just under three weeks, from April 28 to May 16—a 30% increase relative to pre-pandemic figures. Sales, too, went up by about 10-20%.

In addition to bestselling genre sensations (American John Katsenbach among them), the Fair featured critically acclaimed writers from over forty countries. Stand-outs included Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Chileans Diamela Eltit and Paulina Flores, Spaniard Jorge Carrión, and locals Mariana Enriquez, Selva Almada, and Guillermo Martínez. There were over 1,500 book stands on display, helmed by everything from multimedia conglomerates to artisanal press co-ops, as well as over 1,000 programmed events that spanned readings, conferences, panels, book signings, and courses for every taste and age group.

It would be impossible, given this near embarrassment of riches, to mention just one or two based on quality alone. I’ll appeal to our journal’s métier, then, and focus on a few events related to the art (and, yes, the commerce) of translation. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

March 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Carol Khoury, and Eva Wissting

Literary awards, bookstore revivals, and political upheavals from Sweden, Bulgaria, and Gaza!

This week, our editors bring news of a major literature prize in Sweden, disturbing governmental policies repressing freedom of speech in Bulgaria, and the rebirth of a central bookstore in Gaza. Read on to find out more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

The Nordic Council has announced the nominees of its annual Literature Prize, which has awarded a work of fiction in a Nordic language­­­ since 1962. The languages include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Greenlandic, Faroese, and Sámi. The literary works considered may be novels, plays, essays, short stories, or poetry of artistic and literary quality. The purpose of the award is to create interest in the literatures and languages within the cultural community of the Nordic region. This year, eleven nominated writers represent all the countries and languages of the region, and four of the works are novels written in Swedish.

Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers, with a long list of publications since her debut in 1959. In 1994, she was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Blackwater, available in English translation by Joan Tate. This year, she is nominated for The Wolf Run, a novel about a man in his seventies and his relationship to nature as he comes to terms with his life. The other Swedish nominee is Jesper Larsson, for Den dagen den sorgen (literally translated as That Day That Sorrow, or also as “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”), about a single father and his relationship to his teenage daughter. Finnish writer Kaj Korkea-aho, nominated for Röda rummet, also writes in Swedish, and so does Ålandic writer Karin Erlandsson, who is nominated for the novel Hem. The winner will be announced on November 1, during the Nordic Council’s Session in Helsinki. Previous winners include the internationally renowned Sofi Oksanen (Dog Park, Purge, When the Doves Disappeared), Jon Fosse (The Other Name, Trilogy, Morning and Evening), and Nobel Prize laureate Tomas Tranströmer.

More financial support to Swedish writers is on the way in the form of a crisis package. Because of the consequences of the pandemic faced by many writers during the past two years, the Swedish Authors’s Fund has received thirty million SEK from the government. The organization has now decided that around 1,500 writers and literary creators who were previously granted scholarships will each receive an additional amount of approximately twenty thousand SEK.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 4, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Amaryllis Gacioppo, Andriana Hamas, and Eva Wissting

Ecopoetry and code-breaking are capturing readers around the world in this week's dispatches.

In this week’s dispatches, Bulgarian readers brave the winter for an event highlighting environmental literature, Sweden commemorates the beloved children’s book author, Astrid Lindgren, and Italy celebrates what would have been Umberto Eco’s 90th birthday with a new publication. Read on to find out more!

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

Believe it or not—it is already February, and despite the cold weather in Bulgaria, various cultural events are popping up here and there. With an ever-increasing focus on climate change and the dire consequences we are already facing, different local artists are attempting to highlight the need for conscious, collective action.

One of the strategies employed to combat phenomena such as global warming constitutes the recycling of different materials. Interestingly enough, the whole concept also happens to be at the heart of literary critic and professor of literary theory Amelia Licheva’s latest poetry collection, The Need for Recycling, which considers the act through the prism of creative impulses and intuitive journeys through one’s feelings and experiences. The book, officially published by Lexicon Publishing House on Christmas Eve, 2021, also contains illustrations by the painter Veselin Pramatarov. In an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio, Licheva revealed that the title could be interpreted as “the search for lost meaning.” She is fully aware that the formula is far from light, but insists that the initial shock—bound to rock the reader’s inner world—is in fact a sought-after provocation of sorts.

The launch of the book, which took place not long ago at Sofia City Library, was attended by over fifty people eager to hear the poetess’s newest verses. The lively discussion was hosted by the prominent writer Georgi Gospodinov (whose works have previously appeared in Asymptote) and translator Daria Karapetkova, with the actress Snezhina Petrova was in charge of recitation. After the long-anticipated premiere, the author used her social media profile to extend her gratitude to “all of my colleagues, friends, and students who attended the debut of my poetry collection. Thank you for the solidarity and for the unique privilege to be able to feel like a part of a meaningful community.”

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A week ago today, on January 28, Sweden commemorated twenty years since the country’s most internationally known writer, Astrid Lindgren, passed away at the age of ninety-four. The creator of strong, ingenious, and unforgettable children’s book characters like Pippi Longstocking, Karlsson on the Roof, Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, and Lotta on Troublemaker Street, Lindgren has enthralled and inspired readers around the world for generations. Her books have been translated into 107 languages, including numerous translations into English by Joan Tate—who also has translated other significant Swedish writers like Ingmar Bergman, Kerstin Ekman, and P.C. Jersild. Lindgren has been awarded both national and international literary awards, as well as received honorary degrees from Linköping University in Sweden, the University of Leicester in the UK, and the University of Warsaw in Poland. On the year of her passing, the Swedish government instituted the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA), which awards a writer, illustrator, or promoter of reading in March every year. During her lifetime, Lindgren not only wrote for and about children, but she was also an activist for children’s rights––which is why the Astrid Lindgren estate today, together with Save the Children, continues to work on the Pippi of Today campaign for refugee girls. READ MORE…