Place: Canada

May 2025: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

May 10, 2025  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

An invitation to the Griffin Poetry Prize readings, as well as this month's latest opportunities in world literature!

EVENTS

GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE READINGS

The Griffin Poetry Prize, established in 2000, is the world’s most generous award for a first edition poetry collection written or translated into English. This year’s shortlisted authors—selected by judges Nick Laird, Anne Michaels, and Tomasz Różycki—along with the Lifetime Recognition Award recipient Margaret Atwood and the Canadian First Book Prize winner, who will be announced on May 21, will be invited to read at the Griffin Poetry Prize Readings on June 4 at Toronto’s Koerner Hall—an annual highlight for poetry lovers.

With C$130,000 awarded to the winner, and generous prizes for all shortlisted and recognized poets, the Griffin Poetry Prize continues to elevate exceptional poetry from around the world. Join us at Koerner Hall or tune in on YouTube and witness the world’s finest poets take the stage. Tickets to the event are available here, and you can find the livestream at this link.

 

READING AND Q&A WITH KIM HYESOON AND DON MEE CHO

The British Centre for Literary Translation invites you to an evening of reading and discussion with poets Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi on June 23rd, 2025.

National Book Award winner Don Mee Choi is a translator of the work Kim Hyesoon, one of South Korea’s most foremost feminist poets. The two will read from Hyesoon’s Griffin Prize-winning collection Autobiography of Death, which has been published in English by And Other Stories, and will discuss their work together with BCLT professor Cecilia Rossi. You can register for the event, which will take place in person, here.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 9, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary news from the Philippines, Canada, and Guatemala!

This week, our team members report on writers resisting governmental oppression, newly collected poems, one of the largest multilingual literary festivals in North America, and more!

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

Writer, translator, and Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women organiser Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, whose imprisonment PEN International has denounced as ‘a stark reminder of how governments silence female voices to suppress dissent’, has rolled out an unprecedented bid for the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman student council while incarcerated under questionable charges.

The 36-year-old Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Malikhaing Pagsulat (Creative Writing in Filipino) student was arrested in 2020 for alleged illegal possession of firearms—an allegation she and several civil liberties organisations say is made-up. Amanda continues to write and translate behind bars, publishing her collection of poems, prose, and plays, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation, Gantala Press) in 2023, and receiving fellowships from writing workshops like the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (which she attended virtually) in 2024. READ MORE…

Spring 2025: Highlights from the Team

May 5, 2025  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Daniel Yadin, Hilary Ilkay, Julie Shi, Junyi Zhou, MARGENTO, René Esaú Sánchez, Sauvryn Linn, and Sayani Sarkar

Where to start with our bountiful Spring 2025 issue? Here are many entry points—courtesy of our team!

What struck me most about Anton Hur’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear) was his clarity on AI’s role in translation. I also loved his stance on both translation and politics; every answer felt like a manifesto in miniature. Lately, I’ve been trying to delve deeper into Korean literature, and now I’m eager to read more of his work.

Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s “Jombii Jamborii” was my first encounter with Guyanese Creolese in translation, and its rhythm lingers like a half-remembered song. The poem’s playfulness isn’t just aesthetic: it feels like reclamation, turning colonial language into a game where the rules keep shifting.

Youn Kyung Hee’s “Love and Mistranslation” (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) unfolds like a slow revelation, each paragraph a new turn in the labyrinth of love and language. You can almost see her turning words over in her hands, testing their weight: Is this what I mean? Is this what you heard? The way she intertwines translation and love is fantastic.

Federico Federici’s asemic scripts aren’t just “unreadable” art, they are experiments in how meaning persists when grammar dissolves. When he describes languages as living organisms, I think of my own work: translation as metamorphosis, not just a bridge.

Rosario Castellanos was the first Mexican author I translated into English, so I’ll always have a soft spot for her. Translating her taught me how her quietest lines could cut the deepest. These letters (tr. Nancy Ross Jean, which I haven’t read in Spanish, by the way) feel so intimate: you sense her love for Ricardo, but also her simmering bitterness. I don’t know if this was intentional, but the timing feels poignant, as her centenary will be celebrated across Mexico later this month.

—René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large for Mexico

I grew up listening to the cadences and lingo of Guyanese Creolese and, in turn, learning to speak it myself, and I’m delighted to see Guyanese Creolese recognized as a language that merits translation in Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield’s work. I can’t wait to read the full collection of their co-written and co-translated poems. I have had to affirm that, yes, Guyana is a country that exists, many times in my life while explaining my mixed heritage, and I’m grateful to Asymptote for bringing literary attention and awareness to this rich part of the world.

I’m only beginning to be introduced to her work, but it’s such a treat to get a glimpse into Rosario Castellanos’s private correspondence (tr. Nancy Ross Jean). Castellanos is of particular interest to me given her engagement with feminist thinkers from around the world. In the letter, Castellanos articulates a moving and beautiful relationship of love, trust, and care with Ricardo, all the while reflecting on the implications of being called his “wife” (a topic of particular interest in the feminist theory she read). Her private writing is as rich as her public work.

Youn Kyung Hee’s stunning genre-bending essay (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield) is one of my favourites in recent Asymptote history. It’s no accident that the tagline of this entire issue, The Gift, is taken from this work. Bookended by poetry and reflections on translation, Youn Kyung Hee manages to tackle a myriad of topics in a mutually enriching way. The idea of translation as generosity is very compelling, and I like thinking of translation as a mode of creating and sustaining a shared world through literature. This passage in particular will stick with me: “More than need, sheer innocent longing keeps me translating. Far more often, in fact. For how wonderful it would be if you, too, love the poem I love? Like sharing pastries at a nameless bakery.”

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The Cosmos, in Rhythm: Rebecca Kosick on Hélio Oiticica and Brazilian Neoconcrete Poetry

March 24, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Language can’t instantiate an experience of, say, touch in the same way that actually touching something can, which is language’s limitation.

Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) remains one of most visionary artists to emerge from Rio de Janeiro’s Neoconcretismo movement, along with prominent artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, and poet Ferreira Gullar. Oiticica’s art has been described as a “radical and compelling rethinking of mid-century Modernism,” and he is known as a painter, installation artist, and sculptor. He eventually moved to New York in 1970 partly because of the state-sanctioned censorship in the arts by the then-militaristic authoritarian regime in Brazil.

 Less widely recognized is Oiticica’s contribution as a poet. More than four decades after his death, Soberscove in Chicago and Winter Editions in New York jointly published Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics (2023), a collection of his handwritten poems from 1964 to 1966, translated from the Brazilian Portuguese. Dr. Rebecca Kosick’s translation of this visual poetry collection demonstrates that Oiticica’s poetry is, as she has argued elsewhere, “a lyric that stills the sensible for the “reader” to perceive.” Dr. Kosick, herself a poet and scholar whose studies revolve around the question of how language and media intersect in contemporary pan-American poetry (Anne Carson, Augusto de Campos, Lygia Pape, Juan Luis Martínez), has previously debunked the idea of Latin American visual art (and visual poetry) as “a passive recipient of inherited European forms.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr. Kosick about the enduring legacy of Hélio Oiticica and the Neoconcretismo movement of mid-twentieth century Brazil, as well as her own body of work as a theorist and practitioner of poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The art historian Claire Bishop describes the work of Hélio Oiticica as “social and political in inclination, engaging with the architecture of the favelas and the communities that lived there.” Bishop also makes the case for Hélio’s focus on viewer perception, interactivity, and lived experience (vivências) as pivotal to the history of installation art. Could you tell us about Oiticica’s socioaesthetic and ethnopolitical roots and beliefs as a visual artist?

Rebecca Kosick (RK): In a 1966 interview for the magazine A Cigarra, the interviewer, Marisa Alvarez de Lima, asks Oiticica: “Are you an anarchist?” and he replies, “in body and soul.” Oiticica’s grandfather had been a prominent anarchist and was publisher of the newspaper Ação Direta (Direct Action), so these were ideas that Oiticica grew up with. What anarchism meant for Oiticica can sometimes be a little hard to pin down, and he wasn’t as directly involved in organized political activity as, say, his poet-collaborator Ferreira Gullar, who led the Communist Party in the state of Rio de Janeiro for a time. But it’s clear that elements of anarchism were central to Oiticica’s framework for being in the world, and for being with other people. In later interviews, he talks about certain values he picked up from his grandfather that stayed with him for his entire life—for instance, his grandfather, when being summoned to take part in a jury (which was compulsory), talked about how he would agree to show up but would say right away: No matter the crime, I will never vote to convict. Oiticica talks about this as an extremely important lesson and says that sending someone to prison is the worst crime of all. READ MORE…

Fall 2024: Highlights from the Team

November 13, 2024  |  in News  |  by Georgina Fooks, Joseph McAlhany, Julie Shi, Mary Hillis, Michelle Chan Schmidt, Sauvryn Linn, and Thuy Dinh

Looking to dip your toe in the new Fall edition but don’t know where to start? Check out these recommendations from our team!

The Fall Asymptote was a particularly special issue not least because of the focus on the ‘outsider’; many pieces resonated with the topic of alienation. In turn, the featured writers and translators—including many Asymptote colleagues—responded with sensitivity and care to questions of inclusion, liminality, and bordering. The most vital piece in the issue for me was colleague and editor-at-large for Palestine Carol Khoury’s translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Gazan I Relate to. The translator’s note makes clear the stakes of translating even the title, and throughout the piece questions the limits of gestures of solidarity, especially when it is only the randomness of fate that means we are born in different nations, bounded by different borders, on one side, or the other. Al-Essa insists on the vitality of empathy but also the limits of solidarity; it is a piece that I am proud to see in the latest issue and I hope it spurs others to remember, reflect, and act.

He Wun-Jin’s short story “Guide Us, Chicken Booty!” (tr. Catherine Xinxin Yu) was a favourite, in its thoughtful exploration of grief for a trans sibling and the best way to remember them. As the title indicates, Yu translates with humour, but also with nuance, crafting a sensitive and moving text throughout.

Poet Ennio Moltedo (tr. Marguerite Feitlowitz) reflecting on the legacy of Chile’s neoliberal democracy in New Things was particularly potent, with a sharp critique of the limits of memory culture that feels even more potent since the failed attempt to reform the country’s  dictatorship-era constitution. Feitlowitz’s translator’s note demonstrates the thoughtfulness that is palpable throughout the translation.

It is always a joy to read Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s translations of Stefani J Alvarez (The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga is a favourite of mine from the archive) and Dear Sol continues with the question of life writing, reflecting on migration and loved ones left behind. The multilingual touches of Filipino and German paint an evocative picture.

From the Outsiders Special Feature‚ which seems to have set the tone for the issue more broadly‚ Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s essay Home of the Maroon Women was a powerful read. Translated with skill and precision by Anna Kushner, the photos within the essay created a sense of history, of listening to and witnessing the Black women who have gone before. The voices of her family are braided with those of vital Black feminists: Audre Lorde; Maryse Condé’s grandmother,Victoire Élodie Quidal; Angelamaria Dávila; Victoria Santa Cruz. Casamayor-Cisneros reflects movingly on the journeys—both internal and external—that led her to the present moment, to the decision to stop running. Throughout, embodiment is key: “When Black women commit to fully living within and for our bodies, we become ourselves. We render our humanity too eloquent to be stifled, as we find the inner peace freeing from the external expectations that define us solely by our actions and roles for others.”

—Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach

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Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Inheritors of Silence by Abeer Dagher Esber

November 12, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Chloe Bordewich

When had my daughter grown up? Her sarcasm had turned harsher than a frostbitten child, her laugh so rebellious.

Inheritors of Silence (ورثة الصمت) is about the mutually reinforcing relationship between private catastrophes and the collective trauma of political repression. Tragedy metastasizes across time and space—from one generation of women to the next, and from the family’s origins in Homs, Syria, to Nice, and then to Montreal, where the narrator, Sami, and his daughter, Jano, now live. In this excerpt from the opening chapter, Sami is groping through the first hours after his daughter’s attempted suicide. As a Syrian immigrant in Quebec, he is one kind of outsider, a foreigner (though, as Sami himself points out, his neighborhood is full of foreigners like him living lives that are symmetrical but rarely touching). Suddenly, Sami realizes that he is an outsider when it comes to his daughter’s life, too. After a lifetime of loss, he is desperate to find a way back in. Arabic has a great capacity for metaphor, especially metaphors of sentiment, and capturing the full metaphorical repertoire of this text in English while maintaining the fluidity of the prose is challenging. But this allusive vocabulary is a cornerstone of Sami’s narrative voice. He is a poet, and even his quotidian surroundings conjure a stream of images that allow him, and the reader, to wander out of exile—if only for a sentence or two.

—Chloe Bordewich

The morning came with dull normality. A bright light pierced the windowpane as huge plows rumbled past, emitting a ceaseless stream of high-pitched beeps. The day before, a storm had inundated Montreal with snow, stuffing the city’s streets. I woke now to concussive rumbling and tried to shake the previous night’s madness from my body. Exhausted from insomnia, I remembered that what had happened the day before was not a dream. Without so much as a suitcase or a word of farewell, my daughter had, of her own free will, tried to go to her death. My daughter, only in her twenties, had been infused with the poison of knowledge she couldn’t bear and decided not to go on.

I leaped from bed as if stung by the memory of a torture chamber full of scorpions and traitors. I had to face the morning and confront reality in all its baseness, the depravity of events wilder than a wedding of lunatics. Fearing the darkness of night, as well as the light of day, I put my head underwater and fumbled like a slumbering blind man until the world stopped breathing. A deadly silence descended, and I groped for noise. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Woman to Make Over the World” by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers

October 1, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Trask Roberts

If I want to make over the world, it must start with me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, translated from the French by Trask Roberts. In it, a son frantically tries to outrun his mother’s approaching death by embarking on a total makeover: an aesthetic project which requires, most crucially, a long-anticipated nose job. His dissatisfaction with his face mirrors his resentment of his Quebec hometown, polluted by chimney smoke. Both are the unappealing, defective raw materials from which he was forced to fashion his life. Yet even as he rejects his origins, he is drawn to recreate them through his physical transformation.  His ideal of beauty is, after all, his dying mother; he wishes to “breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts.”

At the clinic. 

—What is it about your nose that bothers you?  

If only I could come up with a good reason: I have a deviated septum, I struggle breathing, my nose keeps me from going out, from speaking—my nose, attached as it is to my windpipe, keeps me choked up, keeps me from living, plain for all to see—please, doctor, I’m begging you, fix it! But really, no, I don’t know what bothers me about my nose.  

—I don’t really like it.  

—Don’t really like it? 

—I’ve always thought the nose makes the face. So, if I fix my nose, my face will follow.  

—Yes, but… 

I start to cry. Nothing showy, nary a sniffle, no, just tears on a stolid face.   

—Young man, could it be that perhaps you’re not quite ready?  

—No, I’m crying because I hate my nose.  

READ MORE…

Asymptote Podcast: In Conversation with Jamal Saeed

August 29, 2024  |  in Podcast  |  by Vincent Hostak

Don’t missing this latest episode featuring a conversation with one of our contributors to the current issue!

Join us today for a heartfelt conversation with exiled Syrian author Jamal Saeed, author of the 2022 autobiography My Road from Damascus (ECW Press, Toronto). Podcast Editor Vincent Hostak recently sat down with Saeed, now based in Canada, to discuss his devastating short story, a highlight of our recent Summer 2024 edition. Written amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza and translated into English by longtime collaborator Catherine Cobham, My Mother Fatima’s Cough plumbs the depth of grief and loss that follow generations of a family displaced multiple times over. The discussion is accompanied by a reading of an excerpt in English. Listen to the podcast episode now.

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Summer 2024: Highlights from the Team

July 29, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Ellen Elias-Bursać, Hilary Ilkay, Julia Maria, Marguerite Alley, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Sofija Popovska

Find out what our very own editors have to say about our bountiful Summer issue!

Last week’s Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony featured numerous nods to literature, art, and music, calling to mind Georgi Gospodinov’s statement in his interview for our Summer 2024 issue: “Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it.” Indeed, as our very own Mary Hillis points out, this brand-new Summer edition is a “veritable parade of nations with works from 35 countries.” Read on to discover some of the highlights, courtesy of our multicontinental crew!

My favorite in this issue is Honora Spicer’s Spitting Sutures, with its mesmerizing fluid interplay of drafting a translation, selling a house, and experiences of the body. Fluidity also defines Olivia Sears’s in-depth historical exploration of Italian Futurist Ardengo Soffici in a conversation with Eugene Ostashevsky. Krzysztof Umiński’s Three Translators (tr. Soren Gauger) is also a wonderfully detailed dip into translation history, this time Polish. Two other texts I really enjoyed were Farah Ahamed’s The Day You Ate our Deliveroo Delivery and the dramatic excerpt Trinity by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega), the first for its many-faceted examination of an ethical confrontation, the second for its gorgeously translated insults and imprecations.

 —Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor

I love the compact, compressed nature of Adelheid Duvanel’s The Poet (tr. Tyler Schroeder). It’s got an amazing opening line that hooked me right away. The journey of the story that goes from childhood vignette to the awareness of the narrator as poet is really striking, showing how transformative and creative language can be, how altering a shift in perspective can be.

Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed is such a unique piece of writing, hybridic in its tone and structure, lyrical and poetic prose. The reflections on care in italics intersperse beautifully what’s going on in the almost journal-like entries. The line “I’m trapped by the transactional” will stick with me for a while.

Sarah Gear’s conversation with Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel) is a huge interview for Asymptote and it was a privilege to get such intimate access to the Booker International Prize-winning author’s mind.

—Hilary Ilkay, Assistant Managing Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 26, 2024  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest literary news from Mexico and Canada!

This month, our editors-at-large takes us to Mexico, where competing views of children’s literature vie for attention, and to Canada, where writers and experts came together for a conference on literature in multimedia contexts. Read on to find out more!

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

Just a couple of months ago, I shared with you the homage that Librerías Gandhi, one of the biggest bookstores in Mexico, paid to Norma Muñoz Ledo, a Mexican novelist specializing in children’s literature. Last week, the results of the “Juan de la Cabada” Prize for Children’s Story were announced, and they were baffling. The jury, which included writers Elizabeth Hernández, Gabriela Peyrón, and Gabriela Bustos, determined that there was not a single participant with work of sufficient quality to claim the prize of $250,000 MXN (around $13,800 USD).

Worried about the state of children’s literature in Mexico, the jury suggested to the Culture Office and the National Institute of Fine Arts that the money be used instead to create workshops for writers interested in creating children’s stories. “We hope that this decision can be made to favor the quality of works presented in future editions of the prize,” the official statement declared. In fact, the National Coordination of Literature, which is part of the Culture Office, took the suggestion into account and is set to organize activities focused on children’s literature, to stimulate the production of books, and to improve the circulation of quality works for children. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 28, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, Miranda Mazariegos, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest from Canada, Mexico, and Latin America!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on fascinating digital archives, literary time capsules, and a prestigious award. From e-lit cult works, to ruminations on the future, to a podcast on Mexican literature, read on to learn more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Canada

“Why this huge line,” I wondered, “rolling out of the University of Victoria (UVic) McPherson Library?” The bright British Columbia sunlight, the sweet breeze across the greens, not even the irresistible campus café patios could prevent people from crowding in for one of the coolest events of the year. 

The “Hypertext & Art” exhibit, hosted by the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) from June 10 to June 14, was living up to the reputation and coverage it had already garnered thanks to its exhibition in Rome at Max Planck Institute for Art History in fall 2023 and the indefatigable work done in the field by its well-known and widely awarded curator, author Dene Grigar. The tagline of the exhibit was “A Retrospective of Forms,” and that is exactly what Grigar has been doing for quite a number of years now at the Electronic Literature Lab she leads at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV), where she archived over three hundred works of electronic literature and other media alongside dozens of vintage computers, software, and peripherals. 

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Translation Tuesday: From “After Celeste” by Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve

June 11, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Kate Lofthouse

“It’s no big deal, it happens to one in five pregnancies.”

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant excerpt from the latest novel by Québécois author Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, translated into English by Kate Lofthouse. In plangent, methodically-detailed vignettes, Nepveu-Villeneuve’s narrator describes her return to Moreau, the village of her childhood. In the wake of a recent tragedy, her perception of the world around her comes unmoored; she feels as if she has never left Moreau, as if her years away were only a nightmare, yet Moreau also seems unreal, “a figment of my imagination.” Struggling to engage with the world as a thing separate from herself, the narrator spirals into her past, moving from distant memories of childhood vacations abroad towards the cause of her present alienation.

     I’ll just . . . go home to my sad life and be miserable forever.
—Maddy Thorson, Celeste

Summer is darker than winter on my parents’ street, once green leaves fill the branches of Moreau’s trees and their ancient foliage has cast its shadow over the houses. My parents escape in search of sunshine every year, to Spain, Morocco, Belize, anywhere the July heat is more oppressive than it is on their little shaded street in a small village lost up in the north, a little town I never name when people ask me where I come from, because it doesn’t mean anything to anyone, so I always go back to the closest big city saying around there, and people nod and shrug, because even that city is a minor one, insignificant, one never mentioned in weather reports and which people struggle to picture.

They took me with them when I was little. The three of us went, a close-knit and indestructible family unit with the same sturdy blonde heads and indistinguishable laughter, we fled the shade cast by the old trees over the bungalows and the lawns, and we walked along the shores of Caribbean islands or through the streets of Cairo or Terceira. I would have preferred the cool air of our little street, riding my bike around the block for hours, napping in the hammock in the backyard, drawing on the pavement with Laure, my neighbour from across the way, my best friend. But my parents had other ideas, we left at the end of the school year and came back at the beginning of August, in time to buy supplies and new clothes.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 12, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora!

Join us this in this week of literary news from Central America, the Philippines, and the Romanian diaspora! From recent publications of women writers, to a collection of electronic-inspired poetry, to movements against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, read on to learn more.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Central America 

In December, Nicaraguan novelist and poet Gioconda Belli announced that Libros VISOR had just published a 900-page book collecting all her poetry books. Titled Toda la poesía (1974-2020), it includes a prologue written by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros. This publication came only weeks after Belli won this year’s Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana, one of the most prestigious awards given to poets of the Spanish language. 

Earlier, in late November, Alfaguara put out a book entitled Desde el centro de América, Miradas alternativas, which includes short stories by twenty one Central American women. The collection includes the likes of Nicté Sierra, Marta Sandoval, and Ixsu’m Antonieta Gonzáles Choc, from Guatemala; María Eugenia Ramos and Jessica Isla, from Honduras; and Madeline Mendienta and Carmen Ortega, from Nicaragua. The book was put together by writer and researcher Gloria Hernández, who, in 2022, received Guatemala’s highest literary honor: the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature. 

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I Carved A Girl Of Stone: Nuzhat Abbas on Feminist, Decolonial, and Anti-Imperialist Translation

October 23, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

What drives my work at trace is perhaps a desire to destabilize the spaces I was made to enter and reside in . . .

Since its inception in 2019, Tkaronto/Toronto-based trace press has published “literature that illuminates, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour, and resistance.” Re-emerging after a brief hiatus during the pandemic, their first anthology River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023) assembles emergent and experienced feminist translators, scholars, and writers from Palestine to Uganda, from Indonesia to Kashmir—spotlighted by, among others, Khairani Barokka, Suneela Mubayi, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and Yasmine Haj. In the foreword, the decolonialist historian Françoise Vergès describes the vestiges of imperialism, the dominance of the languages of Euro-American colonisers, the myths of globalisation, and the “hegemony of national languages” inflicted by neocolonial nation-states. Having read and reviewed the anthology myself, I think of it as a complex re-mapping of literary hemispheres “twisting through the atrocities of literary empires and post-colonial capitalism.”

In this interview, I asked trace press’ founding editor Nuzhat Abbas, a Zanzibar-born writer and critic of postcolonial mobilities and gender studies, about the literary publishing house she has founded; how independent presses can stay true to a transnational, anti-imperialist and decolonial feminist ethos; and writings from her archipelagic birthplace in East Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Having founded trace press, in what ways do the values of decoloniality, anti-imperialism, feminism, and anti-racism occur as concrete practices in translation and in publishing? And what is the opposite of that?

Nuzhat Abbas (NA): I prefer to pose such questions to my writers and translators—to inquire how they, in their practice, think through such challenges, especially in relation to localized tensions and displacements, both historic and geographical. For example, trace is located on a forcibly white-settled and renamed space where Indigenous and Black resistance and creativity continues to resist and respond to histories of profound violence and displacement. As racialized im/migrant-settlers working with non-European literatures and languages, how do we ‘translate’ and write toward Black and Indigenous readers in the Americas, and toward each other, as people from the global majority, scattered around the globe, displacing each of our certainties? This is a question for me, a beginning question, one that can only be answered in practice—and differently—by each of the books we make and the conversations that emerge. Building space for these kinds of ‘after-publication’ conversations is very much part of what I want to create with trace. 

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