Place: India

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 11, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Rubén López and Suhasini Patni

The latest in literary news from Central America and India!

In this week’s round-up of the latest in global literary news, we are celebrating award honourees and writers redefining their national literatures by working through the art of translation. From keeping memory alive and imagining the future, these are some of the texts that connect past, present, and future.

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Central America

The Guatemalan writer Gloria Hernández was awarded with the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature on November 3. The prize, founded in 1988, is given annually to Guatemalan writers whose career has had an impact in the international landscape. It includes a monetary compensation of Q50,000 (USD4,700), a diploma, and a medal. Additionally, one of the awarded writer’s books is reedited and published.

Hernández was the seventh woman in history to receive the prize. In her speech, she devoted the award to “the female and male writers fallen performing writing and critical thinking against the enemies of freedom, art, and light,” mentioning several martyrs from the Guatemalan state terror of the 80s, such as María López Valdizón, Alaíde Foppa, Otto René Castillo, Irma Flaquer, Roberto Obregón, and Luis de Lión. She also talked about the role of women in storytelling, as they are the ones that keep the memory of the clan alive. “That memory which was my grandmothers is now living in my mother.” Long an an advocate for children’s literature, she additionally stated that “In the face of ignorance and foolishness that considers children’s literature a minor genre, I only smile and continue with my work.”

The nineteenth edition of the International Book Fair in Guatemala (FILGUA) is close; thousands of writers, editors, scholars, and artists from a wide range of disciplines will gather from November 24 to December 4. There will be more than a hundred book releases, several contests, conferences, and workshops. The fair will resume its face-to-face format after COVID restrictions, but will also keep a virtual schedule, and the organizers hope to reach an audience of 2.4 million people there.

This year, Korea will be the honored guest, and its embassy will hold several activities like Korean writing workshops, a traditional costumes exhibition, a taekwondo demonstration, a Korean art show, and a K-pop concert. The inaugural conference is entitled “The relation between Korea and Latin America,” and will be presented by Juan Felipe López Aymes, a scholar from the Regional Center of Multidisciplinary Research form Universidad Autónoma de México. READ MORE…

Political Mythmaking: On Barricade by Utpal Dutt

November 3, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

...in his attempt at creating a political myth, Dutt does not lose sight of his characters’ humanity.

Barricade by Utpal Dutt, translated from the Bengali by Ananda Lal, Seagull Books, 2022

The Indian playwright Utpal Dutt wrote that myth is one of the most crucial forms of political storytelling because of its ability to transcend time and space, becoming relevant over and over again in new contexts. In Towards A Revolutionary Theatre, which is simultaneously a memoir of staging radical plays amidst the tense politics of his native Indian state of West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s, and a manifesto about the necessity of leftist theatre, he cites William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as an example of a literary work that has “freed itself of the trappings of its own age and has become a gigantic myth,” continually reinventing itself for new political circumstances. This is seen in productions set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which form a critique of the tyranny, demagoguery, and mob rule that make such regimes possible. 

Dutt’s play Barricade, which has been translated from the Bengali original by Indian theatre critic Ananda Lal and published by Seagull Books, is an attempt at such mythmaking. Set in the period just before the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany, the text is ostensibly about the party’s attempts to scapegoat their Communist rivals for the murder of an elderly political leader, but Dutt suggests throughout that the actual subject is the turbulent political situation then prevailing in West Bengal; the play was written in 1972, when the Congress-ruled government in Bengal was actively suppressing all forms of direct dissent. 

However, as Lal said in a recent interview, “The fact that he set Barricade in 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, didn’t make his viewers think that it was remote from their lives. On the contrary, they connected with it viscerally, sympathised and cheered at the right moments.” This speaks to Barricade’s power as political myth, one which is increasingly relevant in the contemporary Indian context exactly fifty years after it was written, especially for its narration of how various democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, and the media are slowly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling party. 

READ MORE…

Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

November 2, 2022  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Annilee Newton, Barbara Halla, Bella Creel, Caridad Svich, Heather Green, Ian Ross Singleton, Janet Phillips, Marina Dora Martino, Megan Sungyoon, and Sofija Popovska

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe” (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

I think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

October 21, 2022  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Julia Sherwood, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from Macedonia, India, and the Czech Republic!

This week, our editors from around the world are reporting on trailblazing new releases, award winners, and literary festivals! From the return of the Dhaka Literature Festival after two years on hiatus to Czech comic artists at the International Comic Art Festival, read on to learn more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

Initially announced in July, more information has emerged regarding the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation in a feature published by World Without Borders. The prize, sponsored by Armory Square Ventures with a jury of acclaimed translation specialists from around the world, aims to “recognize an outstanding translator of South Asian Literature into English.” The winning work will be published by Open Letter Books while excerpts from finalists will appear in WWB. The founders of the prize intend to highlight literatures that are “all but invisible outside South Asia” in the global English-speaking sphere, joining the JCB Prize for Literature in promoting translated Indian literatures both at home and abroad.

The acclaimed Naga writer, Temsula Ao, passed away on October 9 at the age of seventy-six. In her obituary, Chitra Ahanthem explores her legacy and bibliography, highlighting Ao’s focus on the Naga community and her resistance to the homogenizing impulse to club writing from all the Northeast Indian states into a singular literature, which would dismiss the differences across communities and tribes both within and beyond each state. Meanwhile, the 2022-23 cohort of the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorships was recently announced. Among its recipients, Vaibhav Sharma was awarded the Saroj Lal Mentorship in Hindi and will be mentored by the International Booker Prize winner, Daisy Rockwell.

READ MORE…

The Fall 2022 Issue Is Here!

October 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Kyung-Sook Shin, Emma Ramadan, Aram Pachyan, and Álvaro Fausto Taruma amid new work from 32 countries and 19 languages

Welcome to “Half-Lives,” our new Fall 2022 issue, where never-before-published work from 32 countries and 19 languages confront life as it shouldn’t be: stunted, degraded, perversely foreshortened—in short, half-lived. Its centerpiece is the Armenian Special Feature, generously sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the aegis of which we are proud to present stunning new translations of emerging authors such as Aram Pachyan, last year’s winner of the EU Prize for Literature—Armenia’s first recipient!—alongside more established voices like Narine Abgaryan, Krikor Beledian, and Hrant Matevossian. Inescapably harrowing because of their historical contexts, many of these works set the tone for the rest of the issue—including a gritty dispatch from Ukraine via Galina Itskovich and a spotlight on Ukraine-born artist Sergey Katran. Elsewhere, Claire Mullen chats to Emma Ramadan about the joy of translating from the archive, past contributor Anton Hur brings us a new short story by 2012 Man Asia Literary Prize recipient Kyung-Sook Shin, and Grant Schutzman delivers our first work from Mozambique in the form of moving poetry by Álvaro Fausto Taruma. All of this is illustrated by our amazingly talented guest artist, the London-born creative Louise Bassou.

On the heels of Roe being overturned, our editors have also responded by centering one half of the human condition in this issue. Pregnancy is the subject of Lusine Kharatyan’s keenly observed #America_place Pregnant and S. Vijayalakshmi’s intimately recounted Just Like a Womb. Growing up (a “difficult art” according to a very wise Montserrat Roig in this issue’s inspiring Brave New World Literature Feature), the women in these pieces are made to feel less than human in contradictory ways, shamed for the developing bodies in which they are trapped (Rosabetty Muñoz) while becoming objects of unwanted desire at the same time (Eszter T. Molnár). In Mexico, Karen Villeda reminds us that the consequences of being a woman can be fatal, writing that women are not alive, but only “still alive” until they are not. How do women counteract the stunting forces of a hostile world? From the ventriloquism of an Abuela who talks to herself to ensure that no one else speaks for her in Alejandra Eme Vázquez’s You’ll Leave Your Body Behind to the adoption of a third language by Jhumpa Lahiri to develop her own linguaggio, as revealed in Translating Myself and Others reviewed by Caterina Domeneghini, giving voice to female experience, as we endeavor to do in this issue, is one shared mode of resistance.

revised_blog

No matter your taste, there’s something for everyone in this edition, so circulate this glorious new issue by printing our Fall 2022 flyer (downloadable here); like and share our issue announcement and article plugs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

To read the world and read it more fully is itself a recipe for a fuller existence. If we’ve made a difference in that regard to your lives, please consider celebrating our full twelve years of publishing the best in world literature by joining us a masthead or sustaining member from as little as $5 a month—for a limited period only, we’ll even throw in a bonus 2023 digital Asymptote calendar!

READ THE NEW ISSUE

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

September 30, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Katarina Gadze, and Suhasini Patni

Literary dispatches from Croatia, Hong Kong, and India!

This week, our editors on the ground report on literary festivals, award winners, and exhibitions inspired by pivotal writings. From awardees of the Lu Xun Literature Prize to wide-ranging international programs, find out the latest news from the world of global letters below.

Katarina Gadze, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Croatia

The beginning of literary September in Croatia marked the tenth World Literature Festival, which ran from September 4 to 9 in Zagreb. The festival, a tradition for world literature aficionados throughout the region, has grown into an immersive experience for readers to see the best new works of world literature, meet novelists themselves, and listen to discussions regarding their works. This year, the festival brought forth a star-studded line-up of extraordinary international guests and talented authors—such as British writer Bernardine Evaristo, author of one of the most influential books of the decade, Girl, Woman, Other. 2020 Costa Book of the Year winner, Monique Roffey, also joined to share insight into their latest literary masterpiece, The Mermaid of Black Conch. On the local side of things, a talk on the heartbreaking novel/poem Djeca (Children) with its author, the Serbian writer Milena Marković, is also worth mentioning. Other foreign writers who took part in the festival’s fruitful discussions include Israeli writer Dror Mishani, Austrian novelist Karl-Markus Gauss, and German author Katharina Volckmer.

In Rijeka, the Croatian harbour city’s own literary festival, vRIsak, is also back for its fifteenth edition, in which both foreign and local literary voices flocked to the city’s new cultural center, the “Benčić” art district, to discuss contemporary writing and art. This year’s edition promised to be the most ambitious yet, with a lively program celebrating stories of emigrants, contemporary European poetry, and the city Mostar’s literary boom. On the topic of the latter, Mostar author Senka Marić, whose Kintsugi tijela (Body Kintsugi) will soon be published in English translation, spoke about the creative ambitions behind her latest novel Gravitacije (Gravitations). Another theme of this year’s festival was climate fiction, an ode to the healing potential of words in context to the rapid environmental changes of our time.

Last but not least, on September 22, Croatian Writers’ Association (Društvo hrvatskih književnika) organised a panel discussion on a hot topic in today’s literary scene, entitled “Literary Translation Today: Art or Transmission from Language to Language?” On the panel, numerous experts discussed what literary translators are up against in today’s competitive market, as well as the general lack of respect for such a demanding artistic process. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Acharya Chatursen’s Bride of the City

September 27, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Pratibha Vinod Kumar and A.K. Kulshreshth

Sir Mahanaman, today, your daughter attains eighteen years of age. The Republic of Vaishali has chosen her as its foremost beauty.

“I gladly declare that the eighty-four books and ten thousand pages of my literary output over the last forty years of my life are worthless and I humbly gift this book to my readers as my first work.”

—Acharya Chatursen (1891-1960), in his preface to Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu

In the ancient republic of Vaishali, a childless couple discover an abandoned infant girl in a mango orchard. They name her Ambapali, one who sprouted from a mango. When she turns eighteen, Ambapali is forced to become a courtesan–the Bride of the City–under Vaishali’s laws, which dictate that a woman as beautiful as her cannot be only one man’s wife. Ambapali bows before the iron law of her society, but does not allow herself to be crushed. She sets terms that make her residence, the Palace of Seven Worlds, a centre of power. While the richest and the most powerful men grovel before her, Ambapali bides her time even as she burns with revenge . . .

First published in Hindi in 1948-49, Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu (literally, “Bride of the City of Vaishali”) took Acharya Chatursen ten years of deep research. This unrivalled epic of the human condition boasts of a vast canvas of characters that includes the Buddha and Mahavir among “a Bollywood-like panoply of opulent castles, warrior princes, courtesans, dancers, wily courtiers, [and] sorcerers.” Hitherto untranslated, this icon of world literature is now available in a two–volume series out from Cernunnos Books. After reading the sponsored excerpt below, check out Historical Novel Society’s review here. 

The Cursed Law

The city seethed. At the crack of dawn, men had started thronging towards the assembly. Royal Avenue was choked with men on foot, in palanquins, on horseback, and in chariots. The big merchants, tradesmen, courtiers—they were all in the crowd. The outer corridors of the assembly were jammed with men jostling each other. The imposing marble steps were occupied by men sitting on them. A little further away, in the open field, some men stayed in their chariots as they surveyed the large building. Some of them raised their glinting spears and shouted out, creating a cacophony.

The members of the assembly were dismounting where they could and gravely making their way through the unruly mob. A platoon of guards cleared the way for them, and gatekeepers announced their entry into the hall.

The assembly was built mostly of gleaming white marble from the Matsya Kingdom. Inside, its main conference hall had a black stone floor and a hundred and eight black stone pillars that supported the ceiling. Nine hundred and ninety-nine ivory floor pods were neatly arrayed all around the hall. On these, the members of the assembly—representatives of the clans—sat quietly in their demarcated areas. In the centre of the chamber was a raised jade-coloured and intricately carved altar housing two silver pods and covered with a silver canopy. The canopy was ornate with paintings and festooned with flags. Its pillars and the two floor pods had gold inlay work. The pods belonged to the chief minister, Sunand and to the supreme commander, Suman. These two luminaries had not yet reached the assembly.

The altar had steps on three sides, and these steps seated the aged clerks who recorded the minutes of the assembly meetings. Their assistants stood ready with rolls of black and red notebooks in open baskets. Some middle-aged officials directed the preparations in their usual efficient and unobtrusive ways. The rest of the staff scurried to follow their commands.

The chief minister and the supreme commander took their seats without fanfare. The rising tumult of the assembly was drowned out by a blast of the trumpet signalling that the proceedings had started.

The crowd outside became more restive. As they chanted and paced, their faces turned red, and their eyes glowed with anger. The courtyard was packed with the sons of courtiers and merchants. The former brandished their swords and spears, shouting phrases that were lost to all but those next to them. The latter, trained to smile and create bonhomie, looked ready to pick fights. With these crowds thronging the assembly building, it was clear that all the markets and guilds in the city and up-country were closed. Inside, the two chiefs and the members of the parliamentary council were in a pensive mood. They fidgeted as if an unwanted event was about to be thrust on them. The guards were deployed in full strength, their faces taut and foreheads furrowed.

A sudden hush descended on the vast gathering, broken only by the deep, loud creaking of a chariot’s wheels, accompanied by the tinkling of what seemed to be a thousand of its bells. The men in the restless crowd stopped pacing, as if bound by an inviolable command. All eyes were trained on a chariot that advanced at a stately pace towards the courtyard. The chariot was covered with a white cloth, and a white flag fluttered on its golden top. It traversed the courtyard and stopped in front of the steps that led up to the assembly. The quiet throng looked on as an imposing man stepped out of the chariot. His clothes were a spotless white, and so was his flowing beard. A long sword nestled in a sheath at his waist. The sheath and the handle of the sword glittered with inlaid gems. The old man wore a white turban that was topped by a solitaire. A young man joined him, and the old man climbed the steps slowly, but without faltering, leaning on the young one’s shoulder. The men made way for him. The silence remained unbroken as he took the first few steps. READ MORE…

The Essential Integrity of Language: In Conversation with Anukrti Upadhyay

September 14, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

The two languages are two paths to approach our complex soul. . .

Anukrti Upadhyay, a Sushila-Devi-Award-winning author, is one of India’s few bilingual writers; working in both Hindi and English, she has always looked at writing as a form of translation. In Hindi, she has published a collection of short stories called Japani Sarai and a novel called Neena Aunty, both hailed as pathbreaking in Hindi literature. She is, however, best known for her books Bhaunri and Daura—perhaps the only English-language novels set in rural Rajasthan, telling stories of the desert and its folks.

I first met Anukrti in Udaipur at a writing workshop organized by the Rama Mehta Trust. Over a three-day workshop, we spoke about translation, writing, and she discussed the works of her favorite Hindi authors. I caught up with her later and we conducted this interview over email; in our conversation, she talks about being a bilingual writer, whether language affects form, and what transcreation means to her.  

Suhasini Patni (SP): What does being a bilingual writer in India mean to you?

Anukrti Upadhyay (AU): I have written poetry in Hindi for as long as I can remember—and if my mother is to be believed, even before that! Fiction, on the other hand, I began writing only a few years ago, and in English. The how and why of this occurrence, which had seemed organic to me at the time, I can now parse with hindsight; Hindi, the language of spontaneous expression, is the natural choice for poetry and English, the acquired medium, provides room for distance and synthesis which are essential for building stories. Of course, like everything else in life, this is not a complete explanation, nor one that is accurate on all points. After writing prose in English for a couple of years, I began writing fiction in Hindi as well, deriving a deep and unique satisfaction in the freedom and maneuverability I have in the language.

It is very important to me that I practice writing in both Hindi and English. I use “practice” here advisedly, for writing is a practice, just like law or medicine or running a triathlon. Writing fiction in two languages offers me the opportunity to observe and explore in different ways, each offering its own unique range and challenges, its muteness and volubility. These two languages, both mine in different ways, nurture and, I’d like to believe, enrich my writing.

SP: Does a story tell you what language it should be written in? Does language affect genre or form? Do you dream bilingually? 

AU: Aha, what an interesting bouquet of questions! Yes, a story tells me which language it wishes to emerge in. The first rumblings of a story, the first words—a sentence or a phrase—come to me like birds coming home. Whichever language those words are in, that’s the one I work with. I have noticed that the language does not seem to have any overt or discernible connection with the plot or setting or characters. Perhaps there are certain times when I think in one language and other times in another?

No, my language has not, till now, impacted genre or form. To me, the first and foremost condition for a story is that it should hold my interest, and language has never acted as a barrier in that; it has always been only a receptacle for the story.

And do I dream in two languages? Shouldn’t the question first be—do I dream?! Yes, and yes, and I wake up to jot down the vague or sharp images that remain with me in either language. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 9, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, José García Escobar, and Nestor Gomez

Literary news from India, El Salvador, and Guatemala!

Our team of editors across the world is back with the latest literary news as summer winds down. In India, the recently released longlist for a major literary prize has put translations  center stage. In El Salvador, a newly published book of poetry interrogates the concept of terrorism in Central America and the United States. In Guatemala, the city of Mazatenango played host to an international book festival. Read on to find out more!

Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large, reporting on India

First awarded in 2018, the JCB Prize for Literature is India’s biggest literary prize and is given every year to “a distinguished work of fiction by an Indian author.” It is one of those rare prizes that gives equal attention to books originally written in English and translations from other languages, without putting them into separate categories as the Booker does. In a first for the prize, there are six translated titles out of the ten that comprise the 2022 longlist, which came out on September 3. This far exceeds the previous record of three longlisted translations. Two of this year’s longlisted books were translated from Urdu, and the rest were translated from Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, and Nepali. One notable exclusion is Nireeswaran by V.J. James, whose novel Anti-Clock (translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S., who also translated Nireeswaran) was shortlisted last year.

Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, needs no introduction. After winning the International Booker Prize earlier this year, its chances of taking home the JCB Prize are high. Another promising title is Sheela Tomy’s Valli, a work of eco-fiction translated from Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil. Kalathil’s translation of S. Hareesh’s magical realist novel, Moustache, won in 2020 , meaning three of the prize’s four past winners were originally written in Malayalam.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 2, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Jacqueline Leung, and Suhasini Patni

Literary news from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

In India, the country mourns the loss of Kerala’s groundbreaking tribal novelist. In Hong Kong, a genre-bending poet is being celebrated across the nation. And in Sweden, two talented writers have won the prestigious Klas de Vylder’s Grant Fund for Immigrant Writers. Read on to find out more!

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

On August 16, India’s first tribal novelist Narayan passed away in Kochi. Born in the Mala Araya tribe in Kerala, Narayan gained nationwide recognition for his book Kocharethi (1998), which won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi award. The book was a way to counter the misrepresentations of his community from outsiders, and Narayan struggled for ten years to find a publisher willing to release it; despite critical acclaim, many complained his work lacked literary merit. Translator Catherine Thankamma, who translated the text into English—winning the Crossword Book Award for it—wrote a tribute to him for Scroll.in. Her tribute honors the struggles and biases he faced in the literary world.

August has seen many new releases in translation. A significant one is Satya Vyas’s Banaras Talkies, translated from Hindi by Himadri Agarwal. A campus novel, the book is centered around three law students from Banaras Hindu University. The translation was facilitated by Ashoka Centre for Translation from Ashoka University, where Agarwal graduated from. According to Mohini Gupta’s review, “The Hindi novel seamlessly accesses Bhojpuri and English words and phrases and the translation captures these linguistic variations beautifully.”

Many translators in India are also turning to writing fiction. Aruna Chakravarti, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for her translation of Sarat Chandra’s Srikanta, is known for her dedication to Bengali literature. Her first translation, Tagore: Songs Rendered into English, came out in 1984, and her critically acclaimed novels explore the lives of women in the household of Rabindranath Tagore. Her latest book, The Mendicant Prince, explores the Bhawal case—an extended court case from 1920-46 about a man claiming to be the prince of Bhawal. An excerpt of the book can be read here. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

August 25, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Cristina Pérez Díaz and Suhasini Patni

Our staff's recommendations from Greece and India!

This month, our editors select their recent favorite works, including Greek poetry that muses on the voices of cicadas and the natural world, as well as an Indian novel of friendship, philosophy, and the changing Delhi cityscape. Read on to find out more! 

Phoebe Giannisi already had me with her Homerica (2017), and now has got me again with her new book Cicada (New Directions, 2022). Beautifully translated, like Homerica, by Brian Sneeden, the book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages since its clear-voiced announcement in the title, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones. It’s the wind, and the earth, the figs, and the fish, and the egg, the sea, the rain. Words, “the thing that is most yours,” are borrowed from elsewhere. For how else could there be a meditation on the passing of time and transformations, unless out of attention to that which is always present yet is almost impossible to record: the sound or, to say it with Virginia Woolf, “the murmur or current behind it,” the humming of it?

–Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large for Puerto Rico

READ MORE…

Uninhabitable Waiting: On Damodar Mauzo’s The Wait and Other Stories

August 22, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Mauzo highlights the failings of human nature and critiques the resort to impulse.

The Wait and Other Stories by Damodar Mauzo, translated from the Konkani by Xavier Cota, Penguin India, 2022

Damodar Mauzo is a short story writer, novelist, and critic hailing from the Indian state of Goa. He writes in Konkani and his works have been translated into English by Vidya Pai in addition to his long-time collaborator, Xavier Cota. The Wait and Other Stories, a short story collection, has been translated by the latter. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. The writer Vivek Menezes calls Mauzo “an exemplar of Goa’s fluid cultural identity, marked by an unabashed pluralistic universalism that persists despite threats and depredations.” His stories seamlessly bridge the gap between timeless and current, invoking the great short story writers of the nineteenth century—de Maupassant, O Henry, Saki—in terms of how often they take an unexpected turn at the end, but also modern practitioners of the form in post-Independence India like Anjum Hasan and Aruni Kashyap, in the way they evoke both a local and national sense of place.

Goa’s history is tumultuous much like the rest of India, but it is also unique due to its separate, and much longer, history of European colonization. In the fifteenth century, it was ruled over by the Adil Shahis of Bijapur. The Portuguese overthrew them and claimed Goa as their territory in 1510, a sovereignty that remained in place for more than four centuries. As such, Goa was never a part of the British Empire and its Indian holdings. Therefore, India’s eventual independence from British rule in 1947 did not impact its Portuguese-controlled status. When the newly established Indian government asked Portugal to cede all its territories on the subcontinent, it refused. As a result, India invaded to annex Goa, along with the Daman and Diu Islands, into the union in 1967. For two more decades, Goa remained just a union territory after a referendum but was eventually designated as the twenty-fifth state of India in 1987.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

The latest in world literature from Sweden, India, and Vietnam!

This week, our editors report on literary news from around the world as summer gets under way, from threats to dissident writers in Sweden to censorship in India to the anniversary of a pioneering author’s death in Vietnam. Read on to find out more!

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

As Sweden’s application to NATO proceeds, the Turkish government has used the opportunity to raise demands on the country to extradite certain individuals. One such person is Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher, journalist, and human rights activist who has lived in Sweden since 2012 as part of an asylum program for threatened writers and publishers. Last week, the International Publishers Association voiced their concern regarding the situation and encouraged Sweden to safeguard Zarakolu’s freedom. Since then, the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German publishers’ association Börsenverein have followed suit. In 1977, Zarakolu founded the publishing house Belge together with his wife, Ayse Nur, and they published books in Turkey for over thirty years. He was the 2008 IPA Prix Voltaire laureate and is the former chair of IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, as well as an honorary member of the Swedish branch of the international PEN organization.

Another writer who has taken up exile in Sweden is poet and Swedish Academy member Jila Mossaed, who last week was awarded the Prix Max Jacob for her poetry collection Det åttonde landet (The Eighth Country), translated into French as Le huitième pays by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Mossaed was born in 1948 in Tehran, Iran, where she had her literary debut at age seventeen when her poetry was published in the literary journal Khoshe; she later worked as a playwright for Iranian radio and television. In 1986, she fled to Sweden for political asylum. Initially writing exclusively in her native Persian, since 1997 she has also written in Swedish. Recurring themes in her poetry include exile, injustice, and censorship. About writing in her second language, she has said: “To write in the language of exile is to create a small room in that country’s memory. It is a great triumph to become a part of the literary history of a foreign country.”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2022

July 11, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Charlie Ng, and Olivia Roslansky

Introducing new translations from the German, Gujarati, and Spanish!

In this month’s round-up of exciting new translations from around the world, our editors review an artful and intertextual graphic novel from Nicolas Mahler; a lyrical, genre-bending tale of creation and storytelling from Spanish writer Manuel Astur; and a compilation from Gujarati writer Dhumketu, a master of the short story. Read on to find out more!

sussex

Alice in Sussex by Nicolas Mahler, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2022

Review by Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Frankenstein’s monster make an unlikely combination, but in Alice in Sussex, Austrian comic artist and illustrator Nicolas Mahler brings the two together in his vivid reimagining of a classic tale. The title of the graphic novel makes references to both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and H. C. Artmann’s parody of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein—Frankenstein in Sussex, suggesting an intertextual playfulness that is further substantiated throughout the work. Mahler’s seven-year-old Alice—the same age as Carroll’s—experiences an adventure as equally nonsensical as the original’s, but her journey is even more rife with complexities, incorporating a wide range of literary and philosophical references. To sum it up, this adventure down the White Rabbit’s hole is a humorous, inventive set, in which Mahler can play with his own literary and philosophical influences.

Readers familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can certainly remember the beginning of the children’s classic, in which Alice complains that there are no pictures or conversations in her sister’s book. Mahler’s Alice encounters the same boredom when reading her sister’s copy of Frankenstein in Sussex, and thus initiates the White Rabbit’s invitation into his hole, promising to show her “a lavishly illustrated edition.” Drawn sitting by an infinity-shaped stream, the waters foreshadow Alice’s seemingly never-ending descent down the chimney into a huge house underneath the meadow, as well as the long, elaborated, and bizarre dream that follows. Although the promised book cannot be found on the Rabbit’s bookshelf, the graphic novel actualises it—illustrating Alice’s encounter with Frankenstein’s monster later in the story. It also tries to acknowledge her other desire—for conversations—by letting her meet and converse with other idiosyncratic characters. Both, however, turn out to be anything but desirable for young Alice.

In Lewis Carroll’s original, Alice ponders on her identity after experiencing a series of queer events: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” Likewise, Mahler’s Alice is confronted with the same crisis, visually represented by Alice falling into the huge, fuzzy cloud of smoke drifting from the pipe of the Caterpillar, who then asks her: “Who are you?” Alice is unable to answer the question, but she also doesn’t make any great effort; her desire to escape is stronger than any liking for strange conversations. A further existentialist twist is introduced when the White Rabbit can only find The Trouble with Being Born by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran on his bookshelf, and the Caterpillar tells Alice an important thing about life: “Being alive means losing the ground beneath your feet!!!” Such aphorisms are commonly sprinkled throughout the graphic novel—reminiscent of The Trouble with Being Born; the pain of life is treated with levity and amusement, with Alice being tossed around on the Caterpillar’s body, and the Caterpillar’s writhing shifts with his many legs in the air. While Alice is dismayed at losing the ground beneath her feet, the Caterpillar is comfortable with it. Despite being infused with dark humor, Mahler’s style is never overly harsh on his characters; his drawings are delightful, exuding a sense of gentleness. READ MORE…