Place: Kerala

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, India, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on documentaries about poetry, award-winning short stories, and exciting translation fellowships. From novels shortlisted for big prizes to upcoming movie screenings, read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Taiwan’s 60th annual Golden Horse Awards will be held on November 25 and Hong Kong film director Ann Hui’s most recent documentary Elegies is nominated for the Best Documentary Feature. Elegies was already selected as the opening film for the Hong Kong International Film Festival earlier this year, which was a rare occasion as poetry—the subject of the documentary—used to be a niche literary interest in the city. The first part of Elegies presents a sketching of contemporary Hong Kong poetry through interviews of Hong Kong poets and archival materials of Xi Xi and Leung Ping-kwan. The second and third part of the documentary are dedicated to two Hong Kong poets, Huang Canran and Liu Wai-tong, respectively, who both have deep cultural roots with Hong Kong but choose to live elsewhere. Hui studied literature at university, and poetry had long been a subject matter that the director wished to explore through the medium of the moving picture. The film is her way of paying homage to local poetry and the city, as well as an elegy for a bygone era.

To celebrate the nomination and achievement of Elegies, M+ Museum has organised a few screening sessions of the documentary in November. The November 18 screening includes a post-screening dialogue with the director and the featured poets, moderated by M+ film curator Li Cheuk-to. Ann Hui will discuss her ideas about poetry and the implications of poetry for her film productions. The three artists will engage in conversations on the essence of poetry, as well as their own stories of poetry writing. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation? February 2017

Asymptote reviews some of the best new books from French, Kannada, and Danish.

 

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Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet, tr. Sophie Yanow, New York Review Books

Review: Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor

Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying, translated by fellow cartoonist Sophie Yanow in collaboration with the author, immediately recalls the best work of those figures like Alison Bechdel, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware, who have done so much to insist on both the relevance and elegance of the graphic narrative form in the Anglophone world. Fortunately, New York Review Books is dedicated to showcasing the many voices contributing to an ongoing, worldwide comic conversation, and its latest contribution is this Belgian memoir. Originally titled Faire semblant c’est mentir, it centers on the experiences of Dominique—a fictionalized version of the author herself—as she navigates fraught relationships with her parents, including with her looming lush of a father. Also sketched out is a romantic relationship where Dominique attempts to grapple with that most fundamental question of heartbreak: why did he leave me?

A certified electrician and plumber, Goblet clearly understands a thing or two about the necessary connections running through structures to make them work, and her illustrations carry this skill into Pretending is Lying, her first work to appear in English. Image and text perform an intricate choreography, reveling in an aesthetic that frequently slips between the easily imitated and the utterly remarkable. If the easy analogy for reading comics is the process of examining a series of film stills—and even if we might be tempted to label parts of the construction of this work cinematic—I would instead suggest that Goblet offers something that more closely resembles a well curated series of photographs, each of which could easily stand on its own, given each frame’s clarity of vision and attention to detail.

In illustrations that move from Rothko-like explorations of pure color to nuanced collections of penmanship that gradually reveal a series of ethereal forms, the melancholia that we often find in other works emerges here as well—maybe there’s something about the form that lends itself well to expressions of such emotions in its ability to match words with alternatively visceral and measured strokes. The muted color palette of Pretending is Lying is also remarkably expressive. READ MORE…