Posts filed under 'censorship'

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Palestine, Egypt, and Latin America!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news of a “literary cartography” of Palestine, the most recent literary fairs and festivals in Egypt, and censorship of Latin American authors in Florida. Read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Despite the burgeoning array of literary endeavors in support of Gaza, this dispatch aims to shed light on a profoundly comprehensive initiative. Back in July 2023, when we unveiled our coverage of the podcast entitled “Country of Words,” conceived and orchestrated by Refqa Abu-Remaileh, little did we fathom the vastness of Refqa’s overarching vision under the same title.

Country or Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature” was inaugurated by Stanford University in the last weeks of 2023. Rooted in the constellation paradigm within literature, this digital-born project aspires to retrace and remap the global narrative of Palestinian literature throughout the twentieth century, traversing the Arab world, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestled at the confluence of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, “Country of Words” establishes a networked locus for the data and narrative fragments of a literature in constant motion, harmonizing porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into a resilient, open-ended literary chronicle.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

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

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play

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A Weird Alchemy of Taste and Determination: Speaking with Taylor Bradley of Honford Star

That’s what is cool about Specters—it tries to explore how government censorship affects the world of art.

South Korean author Hwang Yeo Jung’s scintillating, multi-layered novel, The Specters of Algeria, was our Book Club selection for the month of April; in a narrative that holds fictions inside facts, facts inside fictions, Hwang brilliantly builds and unravels with the double-speak and intimate language of life under authoritarian governance. This invigorating book has come to us by way of the East Asia-centric publisher Honford Star, a small press that has continued to undertake the vital and thrilling work of bringing groundbreaking writers to English-language audiences. In this following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks with the co-founder of Honford Star, Taylor Bradley, about their process from obtaining rights to publication, their mission and goals, and why The Specters of Algeria is such a special title.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Laurel Taylor (LT): It’s been six years since Honford Star’s founding. What led you and your co-founder Anthony Bird to form this new publishing house?

Taylor Bradley (TB): Anthony and I had known each other since 2008, when we were both English teachers at the same school in Korea. Fast forward to 2015, my wife and I were on our honeymoon in London, where we met up with Anthony and his wife for a pint at this 300-year-old pub called the Chesire Cheese. Charles Dickens was a regular there, and perhaps feeling the inspiration of the Ghost of Literature Past, Anthony and I talked about how nice it would be to have a publishing company. I continued on my honeymoon and didn’t think about the conversation again until a few months later, when Anthony messaged saying he wants to publish the classic Korean author Kim Dong-in and asked me if I want in. I said yes.

Our purpose for starting a new publishing company was to bring a broader range of East Asian stories into English. At the time, we felt the types of books being published were from an extremely narrow band. For example, there hadn’t been much, if any, Korean sci-fi translated into English. We hoped to bring things from areas like classic literature, sci-fi, and queer fiction into English. Fortunately, I think that the translated field has changed a lot in the past eight years, thanks to the efforts of indie and university presses.

LT: You and Anthony were both already working in the publishing sphere prior to Honford Star’s founding, but I’m wondering if there been any unexpected challenges along the way? Unexpected rewards?

TB: We did have experience with printing and publishing, but we had never been in charge of doing an entire book. So finding good translators, editors, artists, printers, distributor, publicists, and sales team has been a journey of trial and error. We’ve been fortunate that our network has really grown into strong group of collaborators, and we have a great printer in Korea that can make the most gorgeous books. Our sales team are a group of wizards, and the distributor is very reliable.   READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung

Fact and fiction are irrelevant.

Amidst the mysterious, intricate narrative of The Specters of Algeria, there is another elusive, shrouded text: the only play that Karl Marx had ever written. This absurdist work, which gives the novel its name, goes on to inflict immense violence onto a circle of close friends, initiated by the hotheaded crackdowns of a censorious regime. In her generation-spanning, multi-threaded debut, Hwan Yeo Jung spins a fascinating inquest into authorship, aesthetics, authoritarianism, and how such things resonate into our intimate relationships. As the arrival of an exciting new voice in Korean writing, we are thrilled to introduce this fascinating inquest into political and human nature as our Book Club selection of April.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung, tr. from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Honford Star, 2023

In her theorizing of anti-neocolonial translation, Don Mee Choi has described the experience of speaking as a twin—in the context of a Korea divided by colonial powers in twain, existing inside a language that has been colonized and recolonized by invasion and annexation, Choi describes the act of translation from between two nations that have never technically stopped being at war. This twinning across history is an idea that came to me again and again as I read The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung, translated by Yewon Jung. Hwang Yeo Jung’s first novel, released in Korean in 2017, takes an incredibly cerebral dive into the minds of two childhood friends who do not quite understand the circumstances of their own upbringing. In seeking answers to the dissolutions of their families and friendships, Yul and Jing (who are also Eunjo and Hyeonga, and maybe also Yeonghee and Cheosul, and maybe also Lily and Marx) sink deep into the fog of memory and a historical era, whose sins are often swept under the rug.

This labyrinthine novel bears rereading, as moments that were baffling on first readthrough settle into clarity when revisited. In the first chapter, for instance, we learn that Yul’s father, Han Jiseop, is terrified of books and paper, burning every scrap he discovers in Yul’s secret keepsake box of Jing’s letters. As a child, Yul does not understand her father’s fear. It is only later in life that Yul learns her father was once a playwright who, along with the rest of his theatre troop (including Jing’s parents), was arrested for producing “seditious materials” about communism. The resulting violence against Jiseop and his fellows ripped their friendships, and in some cases even their minds, apart. When Yul comes upon Jing’s mother Baek Soi on Jeju Island, Soi’s mind has crumbled completely, able to remember only her son and nothing else. But inside her backpack is the titular play that caused them all so much anguish—The Specters of Algeria.

This play resurfaces in Soi’s broken mind, haunting her with memories of times before the break, and pointing to one of the key concepts of this novel—the importance of naming. In her mind’s eye, Soi travels back to recitations at gatherings when Yul was a child:

“What on earth does it mean for someone to feel something about something?” Jing’s mom asked.

“Do you want to be human?” my dad asked in return.

“Tell me a secret,” she said.

“A secret about what?”

“About anything.”

“Find a contradiction.”

“If I do, will you give me a name?”

“Why do you need a name?”

“Because I need courage.”

“Then I will.”

“What is my name?”

“Hammonia.”

“And who are you?”

“Who am I?”

“Fred.”

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Great Material for a Novel: Lucy Jones on Translating Brigitte Reimann

The translation is always another chance to improve a piece of writing stylistically, ‎to make it really sing.

In our March Book Club selection, the sharp and passionate voice of German writer Brigitte Reimann paints a tender portrait of post-war Berlin, when the Wall has yet to go up, but lines have already been drawn, and devotions already divided. In an unflinching autofiction that finally sees an English debut after being long-adored in its original language, Reimann uses the materials from her own life to elucidate the deep ruptures carved into family by politics, the bright, early idealism of socialism in East Germany, and the hope that people hold to amidst the most tumultuous times. In this interview with the translator of Siblings, Lucy Jones, we discuss the storied history of Siblings, the political context necessary to this text, and the meeting-place between art and idealism.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.    

Samantha Siefert (SS): Lucy, Thank you so much for being here to talk with us about Siblings. Can you tell us a little bit more about the road that led you to translation?

Lucy Jones (LJ): It’s probably not a very conventional one. I graduated in German and in German language and literature, and then I actually didn’t do anything with it for a while; I became a photographer. I did photography for about twelve years, and then I came back to translation just after my daughter was born. This is when I went back to the roots of what I started out doing at university.

I started by pairing up with a good friend who translates in the other direction; together, we’re Transfiction. She translates from English to German, and I translate from German to English, and we’ve been going since about 2008.

SS: You’re known for being a huge advocate for Brigitte Reimann’s work. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with her work in particular, how you came to advocate for her, and eventually translate her?

LJ: Translators often do work as literary scouts or something in-between, and I came across Reimann because I was in a seminar for translators in Berlin. There is quite a good infrastructure here, and in that seminar we were visiting different publishing houses. During one visit, I was given a pile of her work, and it was really warmly recommended to me. When I started reading, I realized—especially when I came across her fiction—that it could have been written now as an historical novel. You didn’t have that kind of patina from, you know, a novel from the past. It was more modern, as though it just happened to be set in the past. I found that really striking. READ MORE…

In Spite Of It All: On Czech Comics with Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš

"Comics" . . . as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving.

After decades of being dismissed as trash or a genre suitable only for children, comic books and graphic novels have begun to gain recognition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, becoming the subject of serious scholarly interest and major retrospective exhibitions. Comic art now has an established infrastructure, with an annual prize, the Muriel Award, a Centre for Comics Studies (at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc), and an international comic art festival, Frame, in Prague. In the second of our interviews on comic art, Asymptote’s editor-at-large Julia Sherwood asked two of the Centre’s associates and noted experts Pavel Kořínek and Michal Jareš to introduce our readers to this art form and its leading Czech and Slovak proponents.

Julia Sherwood (JS): You and your colleagues have written widely on all aspects of comic art, from reviews to historical and theoretical articles and essays, including V panelech a bublinách (In Panels and Speech Balloons), published in 2015, the first detailed Czech work that summarizes the various theories and concepts around comic art, which you co-authored with Martin Foret. So to begin with, how would you define the genre? 

Pavel Kořínek (PK): The million-dollar question, and straight off, too. There are, of course, many definitions of comics, and new ones are being added all the time. We can revel in Scott McCloud’s definition of comic art as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”; we can talk about sequentiality and the dominance of the sequential image primarily in the context of print media; we can reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is nothing that can be defined as being specific exclusively to comics; and we can talk about comics as whatever we (or, ideally, some higher institutional authority, by consensus) declare to be comics. After all, we all sort of subconsciously know “what a comic is” (we just don’t know if it’s actually a genre—and in what sense—a medium, a form, or what). It’s only when we look more closely that we begin to encounter more complicated cases: works that may be related to comics, for example, but don’t quite seamlessly fulfill our ideas of what comics are. In our book, we ended up approaching the question of definition as an open-ended challenge: we offered several influential approaches and tried to convey to the reader our conviction that “comics”—while being aware of all that has been said formally and functionally, socially and institutionally—as a genre is something fluid, evasive, and ever-evolving rather than a fixed category. Fortunately. Otherwise, it would have been a staggering bore.

JS: Your monumental Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století (History of Czechoslovak Comics in the 20th Century, co-authored with Martin Foret and Tomáš Prokůpek), published in 2014, details across almost one thousand lavishly illustrated pages on how the turbulent history of Europe over the past century has affected the development of the genre. Difficult as this task may be, could you outline the main stages and how they were shaped by the political events from the early days until World War; under the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, during World War II; under communism; and after its fall?

Michal Jareš (MJ): Talking about something that is new and still evolving, such as a “possible” history of Czechoslovak comics, we also have to bear in mind the history of Central Europe as a whole, particularly in our neck of the woods, from the time of Austria-Hungary to the foundation (and later dissolution) of Czechoslovakia. We also have to consider it within the context of the debates and trends that shaped all of twentieth-century art, including the avant-garde. We constantly encounter attempts to understand comics as well as attempts to forbid them, and attempts at innovation as well as attempts to stay within the educational form of comics. So, at the very beginning we can see a clear continuation of the tradition of Central European caricature and thus topics aimed at the adult reader as well. The development of magazines for children and youth spawned a variety of children’s comics featuring humorous animals (such as the children’s magazine Punťa).  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

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.”

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in world literature from Italy, the Philippines, and Croatia!

This week, our editors on the ground are bringing you news of summer literary festivities, publishers fighting back against silence, gatherings of award-winning writers, translation exhibitions, and more! 

Amaryllis Gacioppo, Newsletter Editor, reporting from Italy

Italians are known for their ability to delight in la dolce vita, and this exuberance is never more evident than in the summer season, when the entire country throws itself into festivities. The Italian literary world is no exception: from June 9 to June 12, indie publisher festival Una marina di libri held its thirteenth edition in the massive open-air courtyard of Palermo’s Villa Filipina. Along with an indie book fair—which included publishers such as Edizioni E/O (Elena Ferrante’s Italian publisher), Iperborea (an Italian publisher specialised in translations of Northern European literature), La Nuova Frontiera (a Rome-based publisher focusing on Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language translations), and famed Palermitan publisher Sellerio—festival-goers were treated to poetry readings, music, wine, pizza, and magazine launches—such as that of Arabpop, a beguiling Italian magazine on its second issue, which is devoted to Arab art and literature. This year’s festival was dedicated to both Pier Paolo Pasolini and the thirty-year anniversary of the Capaci massacre (in which one of Palermo’s famed and beloved anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone, was murdered by Cosa Nostra, along with his wife and three police escorts). One such event featured theatre and music students from Teatro Biondo and Palermo’s Conservatory giving music-accompanied dramatic readings of pieces by Pasolini, Giuliana Saladino, and Leonardo Sciascia at various times and locations around the festival. Others featured educational talks for young people about famous anti-mafia figures including Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (Falcone’s friend and fellow beloved magistrate, murdered with five police escorts by Cosa Nostra less than two months after Falcone), and the presentation of Pietro Grasso and Alessio Pasquini’s new book Il mio amico Giovanni, in which the former spoke about his friendship with Falcone.

In other news, the shortlist for Italy’s most prestigious prize for book-length fiction, the Strega Prize, was announced on June 8. Among the nominees are Marco Amerighi, for his second novel Randagi (Strays); Fabio Bacà for his second novel Nova; Alessandra Carati for her first novel E poi saremo salvi (And then we’ll be safe); prior Strega nominee Mario Desiati for Spatriati (Patriates); Veronica Galletta for her second novel Nina sull’argine (Nina on the riverbank); Claudio Piersanti for Quel maledetto Vronskij (That damn Vronkskij); and Veronica Raimo for Niente di vero (Nothing true). I found the nominees list to be exciting, with many up-and-coming writers unearthed, along with more established writers that have yet to be appreciated in the Anglophone world. With the exception of Desiati, Piersanti, and Raimo, most are relative newcomers on their first or second book, and—with the exception of the latter two—have yet to be translated into English. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

News this week from Vietnam, Japan, and Southeast Asia!

This week, our editors from around the world present reimaginings of Sophocles in Hanoi, memorials and debuts from Japan, and witness writing from Southeast Asia. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Since November 2021, The Goethe Institute in Hanoi has been in collaboration with the Youth Theatre of Vietnam (Nhà Hát Tuổi Trẻ) to produce six interpretations of Sophocles’s Antigone, exploring a variety of salient themes—fate versus freewill, the family versus the state, moral integrity and political order, feminism versus patriarchy, reason and emotion, loyalty and disobedience. While most of the productions were performed live in Hanoi after the gradual easing of COVID-19 restrictions, “Portrait” (“Bức Chân Dung”)—Antigone’s fifth iteration—is shown online from February 19 through February 26, 2022.

Directed by Lê An of Ho Chi Minh City’s Saigon Theatreland, “Portrait” shifts the first act of Antigone into 1970s wartime South Vietnam, where An (Huỳnh Ly)—whose name means peace and contentment—must forge her identity out of her family’s traumatic past. Creon, Antigone’s uncle in Sophocles’s play, is transposed into her emotionally repressed father, Đắc (Công Danh), a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Đắc forbids An to bring home Kỳ’s dead body—his son and An’s brother—an enemy soldier who fought and died for the Communist cause. Despite the obvious ideological landmines evoked by this premise, director Lê An, in a pre-performance podcast, sidestepped politics by discussing her heroine’s psychological quest “to find herself”— possibly to detract from the production’s more provocative implications.

While ideological heresy still cannot be addressed explicitly in modern adaptations of Antigone within Vietnam (despite the heroine’s Greek name which can mean “one who resists/is of the opposite bend”), this theme plays a central role in Vũ Thư Hiên’s oeuvre—including his newest story collection, Confessions at Midnight (Lời Xưng Tội Lúc Nửa Đêm) (California: Văn Học Press, 2022). A well-known dissident writer and translator, Vũ Thư Hiên has become Vietnam’s persona non grata since the 1997 publication of Night at Midday (“Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày)—a memoir, inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which recounts the nine years (1967-1976) he spent in various North Vietnamese prisons after being charged with “anti-Party, anti-State, spying and revisionist conduct.” READ MORE…

What’s Going On in Myanmar?

In their attempts to control this narrative, the illegal regime has made use of tactics old and new.

On February 1, 2021, the military forces of Myanmar deposed the democratically elected members of the National League for Democracy, which had won 83% of the country’s parliamentary seats in the previous election. Protests erupted across the country in response to the coup, and what started out as peaceful resistance quickly turned violent as the junta worked to suppress the demonstrations. In this following essay and dispatch, Asymptote correspondent Lucas Stewart provides a delineation of what has happened in the year since, and examines the place of literature during such times of suppression. In conversations with Yu Ya, whose prolific writing career follows that of her father’s and uncle’s (both of whom were writers imprisoned under the former regime), this following piece puts a finger to human pulse of political unrest. Yu Ya’s quotations were co-translated by Stewart and Eaindra Ko Ko.

My balcony in Yangon had overlooked Sule Pagoda, an ancient stupa that once lay beyond the limits of the old city of Dagon, but now lights up the heart of Myanmar’s largest metropolis. From there, on the sixth day of the coup—a Saturday afternoon—we saw some of the first public outpourings of anger. Security forces, which had secured the City Hall opposite us and other strategic buildings in the early days of conflict, tumbled out; grey-uniformed, some with riot shields, those without a step behind them, they fanned from one side of the road to the other. An officer spoke into a radio, pointed one way north and then south and then back north again, before eventually settling on the east side of the pagoda, closest to the City Hall’s main entrance. There was a stand-off but no carnage that day, nor for the first two weeks. In that time, what had been a hundred protestors grew to hundreds of thousands, many coming from elsewhere, but always heading towards Sule Pagoda, the symbolic crux of protest. Some describe it like a carnival—which was true, I guess, at first. Music blasted out from overloaded speakers strapped to trucks. Sellers sold whatever, food, drink, National League for Democracy (NLD) merchandise. Volunteers picked up the debris left behind as the crowd moved on. Cars bashed their horns as they passed City Hall, knowing the soldiers within could hear their disgust. A neighbour, who remembered the midnight of 1988 when perhaps 300 or more protestors were shot at Sule Pagoda, told me this time if felt different. But that was in the early days.

Among the millions of people who woke up alongside me on February 1 to a blacked out and disconnected country was Yu Ya: prominent young short story writer, and friend of several years since we worked together on Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds, an anthology bringing short stories from Myanmar’s censored ethnic nationality languages to light for the first time. She later worked for BBC Media Action as a scriptwriter, contributing to inclusive, working-class voices radio programmes such as The Teacup Diaries.

Like many in Myanmar, she is no stranger to military coups, nor to the violence and oppression that follows the ascent to illegal power. Min Lu, Yu Ya’s father as well as a leading poet and author, was jailed in the aftermath of the 1988 revolution for penning ‘What’s Going On?’—a satirical, sarcastic poem attacking the then-illegal regime’s murders and maladministration. The poem witnessed a revival in the weeks following the 2021 coup. So now, what is going on in Myanmar? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Poland and Thailand !

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Poland and Thailand! In Poland, Julia Sherwood takes us through the Conrad Festival, the 2021 winner of the prestigious NIKE Prize, and the launch of the first ecopoetics course in the country. In Thailand, Peera Songkünnatham explains how an innovative series of illustrated children’s books have risked censorship for their depiction of government protests. Read on to find out more! 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Poland

Tomorrow, 24 October, is the closing day of the 13th edition of the Conrad Festival that started in Kraków on 18 October headlined “The Nature of the Future”, which has sought to “imagine the shape of our near and distant future, all while thinking about the changes that we are going to witness in the natural environment”, as well as highlighting themes of feminism. International literary heavyweights—Han Kang, Rebecca Solnit, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Valeria Luiselli, Helena Janeczek, Elias Khoury, Lisa Appignanesi, Behrouz Boochani, Brandon Hobson, George Saunders and Petra Hůlová—as well as acclaimed Polish writers such as Julia Fiedorczuk, Mikołaj Grynberg and Dorota Masłowska have been taking part in discussions and presentations, held mostly online (the recordings can be watched on the festival’s YouTube channel.)

2021 NIKE Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award went to Kajś, Opowieść o Górnym Śląsku (Somewhere,  A Tale of Upper Silesia), in which its author, Zbigniew Rokita, searches for his Silesian roots and grapples with his own ambivalent feelings about his native region. The decision to shortlist only one work of fiction while all the other books, including the winning title, represented nonfiction, caused some controversy. However, this is hardly surprising given the strong position of literary reportage in contemporary Polish literature. The genre even has its own award, the Kapuściński Prize (this year it went to Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland , translated into Polish by Martyna Tomczak) and its own teaching institution, the Warsaw Institute of Reportage whose founders and teachers include the most celebrated reportage authors Mariusz Szczygieł, Paweł Goźliński, and Wojciech Tochman. 

Last year Filip Springer, one of the Institute’s teachers launched a new course, The School of Ecopoetics, the first of its kind in Poland. Feeling the need  to explore what individuals and writers can do to prevent an ecological disaster, Springer, a writer and photographer (and past Asymptote contributor), approached the poet, translator, and literary critic Julia Fiedorczuk who is a leading exponent of ecopoetics in Poland (and also a past Asymptote contributor) to design the programme. Although the course was aimed at writers, poets, journalists, and critics, the organizers stressed that the School of Ecopoetics “is not a school of writing”. Instead, “its goal is to help the students develop ecocritical reflection, to change their way of thinking by drawing attention to the relations between human beings and non-human nature.”  Judging by the enthusiastic responses shared by some of the first twenty graduates on the School’s Facebook page, the mix of traditional lectures and fieldwork (hiking through forests, sleeping in tents and discussions around the campfire) held from June 2020 to October 2021, was a resounding success. Recruitment for next year’s course starts in November.   READ MORE…

How to Tell Stories Under Lèse Majesté? An Anonymized Novel Has Some Answers

How can a writer who traffics stories between the two worlds—whether in journalism, literature, or scholarship—do so responsibly?

In Carolyn Forché’s poem, “What Comes,” she writes: “To speak is not yet to have spoken.” Amidst the myriad of voices clamouring to be heard today, writers often aim to reconcile the journalistic motives of witness and the cultivated balance of narration, bringing the scattered language of a society into a solid, comprehensible whole. The best of these texts has proven to be a powerful tool in re-establishing the broken links between people living under a regime, and in a newly released book from Thailand, an anonymous writer seeks to do the same in a fascinating and deeply probing exploration of the country’s strictly enforced lèse majesté laws. 

What can literature do during times of emergency, wherein testimony takes precedence over much of storytelling? This year in Thailand, amidst the ongoing crackdown on anti-government protesters—exacerbated by viral outbreaks in prisons—witness accounts by lawyers and journalists have assumed the task usually assigned to literature: to describe the human condition and to build conscience. One particular book, however, has managed to straddle the worlds of journalism and literature. A collection of anecdotes about those affected by the lèse majesté law in the 2010s, ในแดนวิปลาส (In the Land of Madness, Paragraph Publishing, April 2021), has much to teach us about how to tell the stories silenced in the throes of oppression and censorship. It is anonymized yet revealing, packed full of pain but with surprising touches of humor. Perhaps due to its relevance to current events in the country, the book has seldom been considered as a literary object. Yet, in its description, the book categorizes itself as a “Thai novel.” This gets my puzzle-solving mind turning.

One might read the categorization as ironic, and—taking “novel” to mean fiction—come to the truism that, in the Kingdom of Thailand, the truth surrounding the monarchy and its victims must, for reasons of safety, make itself anonymous, dressed up as fiction. But reading the label as a genuine attempt to define itself may yield deeper and more surprising insights. In the author’s preface, a line is drawn between reporting based on facts and storytelling based on feelings:

All the stories in this book grew out of prying curiosity indeed. Half of its fruits became serious news and information while I worked as a journalist in a small but big-hearted news agency; the other half turned mostly into emotions and feelings I put away in a bag and didn’t know what to do with.

In a situation where rights and liberties were repressed for a long time, where injustice was standard practice, the bits and pieces being collected in my bag kept getting heavier and heavier, to the point where the bag seemed to be bursting. There were two parallel worlds. People lived normal and bright lives in one, while the other was pitch dark, cruel, and noticed by very few. One stranded between the two worlds would therefore find it extremely difficult to maintain one’s sanity and normalcy.

It isn’t that fact and feeling are necessarily opposed; rather, the preface suggests that there is a remainder left over from the work of journalism—that certain parts of a journalist’s experience can only be stored as feeling and emotion. Shining the “spotlight” on society’s darkest corners provides only one aspect of reality. The other sides—unspoken or unspeakable, unborn or unbearable—are best accessed via novelistic means. In the Land of Madness definitely ‘reads like a novel’ in the sense that it is a well-crafted, compelling story wherein some characters are depicted with vivid inner lives, whereas others remain unknowable despite their palpable presence on the page. Calling it a novel also allows for some artistic license, a deviation from factual description to get at a deeper truth; in the book’s most surreal moment, the narrator notices a friend’s “internal” injuries by seeing lances of sunlight piercing through holes in his frame. READ MORE…