Posts filed under 'migration'

Within This Language a Home: On the Linguistic Exiles of Minae Mizumura and Jhumpa Lahiri

July 5, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

We seek within language the stable perceptions of identification; we are looking for the words to pronounce ourselves.

Minae Mizumura was born speaking Japanese, adopted English upon moving to America, studied French diligently at the Sorbonne and Yale, then in adulthood, returned to Japan to become a novelist in her native tongue. Jhumpa Lahiri was born speaking Bengali, quickly gained fluency and rose to literary prominence in English, then in the mid-nineties, fell in love with the Italian language, and began a prolific transfiguration of translating and writing Italian texts. In this following essay, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses these two accomplished writers in the varying, intriguing ways they’ve travelled through the realm of language, and how the possibilities of exile provide for a rediscovery of selfhood.

The art of self-introduction is a practice in brevity and precision. When I lived in China, I was Xiao Yue—yue as in moon. When my family moved to Canada, I became but you can call me Shelly. Later, when I carved a home-like enclave for myself in Japan, I learned the concise method of mental hyphenation: Shelly-Chinese-Canadian. Such is the way I moved through the world, always in dialogue with its perceptions. The self is not a distinct article of qualities, but a myriad web of associations—one spends a life following its appendix.

When an individual’s place in the world is rendered fluid by border-crossings and trans-oceanic migrations, it serves to learn that identity is not an indefatigable statement of presence, but a tenuous and mutable clay. Names, meant to be cemented by the fact of birth, become vulnerable to the phonetic insistences of other tongues. Language, the intact system by which to categorise the world, becomes scattered and dismembered with interruptions, contrarian rules, and adversarial vocabularies. One learns to see the multiplicities innate in all things—the layers of presence dispersed across the world, evoked by the differences in seeing. What you call that I call mine.

“‘My name is Minae’: how many times did I say this and then feel my mind go blank?” In Minae Mizumura’s novelised autobiography, An I-Novel, she peruses the same delicate network of memories, beliefs, and influences to reach herself. The three-hundred-some pages are held within the bookends of one day and night, perched on the structural lattice of phone calls with her sister, Nanae. The two sisters behold each other in both the comfort of familial intimacy and the strangeness of difference, made bolder by the contrast of similarity. Nanae, accustomed to American patterns, has settled into a life—however precarious—defined by an apartness from Japan, a homeland resigned to being occasionally ached for and remembered. Minae, however, spends the duration of this long, diaphanous day gathering pockets of assurances and assertions so that she may get up the courage to tell her sister about her decision to return to Japan—and their first language—to become a novelist.

The pull that Minae feels towards her birth country has everything to do with a knowledge that she has the power to excavate something profound and secret in the earth of Japanese language, a richness that the stone facade of English does not betray—“. . . the act of writing in Japanese transformed me to someone with knowledge of a rarefied world conveyed through the mix of different writing systems, knowledge inaccessible through English.” The lilting elegance of hiragana enchants her—writing its sweeping shapes embroiders her into the brocade of The Tale of Genji, calling towards a graceful world of balance, beauty, and softness. Even the repetitive, metronomic nature of learning kanji beholds an element of magic, displacing her into the transcendent history of the characters: “I felt like a monk in a temple, his body freezing in the bitter cold of winter, copying a sutra by candlelight.” Language—even beyond its purposes of notation and definition—is a gateway, a stage upon which the fantasies of self may spiral in its complex, infinite choreography. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

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Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

Beyond Human Subjectivity: An Interview with Jon Pitt

December 2, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Mary Hillis

There’s a kind of alchemy in the act of translation, especially with writers like Itō who explore the in-between spaces of cultures and language.

Itō Hiromi is one of the most well-known figures in contemporary Japanese literature, having made her mark with sensational and unabashed poetry, widely ranging essays, and award-winning novellas. In the essay published in our Fall 2020 issue, “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” she brings the reader from California to Kumamoto and back again, observing the changes of her life and nature in tandem—the distinction of which are rendered, at times, indistinguishable.

The most recent edition of the Asymptote Educator’s Guide features a lesson plan for “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” which encourages students to engage with this work in distinguishing intercultural patterns, identifying literary forms, and discussing translation and migration. Educator’s Guides are published alongside each issue of Asymptote, and include teaching ideas for educators who want to bring world literature to their classrooms; each Asymptote piece introduced in the guide is accompanied with contextual information. possible discussion questions, and writing prompts.

Jon Pitt, the translator of “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” is a professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities, and has long studied the intersections between literature and ecology. In the following interview, Asymptote Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis speaks with him about the resonances of environmentalism and migration in both Itō’s work and Japanese literature overall, as well as the increasing entwinement between ecology and art in the Anthropocene.

Mary Hillis (MH): I understand that in addition to working on a translation of Itō Hiromi’s Kodama Kusadama (Tree Sprits Grass Spirits), from which “Living Trees and Dying Trees” is excerpted, you are a professor of environmental humanities. How did you initially become interested in the environmental humanities? And how does this field relate specifically to Japanese literature, film, and sound?

Jon Pitt (JP): I became interested in the environmental humanities while I was pursuing my Ph.D. I entered graduate school with the intention of researching representations of city life in Japanese literature, but along the way I discovered that representations of the “natural” were just as compelling and complex. I started thinking about trees and how they appeared in so many of the novels I was reading, wondering what would happen if I took them seriously—as more than mere scenery or background to human action. When reading scientific texts about trees and forests, it struck me how new readings of literature might be possible if put into dialogue with scientific writing. I gradually learned that this kind of interdisciplinary approach was one of the key tenants of the environmental humanities, and that there was a growing number of scholars looking for ways to approach the study of literature or film by decentralizing the human.

Engaging with Japanese literature (or film or sound media) through an environmental lens helps address a paradox that many critics have pointed out over the years: namely that there exists a persistent myth of Japanese culture stemming from a unique, “harmonious,” relationship to the natural world, in spite of serious environmental degradation and resource extraction that stretches back centuries. How can both of these things be true? How have artists helped to promote a certain relationship with nature that may hide darker histories of violence against the natural world? I think the environmental humanities help us better understand these kinds of questions.  READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Aneesa Abbas Higgins

August 26, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Moore

Fear makes fools of us all—I believe passionately in the power of literature and books to help break down the barriers that divide us.

According to the Index Translationum, a database published by UNESCO, texts written originally in French are the second most frequently translated, with over two hundred thousand titles published since 1979. Though the numbers exhibit a disappointing hierarchy, the fact that French occupies such a large presence is unsurprising; after all, as today’s interviewee, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, informs us: “French is a world language.” Spoken in diasporic populations around the world, the French of today is a linguistic carrier of resistance and individualism just as it once was a language of oppression.

Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated numerous works from the French, including Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Jacaranda, 2017) and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 2020). In her efforts to represent a variety of original French voices, her contributions to English-language readers have been invaluable. Now, in our second feature for Women in Translation Month, blog editor Sarah Moore speaks to Higgins about her most recent translation, All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Penguin, 2020), how French female authors are represented in translations, and the challenges of translating today.

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Sarah Moore (SM): You translate from the French into English—could you talk about your relationship with French and how you learned it?

Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): I started it at school at the age of eleven—I’ve always loved languages, and I added German, Latin, and Russian over the next few years. I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Spanish and made a real effort to learn Urdu; I even tried Japanese at one point. But French was the one that really stayed with me, and I’ve spent a good part of my life going back and forth between London and various parts of France. I did my MA in French and taught French at an American school in London for more than thirty years, so I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in French language and literature in one way or another. Learning another language is a lifelong project, and I think of myself as still learning. As a translator, one learns more and more about one’s source and target languages all the time.

SM: How did you come to be a translator?

AAH: Translating was something I’d always thought about. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life and have vivid childhood memories of my father, an Urdu speaker who was working on translating Shakespeare at the time, talking about the endless challenges of conveying such rich, figurative language. I’ve been a reader all my life, and have also always loved to write. So when I decided to retire early from teaching, it seemed like a natural progression. I took some courses in translation and creative writing, sought advice from the wonderfully generous and supportive translation community, and set about researching, translating samples, and pitching books I wanted to translate to publishers. I was lucky enough to find a publisher and obtain a PEN grant for one of those books, and I went on from there.

SM: Which books did you initially want to translate when you began your career?

AAH: Looking back, I was definitely looking mostly at female authors, but I was primarily interested in works that originated beyond the confines of mainstream metropolitan France. French is a world language, just as English is. There are many, many authors who write in French and whose relationship with the language is complex. French, the language of the colonial oppressors, becomes the vehicle for voicing anti-colonial sentiment and raising black consciousness worldwide, in the same way as English has been used by writers from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. I wanted to help bring more of those voices, the inheritors of the original mantle of the Négritude of Senghor and Césaire, into English. And for me, it’s personal. I’ve always been drawn to writers and books that express what it means, and what it feels like, to be both an insider and an outsider in the society one lives in. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part I)

February 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work . . . but this was something survivable.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.

Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?

Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2019

December 16, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

Our selected works of translation this month touch on the eternal themes of narrative, identity, and the poet's voice.

It has been a wonderful year of covering, dear reader, the most fascinating translated works of world literature. Today, we are back with three more varied and exceptional books. Below, find reviews of a discursive and genre-bending Korean work, a powerful Uzbek novel that traverses existential questions of migration and hybridity, and the intimately potent lines of a young Argentine poetess. 

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Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Yewon Jung, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2019

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

To Jung Young Moon, the author of Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, meaninglessness is a more accurate portrayal of reality than contrived narratives. Continuing the fascination of Vaseline Buddha, one of his earlier novels which delves into the mind of an insomniac writer, Moon experiments with how the novel as a genre may go beyond the typical constituents of character, plot, and structure, and whether or not readers are able to find enjoyment in navigating largely banal thoughts and experiences. 

Set in Texas, where Moon did a residency in 2017 (specifically, in Corsicana, which he refers to as “C, a small town near Dallas”), Seven Samurai culminated from his desire to write about the state. But Moon does not know much about Texas, nor does he pretend to do so. Meandering through a list of stereotypes, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to cowboys to the disdain for adding beans to chilli, Moon does not so much feature Texas as a place of interest, but rather as a springboard for his endless ruminations that find beginnings in almost anything, but that ultimately lead nowhere. READ MORE…

Olga Tokarczuk and Polish Literature’s Home Army

November 4, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Cynthia Gralla

Poland has been using art to revitalize—or reform—its postwar image.

“I and motherland are one. My name is Million, because for millions do I love and suffer agonies.” Adam Mickiewicz’s words from his dramatic cycle Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) are indicative of Poland’s long tradition of voicing resistance and examining its national identity through literature. Last month, acclaimed Polish writer and past Asymptote contributor Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, and yet has also outraged many conservatives in her own country. In this essay, Cynthia Gralla takes us through the history of resistance in Polish literature in the twentieth century, before examining Tokarczuk’s own challenge, defiance, and her place in such a history.

The past hundred years in Polish literature have been, by one reading, a history of resistance through weaponized words.

Poland has made resistance an art. Born into a Polish-American family, I have heard tales of my relatives’ wartime resistance work since childhood. Between 2012 and 2014, I lived in Lublin, Poland, conducting research into their activities during Nazi occupation with the help of a Fulbright grant. My relatives served as ski couriers in what eventually became known, in 1942, as the Armia Krajowa—literally “the Home Army.” Before that, it was called Związek Walki Zbrojnej, or “the Union of Armed Struggle”, and the Służba Zwycięstwu Polski, or “Polish Victory Service”. The name mattered little; all were incarnations of the Polish Resistance, the heart of a national body so conditioned by the vicissitudes of history and occupation that it began beating again as soon as Germany invaded. It also beat steadily throughout the nineteenth-century partitioning of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, in the classrooms of that century’s “flying university” (which educated luminaries like Marie Salomea Skłodowska, also known as Marie Curie, when teaching youth in Polish was forbidden,) and during the parched years of Communism. READ MORE…

Co-Translation Across Borders: An Interview with Rachel McNicholl and Sinéad Crowe

May 23, 2019  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Rachel McNicholl, and Sinéad Crowe

As in all good tales and legends, Jarawan’s own narrative style is full of recurring motifs, imagery, and phrases.

How did the co-translators of Pierre Jarawan’s The Storyteller work together to craft a polished final draft—while living in two different countries? In this interview, Rachel McNicholl and Sinéad Crowe, the translators of this month’s Asymptote Book Club selection, tell us about the ups and downs of their long-distance collaboration.

They also discuss how The Storyteller, a novel about a young man born in Germany to Lebanese parents, blends twenty-first century issues of migration and displacement with the ancient Arabic tradition of oral storytelling. Read on for more about the novel’s “central themes of rootlessness, the search for a sense of home and identity, family secrets, and the relationship between fathers and sons.”

Lindsay Semel (LS): Tell me about the experience of collaborating on the translation of a novel. You’ve said in a previous interview that you translated The Storyteller in alternating sections and then underwent an intensive revision process to come to a seamless final draft. Were there any passages that you interpreted differently?

Rachel McNicholl (RMcN): As with most translations, there were some details and nuances that we needed to check with the author. Occasionally, when reviewing each other’s chapters, Sinéad and I realised that we were visualising something slightly differently, even though we’d read the same German text. For example, how exactly the river Berdawni carves up the city of Zahle (in Part II, ch. 5). We consulted online maps and satellite images, of course, but being able to check with the author is even better!

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Erri De Luca

April 16, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Matilda Colarossi

We pave roads, shovel snow, / smooth lawns, beat carpets, / gather tomatoes and insults, / we are the feet and know every inch of the land.

In this Translation Tuesday, Italian poet Erri De Luca reflects on the Mediterranean migrant crisis and movement across borders, seas, and languages. From desert crossings and the “thrashing of dust in columns” to exploitation in the first world, De Luca poignantly evokes the struggles faced by the newest Europeans.

 

Six voices

It was not the sea that welcomed us
we welcomed the sea with open arms.

Descending from highlands burnt by war and not the sun
we crossed the desert of the Tropic of Cancer.

When from a high ground we were able to view the sea
it was a finish line, a caress of waves at our feet.

Ending there was Africa, the under-sole of ants,
from them caravans had learned to tread.

Under the thrashing of dust in columns
the first man alone is required to raise his eyes.

The others follow the heel that precedes them,
the voyage on foot is a trail of backs.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

April 12, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Nina Perrotta, and Ruba Abughaida

On our itinerary are independent bookstores in Boston, a bistro on the Tripoli port, and the curious outskirts of Paris.

This week, we’ve come across a spoil of literary riches! Big international names come to show in eastern USA, cultural collectives take full advantage of the historic wonders of Lebanon, and, in France, the académie Goncourt is always up to something. Our editors at the front are here to share the treasures.

Nina Perrotta, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the USA:

New York may be the undisputed publishing capital of the US, but the nearby city of Boston, just a few hours away by car, is also home to a thriving literary scene. Birthplace of the 19th century American Transcendentalism movement (notable members include Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott), Boston boasts one of the country’s richest literary traditions, and it remains a hub for writers and independent booksellers today.

Early last year, one of the city’s most prominent bookstores, the Brookline Booksmith, launched the Transnational Literature Series in partnership with Words Without Borders and the Forum Network. The series “focuses on books concerned with migration, displacement, and exile, with particular emphasis on works in translation,” and hosts conversations between writers and their translators. Previous Transnational Literature Series events have featured Ivana Bodrožić with translator Ellen Elias-Bursać, Olga Tokarczuk with translator Jennifer Croft, and Luljeta Lleshanaku with translator Ani Gjika.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

February 1, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Chloe Lim, MARGENTO, and Maria Snyder

In this week’s dispatches, literary highlights from Romania, Singapore, and the United States!

This week, join three Asymptote staff members as they report the latest in literary news from around the world. From the legacy of Romanian poet Emil Brumaru, to new releases of poetry, literary competitions, and the Iowa City Book Festival, there’s plenty to catch up and reflect on.

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, reporting from Romania and Moldova

The most resounding recent piece of literary news in Romania is the passing of poet Emil Brumaru (born eighty years ago in Bessarabia, present-day Republic of Moldova), one of the greatest Romanian poets of the past fifty years. Superlative eulogies have inundated literary magazines and wide circulation newspapers alike, foregrounding both the vastness and the subtlety of the oeuvre, while also deploring the disappearance of a widely popular presence prolifically active in literary publications and even social media. Brumaru’s obsessively erotic verse, ranging from the profane and the pornographic to the angelic and the (still physically) mystical, comports a richness of nuances and a chameleonic craftsmanship that perhaps explain why such a huge voice remains for now largely unknown to the English-speaking world, except for a handful of poems translated in a couple of anthologies, graduate theses, or casual blogs.

While women are arguably the only—inextinguishable, nonetheless—subject of Brumaru’s poetry, women writers themselves are taking centre stage in Romanian letters as well. The first edition of the Sofia Nădejde literary awards—curated by poet and radio show host Elena Vlădăreanu—was in that respect a remarkable milestone. While doing justice to novels or collections by established writers such as Gabriela Adameșteanu and widely known young poets and critics like Teodora Coman, the judges also picked for the debut collection award a release significantly titled Kommos. A Hysterectomy Procession by Iuliana Lungu, an up-and-coming poet who has already won support and even accolades from living legends such as Angela Marinescu and Nora Iuga.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 25, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jonathan Egid, Lara Norgaard, and Nestor Gomez

From doublespeak in São Paulo and migrant caravans in El Salvador to a very British dystopia, catch up on the latest in world literature!

We’re back this week with dispatches from three countries where literature and politics have been interacting in unexpected ways: Brazil, El Salvador, and the UK. In response to the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Central American migration to the US, and the Brexit negotiations, museums and literary communities in these countries have been producing thoughtful exhibitions, fiction, and criticism that reflect on national identity and uncertain political futures. 

Lara Norgaard, Editor-at-Large for Brazil, reporting from Brazil

It is hot and humid in Brazil, and long summer days provide opportunities for new authors and space for reflection about writing as political resistance. Early career authors have an opportunity to submit their work for the SESC Prize for Literature, which is open for submissions from January 9 through February 14, when unpublished authors can submit their manuscripts; the Record Publishing Group will release winning texts.

For Brazilian writers interested in producing their own literature beyond the traditional market, 2019 also offers new opportunities. Graphic artist Rodrigo Okuyama hosts a series of free workshops on zine-making at the Centro Cultural São Paulo. On Saturdays from January 12-26, participants can learn about format, illustration techniques, and how to marry narrative content with visual form. These workshops allow new voices to join a growing independent publishing scene in Brazil, where small collectives like PANTIM work at the intersection of literature and the visual arts. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 18, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Diána Vonnák, Jacqueline Leung, and Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Your weekly literary news from around the world, all in one convenient package.

Awards, new translations, and a poet working to help the homeless—all this and more awaits in today’s dispatches! From Hong Kong, Hungary, and Indonesia, our editors-at-large have the latest updates.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, reporting from Hong Kong

In the last few months of 2018, Hong Kong saw the deaths of several literary greats, but with January comes commemoration and activity. Martial arts novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung, or “Jin Yong,” passed away on October 30, 2018, just half a year after the publication of Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born, the English translation of one of his emblematic wuxia series set during the Song Dynasty. A Bond Undone, the second volume of the quartet, will be published at the end of this month in Gigi Chang’s translation. Its release is likely to gain even more traction in the aftermath of the writer’s passing.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2018

October 22, 2018  |  in News  |  by Chloe Lim, Jonathan Egid, and Nina Perrotta

To give you a taste of the Fall 2018 issue, the blog editors share their favorite pieces from Russian, Catalan, and Vietnamese.

Today, we share our favorite pieces from the Fall 2018 issue, released just four days ago, highlighting the diversity of cultures, languages, and literary styles represented. Chloe Lim, writing from Singapore, is joined today by two new blog editors as of last week: Jonathan Egid and Nina Perrotta, writing from the UK and Brazil respectively. Happy reading! 

From the visceral, violent power of José Revueltas’ The Hole to the lyricism of Osama Alomar’s “Nuclear Bomb” and the schizoid voices of George Prevedourakis’ Kleftiko, our Fall 2018 edition plays host to a typically broad variety of styles, forms, and languages. A piece that particularly caught my eye was “Epilogue,” a quiet, sombre short story by Irina Odoevtsova about two Russian émigrées in Nice, their separation and their separate fates.

The story follows the unhappy existence of Tatiana and Sergei, initially as poor migrants surrounded by the Anglo-American holidaying elite of the Riviera, through Sergei’s uncertain departure and Tatiana’s newfound wealth to a tragic conclusion, with much of the story being told through short, terse conversations between Tatiana and Sergei, Tatiana and her new lover and (more frequently) Tatiana and herself. The restrained, even sparse dialogue and plain prose nevertheless creates touching, vivid and tragic characters in strikingly limited space, conveying to us the tragic story of a woman struggling to understand her dreams and desires, and the tragic consequences that come from her acting upon those confused and conflicting desires.

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