Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 26, 2022 | in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup | by Carol Khoury, Nestor Gomez, and Peera Songkünnatham

The latest literary news from El Salvador, Thailand, and Palestine!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a new poetry anthology promoting peaceful coexistence in El Salvador, new translations of Arab women authors, and discussions of magical realism and the Isaan dialect surrounding the Thai winner of a grant from English PEN. Read on to find out more!

Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador

On August 5, Otoniel Guevara presented a new anthology titled Peace Isn’t Achieved Just With Desire at the Casa Morazán in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In the anthology’s prologue, Guevara describes the project as a compilation of poems in defense of human rights, peaceful coexistence, and respect for life on the planet. He also characterized the anthology as a criticism of regimes that promote fanaticism, hatred, lies, totalitarianism, and disrespect for life in all its manifestations.

Inspiration for this project began several years ago when, in Guevara’s words, “a new religion was maturing in El Salvador, encouraged by a surge in journalism for sensationalism and blatant fake news in support of political projects empty of content, but rich in images and superficial concessions, especially to the youth. This populism, packaged to preserve and strengthen ignorance and ahistoricism, was rapidly coating a layer of corrosive mold: fanaticism.” Publication of the anthology was delayed because of the pandemic and the love affair that many Salvadorans established with the current ruler of El Salvador. However, supporters of the project continued to grow among friends and cohorts.

Translating Past Into Future: Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada on Dialect Storytelling in Northeastern Japan

January 5, 2022 | in Interviews | by Mary Hillis

No matter how different the languages are, there are similar emotions.

In their work introducing the rich tradition of oral storytelling in the Tsugaru dialect, Joshua Lee Solomon and Megumi Tada of Hirosaki University are moving beyond traditional geographic and linguistic boundaries. Having translated the unique folklore of northeastern Japan from its local vernacular into English, they’ve also facilitated a workshop combining English language education and studies of the region. In the workshop, students learned to perform the tales under the guidance of master storytellers from the preservation society Wa no mukashi-ko, and eventually performed in English alongside the storytellers performing in dialect. We discussed, via Zoom, the interrelated areas of translation, cultural preservation, and language education. Listening to their retellings of favorite folktales, I experienced firsthand how the emotions of storytelling—nostalgia, laughter, heartache—transcend space and time.

Mary Hillis (MH): Could you give some background information about the local Japanese dialect in Tsugaru?

Joshua Lee Solomon (JS): There is a lingering perception that the Tsugaru dialect is used by uneducated or somehow uncivilized people, and this is connected to a long history of prejudice against the poorer regions in northeastern Japan. The Tsugaru region was historically isolated for a very long time by mountains and its relative distance from the political and economic centers of the country, so it’s a repository of very old Japanese words.

One of my favorite examples of this is the word in the Tsugaru dialect of “udade.” Depending on the age of the person you’re talking to, they might say this word only means something really bad or uncomfortable, whereas young people are more likely to use it meaning cool and good—the same way you use “yabai” in contemporary standard Japanese (like certain expletives in English used in either positive or negative connotations). But actually, I think this word comes from the Manyoshu, which is an ancient collection of poetry. In the text, there’s the word “utate” and that word is an intensifier—meaning “extreme” or “very much.” In this way, there are older Japanese words that are kept in the current language.

Translating le multilinguisme

June 11, 2018 | in Essays | by Claire Jacobson

Translation is never a horizontal movement; there is always an uneven power dynamic between two languages.

Mektoub. Taleb. Mesquin. Cheb. Bezef. Each of these French words is also Arabic, albeit represented in French orthography. Through long proximity by colonization and immigration, Arabic influence has bled—at some moments more overtly than others—into the French language, and Azouz Begag’s 1986 autobiographical novel Le gone du Chaâba engages with this reality in each word choice and every line of dialogue.

The son of an Algerian migrant worker who settled permanently in France in 1949, not long before the brutal war for independence began, Begag employs a remarkable mixture of French, spoken Arabic, and Lyonnais slang to illustrate the linguistic realities of his community—something that poses problems for a translator who wants to retain its linguistic flavor without rendering the text totally opaque. Written in the eighties, the book and its projet linguistique is perhaps even more relevant at a time when so many Westerners think the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar” is exclusively synonymous with terrorism.