Posts featuring Gabriel García Márquez

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Colombia!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us news on the most recent bestsellers in the Philippines, the translation of board games in Bulgaria, and the posthumous publication of García Márquez’s final novel in Colombia. From Wattpad-homegrown Filipino authors to the politics of posthumous publication, read on to learn more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines 

The memoir of Korean mega boy band BTS (both its English and Filipino translations) and the novel Queen of the Universe (Tuttle Publishing, 2023) by 2015 Miss Universe titlist Filipino beauty queen Pia Wurtzbach have triumphed over the early 2024 bestsellers list as gazetted by the National Book Store (NBS), the Philippines’ largest chain of commercial bookshops. 

A source of the so-called ‘Pinoy Pride’ from said list are The New York Times chart-topping debut fantasy novel by Thea Guanzon, The Hurricane Wars (Harper Voyager, 2023); journalist and historian Ambeth Ocampo’s Cabinet of Curiosities: History from Philippine Artifacts (published last year by Anvil, NBS’s sister company); and Panda Book Awards-shortlisted Gail Villanueva’s Lulu Sinagtala and the City of Noble Warriors (HarperCollins, 2024), a children’s book imbued with ancient Tagalog mythological lore—all testaments that Filipinos read books written by Filipino authors. 

Populating the local fiction hits are Wattpad-homegrown Filipino genre fictionists, their works ranging from new adult to romance, from chick lit to fantasy—among others, Gwy Saludes’ The Rain in España (which has since been adapted into a popularised Viva One web series) and Safe Skies, Archer, both released last year by Precious Pages under Saludes’ penname 4Reuminct; Disney Panganiban’s Zombie University 3 (Lifebooks, 2023); and No Perfect Prince (Majesty Press, 2023) by Jonahmae Pacala or Jonaxx, dubbed as the country’s ‘Pop Fiction Queen’ and the most celebrated contemporary writer from my hometown.  READ MORE…

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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Principle of Decision: Translation from Swahili

. . . the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version . . . How [to] transfer the same to the English version?

This edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—provides a look at how translators render the subtleties of a poem with multiple layers of meaning in a new language. This round, Asymptote contributor Wambua Muindi leads our Swahili edition of the column.

Ken Walibora’s Kufa Kuzikana was originally published in 2003 and just clocked two decades since publication. For this edition of Principle of Decision, I chose the first two paragraphs of Walibora’s novel partly to celebrate it but also to appreciate the story it follows in the context of what occupied the first half of 2023 in Kenya—the cycle of anti-government and cost-of-living protests, the ensuing police brutality, and the ethnic targeting and profiling.

I also found these paragraphs appropriate here given that introductions are always novel and always set the tone for a story. In this case not only do the two paragraphs borrow the geography of Kiwachema, the fictional country the novel is set in, they also illustrate the constant movement and consequent contact that is the backdrop against which Walibora animates post-colonial Kenya. The friendship between Akida and Tim—the novel’s main characters—becomes a fable for the nation and demonstrates the exclusionary logic of national politics despite the promise of nation-building. 

I wanted to see what different translators’ English renditions of the novel’s opening lines would sound and feel like. Of particular interest was the auditory and visual imagery that gather as you read the Swahili version, and the way these sentences introduce the tone of the narration. How does a translator transfer the same to the English version?  This is also a question many of the translators asked themselves. Phrases like ‘dhahiri shahiri’ and ‘miinamo ya vilima’ which embody the particularity of Swahili sounds, posed an interesting challenge. The particularity with which the translators supply the tonality of Swahili is fascinating. Take for instance the last word: It is translated differently by each of the translators below, showing the different interpretations given and techniques employed in English translation.

—Wambua Muindi

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Dispatches from the Philippines, Croatia, and the Romanian diaspora!

In this week’s literary roundup from around the world, people in the literary community are both paying tribute to celebrated icons and paving paths for contemporary voices. From the Romanian diaspora, an exciting new publication threads the past and present, adding to an incredible legacy of literary journals. In the Philippines, book fairs are highlighting minority languages and independent publishers. In Croatia, new literary projects orient their local communities around the act of reading and writing, as well as making intellectual space to consider the role of the political novel. 

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting for the Romanian diaspora

One of the most significant recent events involving the Romanian diaspora was the debut release of the literary journal Littera Nova in Madrid, Spain, earlier this week. With an impressive range of established and emerging writers contributing literature both in original languages and in translation, alongside essays and criticism, the journal confidently joins a rich market as well as a solid and long-standing tradition. As the founding director Eugen Barz states in his prefatory note,  previous frontrunners in the literary journal landscape include post-WWII Romanian periodicals published in metropoles as diverse as Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Honolulu, and edited by legends such as Mircea Eliade, Alexandru Busuioceanu, George UscatescuStefan Baciu, Vintila Horia, and many others.

In the wake of iconic late-Romantic/early-modernist Eminescu’s 173rd birthday, the issue also includes a significant number of remarkable texts referring to the great classic: an erudite and incisive essay from Asymptote past contributor Felix Nicolau drawing parallels between Eminescu and both Shakespeare and Dimitrie Cantemir; poems translated into English by K.V. Twain; and a selection from the poet’s correspondence by Ovidiu Pecican. The journal deftly balances criticism and creative writing/translation, featuring classic modernists such as Lucian Blaga and Ion Pillat (translated into Italian by Stefan Damian and Bruno Rombi, and into French by Gabrielle Danoux), and Surrealist master—and past Asymptote contributor—Gellu Naum (in English translation from Nicoleta Craete), amongst others.

The Romanian diaspora continues to contribute significant texts and translations in platforms all around the world; for example, Asymptote contributor Diana Manole has recently had one of her plays featured in EastWest Literary Forum, released a collection of new and selected poems by revered Nora Iuga (co-translated with Adam J. Sorkin), and is gearing up for the release of her own forthcoming poetry collection in Canada. Also, major diasporic poet, novelist, and critic O. Nimigean, whose rare social media posts are at times almost as impactful as his best-selling books, reasserted on Facebook the continued relevance of the late paradigmatic fiction writer and anti-Ceaușescu militant Paul Goma (himself an epitome of both domestic and exilic heroic resistance), particularly as reflected by Flori Balanescu’s recent books on the subject. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2023

. . . di Giorgio, standing in front of the rosebush, flicks the switch on, invites us to see.

Asymptote’s Winter 2023 Edition is out, showcasing literature from thirty-four countries and fifteen languages! Marking our twelfth year in world literature, this issue is headlined by César Aira, Geetanjali Shree, and César Vallejo. Here, blog editors Xiao Yue Shan, Meghan Racklin, and Bella Creel introduce their highlights from the issue, from an explosive, violent garden, to a perverse love story and vengeful doll, to a piece of criticism that reads more as art than review. 

In a short eulogy for the brilliant, transportive Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez recounts a brief visit he once paid her in Barcelona, around a decade before her death. Slightly taken aback by her impeccable resemblance to her characters, namely in what she had described as her “innocence,” the García Márquez intuited that Rodoreda, like the people she had raised to such stark emotional reality, had a penchant for growing flowers. “We spoke about [gardening], which I consider another form of writing,” he recounts, “and between our discussion of roses . . . I tried to talk to her about her books.”

The botanic, as both these great writers knew, is transportive. There is nothing so beguiling as the language of flowers—their ancient names, colour, perfume, their mystic properties and secret variety; we know this, because the writers before us had long known it, just as the writers before them had known it, and on and on backwards, ever since the first poets looked at the world in bloom, and saw in it an opening to the sublime. Over and over, we’ve harvested from the natural world to give our poems tint and fragrance, to purple our prose and frame our visions, and in the same way that soil can be exhausted, the power of this invocation has since waned through countless verses. The challenge to the text now, when evoking landscape, is what García Márquez knew: the writer cannot simply pick the flowers—she must grow them herself.

In Marosa di Giorgio’s excerpt from The Moth, the garden is explosive. Translated with a musical ear by Sarah María Medina, the prose poems luxuriate in their sheer volume of lush imagery, of ripe fruit and their rainbow palette, bacchanalian sweetness and insatiable appetite. Di Giorgio has always been an exceptionally visual writer, with her prodigious use of images inspiring comparison to the works of Bosch and Dalí—and here her painterly instincts are once again ravishing. In broad strokes a feast is spread before us, peaches and dates and syrup, as her image-language fills the lines with taste and spectacle. She once said that “only the poet knows what colour to give each word . . . In The Moth, I paint myself as a reciter who interprets in front of the rosebush.” 

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Death, Hope, and Humor: David Unger on Translating Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden.

In 1946, Nobel Prize laureate and Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias published his magnum opus, El señor presidente, which would become one of the boldest and most inventive works of Latin American literature, an important predecessor for literary giants including Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolaño. However, the text remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. In this intimate and revelatory interview, Editor-at-Large José Garcia Escobar speaks with Guatemalan American author and translator David Unger on the complexities of translating Asturias’s great work into English, balancing authenticity and readability, and its political and artistic legacy.

In 2015, I was living in New York and often got together with the Guatemalan-American writer David Unger. A year prior, he had won the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize (Guatemala’s highest literary honor), and his novel The Mastermind (Akashic Books) had just come out.

We met every other month, more or less.

We would go to Home Sweet Harlem, on the corner of Amsterdam and 136th, or Chinelos, a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, and talk about books, translation, and life.

He told me he was flattered that Cristina García had agreed to blurb The Mastermind. He told me of the time he met and had a strong disagreement with Nicanor Parra. When Parra died in 2018, David wrote a piece for The Paris Review. He told me to go see Andrés Neuman at McNally Jackson and read more of his work. Then one day, as we walked back to his office at City College, he said, “I’m translating El señor presidente.

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Ambrosial Wafts: An Interview with A.J. Naddaff

I believe literature is the conduit to the deepest understanding of society.

The first time I corresponded with A.J. Naddaff was after I had read an early issue of his excellent newsletter Untranslatable, devoted to extensive conversations with Arabic-to-English literary translators about their craft. Startled by the sharpness, intimacy, and candour of each interview, I emailed him merely to convey my appreciation for the work he was doing and how fortuitous it seemed to me that he had begun this initiative at the time that I found myself falling in love with the limitless depths of classical Arabic literature. He wrote back, expressing genuine curiosity about my interests, saying: “Connecting with people who share this love makes the world feel a bit smaller and kinder.” That told me all I needed to know about how A.J. makes space for his interlocutors to arrive at such acute insights as “Every poem is a linguistic event which reimagines its entire tradition” (Huda Fakhreddine) and “That joy and pleasure of someone having it on with you is the very pleasure of literature. You know it and yet you still fall for it” (Maurice Pomerantz).

Besides being a gracious person and a master’s student in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, A.J. wears many other hats: he is an award-winning multimedia journalist, translator, and social science researcher. He’s met and reported on people of diverse stripes, from Sufi intellectuals to ISIS extremists, co-translated Hassan Samy Youssef’s Threshold of Pain with Rebecca Joubin and Nick Lobo, and is currently working on a thesis regarding the translation of the pre-Islamic mu’allaqat into English. I was excited to encounter someone with his feelers in so many different worlds and to hear his meditations on the translatability of Arabic literature, the meanings of home, the in-betweenness of negotiating both the journalistic and the literary, and the state of contemporary Lebanese art in the aftermath of trauma.

Alex Tan (AT): In one of the first issues of your Untranslatable newsletter, you quote the brilliant Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who wrote of how in the classical Arabic literary tradition, the ancients “endeavoured to make their works untranslatable.” What does untranslatability signify in classical Arabic literature? Why did you decide to name your newsletter after a quality that appears to defy the possibility of translation?

A.J. Naddaff (AJN): In my opinion, and this is up for debate, the idea of untranslatability is the wrong framing for understanding tensions that exist when translating Arabic. Alexander Key has proposed that the idea of untranslatability is a modern idea—that the ancients thought mental content (maʿnā) was always transferable between languages, from Persian to Arabic. So untranslatability was birthed out of early modern European notions, and we should push ourselves—as many translators are doing—to reimagine limits when translating Arabic into English.

Shawkat Toorawa takes it even further and believes that it’s possible to translate something sublime, like the Qur’an, into another language and to still convey the cadence, movement, and the beauty of the original, which I’m totally on board with.

AT: Most of the scholars you’ve chosen to interview so far are translators of pre-modern Arabic literature and contributors to the NYU Library of Arabic Literature series. I’d like to ask about your thoughts on the relationship between the pre-modern and the modern in Arabic writing. You work on the Mu’allaqat (hanging odes), but you’re also interested in contemporary Levantine literary production. How do you position yourself between these two worlds? Does your knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms haunt your approach to the modern?

AJN: Coming into my master’s at the American University of Beirut, I carried this notion that bifurcated “old” or classical Arabic literature from “modern.” I remember distinctly telling my teacher Bilal Orfali that I was excited to read old Arabic literature and he politely cut me off and encouraged me to think of literature more as a continuum. I think this is probably how we should think of literature in all traditions, but especially in Arabic.

So now, I position one foot in each world with no problem. I’m not haunted by my knowledge of pre-modern genres and forms besides by how little I know. Salim Barakat, one of the most celebrated modern Arabic authors, claims he only reads pre-modern works. Rachid el Daif’s novels are full of references to “pre-modern” literature: One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyei, the Kitab al-Aghani, al-Jahiz, Majnun and Layla, and Pre-Islamic (Jahili) poetry all make appearances. Mahmoud Darwish has a famous poem where he draws on elements from the sixth century poet-king Imru’ al-Qays’s final trip to Constantinople to allegorically critique the Oslo Accords. As T.S. Eliot said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

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Realizing the Myriad Possibilities of the Text: An Interview with Arunava Sinha

This is the truth of the world, that we live in various languages and not just one.

Arunava Sinha is a Delhi-based translator literary translator who works from Bengali to English and English to Bengali. He is the winner of the Crossword Book Award for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), and sixty-six of his translations have been published so far, including a collection of Modern Bengali Poetry, novels by acclaimed writers such as Buddhadeva Bose and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, and a collection of Bengali short stories. He teaches in the creative writing department at Ashoka University and works as the books editor at Scroll.in.

I met him for the first time in 2019, when I worked as his teaching assistant. In a small class of six students, translating out of Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali, we worked on hearing the voice of a book and how to articulate it in a different language.

In this Zoom conversation, Sinha talks about translating Khwabnama by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, the questions he receives in his literary translation classes, and the publishing industry in India.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for many years. In your latest interview with Forbes, you said you developed an interest in literary translation after realizing that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was a translation. Can you talk about your journey so far?

Arunava Sinha (AS): It began as an interest in college. I was an English literature student, and as you said, it struck me that these words we’re marveling over when we’re reading Garcia Marquez are really written by somebody else. I wanted to know what writing those words might be like. And of course, it immediately showed me that translation is completely different from what we assume it is. It’s all that is not said but that you are hearing at the back of your head. It is so little about the dictionary meaning because that’s the most easily solved problem. That is what makes a text so rich and what makes translation so interesting.

I had forgotten about translation because I moved to Delhi and switched jobs. It wasn’t until an editor at Penguin called me, asking me about Sankar’s Chowringhee that I rekindled my journey. And it was just at the right age for a midlife crisis, too!

SP: What kind of books did you begin with translating?

AS: I started with the canon, partly because there were not too many translations of the best-known books from Bangla at the time. There were a number of English publishers, and they were hungry for books to publish and there were not enough writers in English. So, it was quite a happy combination of circumstances. There was plenty of variety in the writing in the canon, but if you really step back and look at the big picture, it represented just one segment of possible writing in Bangla. That is what led me to start looking for texts with more diversity, both in terms of the content and the writer. People who wrote regularly did with a certain kind of lucidity which I think was market-facing even if they didn’t tell themselves so. But their books were written to be read by large numbers of people. They adopted a certain lucid idiom. Their art lay in playing with lucidity, but they never became obscure except for some experimental writers. When the field widened and I had other types of books to look for, they were not as bothered about the market. And they wrote in much stronger, much more literary—by literary I don’t mean high literary—but much more of an idiom that only literature can accept and accommodate. This of course has also made translation a more complicated but invigorating task. As you do more of the same thing, you want your challenges to get bigger.

It was partly this that led me to the text, until now, I think was the toughest to translate, which is Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama, which is daunting not just because of the actual language but also because you immediately realize the quality of that book and you are terrified that you will not be able to preserve it in the translated version. I think this was the biggest concern for me. I’m still not sure if it has worked or not. And I don’t think I ever will be. When you’re translating, your real challenge is the language, it’s not the literature. At that point, you’re not thinking of the literature, you’re just thinking of how to get a sentence across. Miraculously, somehow if you do it right, then all the pieces fall into place.

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Emma Bovary’s Adventures in Saigon, Part II

Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese translation of Flaubert’s classic complicates perceptions of domestication and foreignization.

This is the second in a two-part series that explores the mixed translation effects of foreignization and domestication, as illustrated by Hoàng Hải Thủy’s 1973 Vietnamese adaptation of Madame Bovary. Read the first part here.

Note: The below version has been revised to reflect important corrections. Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical framework, as reflected in the revised essay, does acknowledge the subaltern’s perspective and show that domestication and foreignization encompass both discursive approaches and their multifaceted effects.

Since the earlier version did not fairly reflect the full implications of Mr. Venuti’s work, the author owes Mr. Venuti an apology and would like to thank him for his forbearance and collegial support.

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Hoàng Hải Thủy’s adaptation showcases his wit, creativity, and lyricism. In Người Vợ Ngoại Tình, Charles Bovary becomes Trần văn Bô, an inspired choice since the name represents both a phonetic and metaphorical rendering (although by Vietnamese convention Trần would be his family name and Bô his given name). is a round, onomatopoeic sound that in Vietnamese evokes a chamber pot, and an idiot’s babbles.

Hoàng Hải Thủy changes Emma’s name to Ánh—which means “shadow,” “reflection,” and “refracted light” in Vietnamese. This domesticating approach nevertheless reflects Hoàng Hải Thủy’s concise and elegant understanding of Emma Bovary. In Flaubert’s original context, mirrors and windows are employed to accentuate Emma’s outsider status—she’s a reflected image, being gazed at by her solipsism, by other men. She is elusive, insubstantial, but also transcendent.

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A Linguistic Emigration: Chinese Women Writers on Their Translation Practices

You want to learn a language not only to fit in, but to create something new in it, like any native speaker would do.

Recently, I came across an interesting comment, that despite the fact that more POC writers are being published, the English publishing world will not actually become more diverse, as the editors and gatekeepers who select them for publication continue to be predominantly white.

Asian writers have perhaps heard similar feedback from their editors: “Your story is not Asian enough,” or: “Why don’t you write more about your family’s immigration stories?” Sometimes the endeavors of white editors to market POC writers may in fact reinforce stereotypes. The same could be said for translations: if the translators of foreign literature continue to be exclusively white, native English speakers, then English readers would likely continue to receive material that reinforces their expectations, rather than that which may broaden their perspectives.

The word translation is rooted in the Latin translātus (to carry over); it’s always about appropriation and transition, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about how we can strive for a more inclusive and dynamic future in publishing—trusting and bringing in more POC translators to deliver English translations may be one solution.

Jianan Qian, Na Zhong, and Liuyu Ivy Chen are all millennial Chinese female writers who have received higher education in both China and the US. They write bilingually and translate between their two languages, having already introduced several talented contemporary Chinese experimental writers and young female authors to the English world. Their work has been tremendous thus far, and one expects their futures to be even greater.

                                                                                          —Jiaoyang Li, July 2020

Jiaoyang Li (JL): All of you were writers before becoming translators. What is the relationship between writing and translation for you? Is translation a kind of creative writing?

Jianan Qian (JQ): For me, the purpose of literary translation is twofold. First, the work pushes me to do intensive reading. Usually I choose my own translation projects, so I can take the time to appreciate the author’s writing on a granular level. I also consider translation to be a writing practice—it might be a sort of creative writing, but for me, it is more like an opportunity to see how beauty comes into being differently in the two languages. I work with a wonderful co-translator, Alyssa Asquith, and I always learn a lot about linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural differences from our exchanges.

Na Zhong (NZ): A great translator should think like a writer, and to be a great writer you have to be a great reader. Translation provides the reliable gymnastic exercise for me to maintain, stretch, and become aware of my linguistic muscles. A rich text demands that I pay maximum attention to its diction, syntax, voice, and many other elements of writing. And a carefully chosen word can lead me into the depths of the story that would be impossible to reach if I were only engaging with it as a casual reader.

And yes, translating is a kind of creative writing, as imitation lies at the heart of all art forms. In the most literal sense, translating is rewriting the story in another language. It allows me, the translator, to adopt a voice and way of storytelling that I have never embodied before. The writer creates the characters imaginatively; the translator recreates the implied writer imaginatively.

Liuyu Ivy Chen (LC): For me, writing in my second language is an act of translation; living in a foreign country is a daily work of translation. Reading a new book, meeting strangers, falling in love, visiting an old place, or forgetting about the past are all translations to be enacted or retracted. This distance to cross and reduce is not so much between two languages, but between me and the world. There is so much I don’t understand, and translation is one way to cope with the unknown, to stay open-minded, and to bring seemingly unattainable beauty closer to touch. I read, write, and translate to touch the world. Translation is not only a kind of creative writing; it is a way of living. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in world letters from Beijing, Oklahoma, and the UK.

Three superpowers this week compete for our attention with their respective updates in the realm of national literature. Our editors bring you news this week from the Beijing Literature Summit, the results of the Neustadt Prize in Oklahoma, and the continued fallout of the 2019 Booker Prize award in the UK. Read on to find out more!  

Xiao Yue Shan, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting for China

“Beijing is the country’s literary mecca,” articles enthusiastically parroted this month as the nation’s capital held the 4th Beijing Literature Summit on October 18. Though the multifold of equally rich literary cities in this vast country could dissent, the summit and forum nevertheless overtook headlines as well-established members of the Beijing literati took the stage in the square at Zhengyangmen, the immediate heart of the city. Attendees included preeminent novelists Liang Xiaosheng 梁晓声 and Liu Qingbang 刘庆邦, and the poet Yang Qingxiang 杨庆祥 (a leader of “new scar poetry”), as well as an assembly of Beijing’s foremost scholars, critics, and publishers.

The talks concentrated around three predominant themes: the past, present, and future of Beijing literature. Throughout the seventy years of the People’s Republic of China, literary culture in Beijing remained at the forefront of the country’s social and cultural reality, thereby receiving the most immediate impact from the tumultuous chronology of the country as a whole. In discussing the tremendous weight of history, Liang stated that the past is not overbearing but exists in a continuous exchange with the present. The question is, he said: “How should we use the text to state it?”

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“Guatemala has always produced great writers”: An Interview with Guatemalan Poet and Feminist Ana María Rodas

One day, poetry simply came out of me. One day, I was filled with poetry.

Wearing a thin sweater, a colorful scarf, and a dazzling smile, Ana María welcomed us to her house in Zone 15, Guatemala City. Outside it was pouring, much like when she presented her famed Poemas de la izquierda erótica (Poems from the Erotic Left), forty-six years ago. She offered us tea—“To fight back the cold,” she said, still smiling—and told us we had to do the interview in the living room, not upstairs, because, “There are books scattered everywhere; imagine, a lifetime spent collecting books.” And, yes, one can only imagine.

Ana María Rodas, born in 1937, is a veteran Guatemalan poet, journalist, and teacher. Her career spans more than sixty years. She has released close to twenty books, and her work has been translated into English, German, and Italian. In 1990, she simultaneously won the poetry and short story categories of the Juegos Florales de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe. In 2000, she won the prestigious Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature for her life’s work. She is also one of the leading figures of Guatemalan and Central American feminism. She has lived her whole life in Guatemala. And one cannot say this lightly. She grew up during the Jorge Ubico dictatorship (1931–1944), admired how the Guatemalan Revolution toppled Ubico in 1944, thrived during the so-called Ten Years of Spring, lamented the 1954 CIA-backed coup that removed the democratically elected, progressive president Jacobo Árbenz, and witnessed the atrocities of the Civil War (1960–1996). Many of her friends and colleagues were killed during that time. Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and her dear friend, Luis de Lión, author of El tiempo principia en Xibalbá—considered one of the cornerstones of contemporary Central American literature. Even if she never picked up a rifle or joined the militarized resistance, her feminist struggle and intellectual defiance have influenced many generations.   

She’s not a cynic, though. Or bitter. She’s hopeful. “Even though we have a brute for president,” she says, “I believe in resisting.” And resisting, Ana María has done.

But as much as Ana María is grandmotherly and warm, as much as she’s a jokester and amicable, she is also analytical, astute, and disarmingly agile. She’s a force of nature, a rising tide, and an unmovable object. Her poetry is sensitive, electric, and subversive.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Close-up on Brazil, Guatemala, and Hong Kong in this week's dispatches.

Between the pages of beloved books some sunlight gathers, as writers and readers from the various corners of our world gather to greet, honour, and celebrate one another. Crowds gather in search for literature in Rio de Janeiro, a Guatemalan favourite is shortlisted for a prestigious Neustadt International Award, and genre fiction takes the spotlight in Hong Kong. Travel with us between cobblestone and concrete, as our editors bring you the close-up view on global literary news.

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

One can hardly say it’s been winter here in the state of Rio de Janeiro, with the sun shining over the 17th edition of FLIP, the International Literary Festival of Paraty, from July 10 to 14. The festival—one of the world’s largest, and certainly Brazil’s most anxiously awaited—brought thousands of readers and writers to the cobblestone streets of Paraty in celebration of world literature. The main programming welcomed internationally acclaimed writers Grada Kilomba (Portugal, author of Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism), Ayòbámi Adébáyò (Nigeria, author of Stay with Me), and Kalaf Epalanga (Angola, author of Também os brancos sabem dançar), among others, with events in various languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, and Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). But the magic of this year’s FLIP certainly wasn’t confined to the mainstage: the “houses” of Paraty’s historic center were transformed into venues for book readings, signings, and endless conversation; a parallel “Flipinha” brought the literary festival alive for children of all ages; and the first-ever FLIP international poetry slam packed the main plaza for an unforgettable night, featuring poets from Cabo Verde, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, the US, and the UK. Anyone looking for a recap of the main events can head to FLIP’s YouTube page to check out the action!

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Barren Landscape: Who is Afraid of Albanian Women?

For many Albanian women, the domestic is a space of terror and violence; what could be more heroic than surviving and writing in spite of that?

How is it that a formal literary curriculum can almost completely erase the works of a group of proficient, formidable writers? In this essay, Barbara Halla, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Albania, asks this question of her country’s educational system, while also discussing and revealing the extensive work of Albania’s female writers. 

I could make a long list of my grievances about the Albanian educational system, but I have generally appreciated the breadth of my literary education. In four years of high school, I was assigned some eighty books to read, spanning Western literature from Antiquity (starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh) to Shakespeare, Hugo, Hemingway, and Márquez.

I no longer retain the official list of my required reading, but it is not hard to find a contemporary equivalent. I graduated from high school in 2011, and in eight years, the list selected by the Ministry of Education does not seem to have changed much, which I find questionable. While I am grateful for my literary education, with the years I have become acutely aware of its flaws, the most egregious of which is the complete dismissal of women writers, especially Albanian women. Dozens of books, an entire year dedicated to Albanian literature during my senior year, and yet I graduated without having heard the name of a single Albanian woman writer. It was almost as if they didn’t exist.

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