Posts featuring Jayant Kaikini

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 4, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Charlie Ng, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Hong Kong, Central America, and India!

In this week of dispatches from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on literary awards, the establishment of a literature museum, and book fairs! From controversy surrounding the new museum in Hong Kong to the most recent Indian texts in translation, read on to learn more!

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

Public voices demanding for a museum of literature have been around for years in Hong Kong. On July 22, during the Hong Kong Book Fair 2023, Poon Yiu-ming, the Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Writers, announced that the Museum of Hong Kong Literature would be inaugurated in April next year in Wan Chai with support from Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Poon petitioned Lee last year on the establishment of a literary museum. However, the announcement has attracted controversy in the literary arena. 

The concept of a museum for Hong Kong literature was proposed by a group of local writers and scholars, including Dung Kai-cheung, Tang Siu-wa, Yip Fai, Liu Waitong, and Chan Chi-tak, among others, who formed the “Hong Kong Literature Museum Advocacy Group,” in 2009. A signed petition that successfully solicited signatures from hundreds of local and international Chinese writers and scholars was published in Ming Pao, which proposed to establish a literary museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Since the suggestion was not adopted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority then, the Advocacy Group proceeded to establish the House of Hong Kong Literature as a non-governmental organization for promoting and preserving Hong Kong literature.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 15, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

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.”

READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

March 17, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas, MK Harb, and Suhasini Patni

Because, as Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away."

Tired of doomscrolling? We think you’d like these staff recommendations—hailing from the UK, India, and Turkey. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

unnamed-1

Like so many of us in this pandemic, my reading has turned to sci-fi and magical realism. When our world is wedged between the hybrid machination of zoom and an increasingly taxing everyday life, fantasy provides an escape into a world of pleasure. Perhaps no one has done this as masterfully as British author, Susanna Clarke, in her recent fantasy novel Piranesi. Set in a disenchanted world of The House, Piranesi, a futuristic scribe of sorts records his everyday life in an infinite universe consisting of severed statues, columns and fringe pockets of water. His universe is awfully lonely, yet he finds a way to narrate it with an uncanny curiosity. He has an endearing voice, which he often uses to enchant the only other member he interacts with, a dapper and sordid gentleman by the name of “The Other.” Together they enter a surreal journey searching for “Great and Secret Knowledge,” encountering the most mundane of objects along the way. Though The Other is not able to value this world in the same way Piranesi does, the latter often lends him his eyes to make him understand. The beauty of Clarke’s writing is not its construction of a highly centralized and systemized future universe, rather its focus on collapse and the journey that lurks between empty halls. I hope you give it a chance and let Piranesi guide your night.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

READ MORE…

A Fine Balance: An Interview with Keerti Ramachandra

February 17, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Suhasini Patni

Isn’t that true of so many Indians? We inhabit several languages simultaneously and travel between them easily and unselfconsciously.

Keerti Ramachandra is a Katha AK Ramanujan Award-winning translator who works out of Marathi, Kannada, and Hindi. She has translated Vishwas Patil’s Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Jhadajhadati (A Dirge for the Dammed), which was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize.

This interview was conducted in two parts. I first met Ms. Ramachandra in her house on Residency Road, Bangalore, where she talked about her journey into translation. We continued the conversation over email where she discussed the various books she’s worked with, the process of collaboration, how her work as an educator and editor seeps into translation, and the state of Indian publishing.

Suhasini Patni (SP): You’ve been translating for several years now. Can you talk about how you came into translation?

Keerti Ramachandra (KR): I come from a bilingual family and a multilingual society. Every day, I would come home from school and report to my mother the events of the day in Marathi. Then repeat it all for my grandparents in Kannada, and then argue vociferously about the veracity of my stories with my brothers in English. Every now and then, our nanny used to ask me in Dakhani (her variety of Hindi): “Kya hua, bibi? Humkobhi bolo tho!” (What happened, baby? Tell us also!). And I would. Isn’t that true of so many Indians? We inhabit several languages simultaneously and travel between them easily and unselfconsciously.

Formal translation happened much later. Until 1994, I was a complete Anglophile. With a background in English literature and the extensive use of English in everyday life, I claimed English was my mother tongue.

Though we spoke all the languages at home, I had never studied Marathi, my mother’s tongue. I could read and write Kannada, my father’s tongue, since it was compulsory until matriculation, but knew only the classic “textbook” inclusions. I had better acquaintance with Hindi because it was a compulsory subject in school and college. Therefore, it seems outrageous, foolhardy, or audacious for me to get into translating Marathi literature!

READ MORE…