Posts featuring Jennifer Feeley

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors from around the world report on book-crafting as political resistance and new poetry anthologies in Puerto Rico, a controversial book fair in Hong Kong, and the recovery after decades of a lost manuscript by a major literary figure in Sweden. Read on to find out more!

Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Puerto Rico

The poets Nicole Delgado and Xavier Valcárcel founded Atarraya Cartonera in 2009. Making books out of discarded cardboard boxes was their response to the economic crisis just beginning to hit Puerto Rico—the result of more than a decade of neoliberal policies and obscene corruption. In the 1990s, neoliberalism had left its mark on the book market with the arrival of the gigantic US chain Borders, whose monopoly forced many small independent bookstores out of business. Borders sold books mostly in English, which clashed with the reality that Puerto Rico’s first language is Spanish and most of the population is not bilingual. In their stores, Puerto Rican literature was showcased in a small shelf under the headline, “Of local interest.” Nicole and Xavier paid frequent visits to Borders but through the back door. They took the stores’ discarded cardboard boxes to handcraft Atarraya’s own “of local interest” books. Thus, they turned book-crafting into a political gesture by looking at the neoliberal crisis, as Nicole puts it, “not as an obstacle but rather as a material to work with.” The press participated in a larger web of cardboard presses in Latin America, each in its own way a response to a national and global crisis. Atarraya was hence an effort to connect with literary movements in other parts of Latin America, something that has always been hard in Puerto Rico because of the trade limitations imposed by the US. Active until 2016, Atarraya published a total of twenty-four poetry titles, all of which are now available for free as pdfs on its archival blog.

Nicole and Xavier have continued collaborating––and dream of reviving Atarraya one day. Last month, they co-hosted a virtual editing workshop at La Impresora, a publishing press and Risograph shop founded in 2016 by Nicole with fellow poet and editor Amanda Hernández. La Impresora recently received a grant from Proyecto Inversión Cultural, which has facilitated, among other things, the offering of free workshops. The first, addressed to emerging writers without a published book, tackled the ropes of the editorial process. Together with the ten participants who were all in their early twenties, Nicole and Xavier rehearsed what goes into bookmaking, including content, conceptualization, and production. The result is a collaborative, forthcoming anthology including poems from each of the attendants. The title, Ese lugar violento que llamamos normalidad (That violent place we call normality), reveals how things have and have not changed in the ten years since Xavier and Nicole edited a first poetry anthology, back with Atarraya Cartonera. The latter’s title was Plomos (Lead Sinking Weights), a loaded word that simultaneously alludes to the small weights used for sinking the fishing net, to water contamination by lead, and to gun violence––part of Puerto Rico’s “normality.” As Nicole and Xavier write in the blog, “any relationship between that word and the violent circumstances of the country or with the contamination caused by certain heavy metals, is absolutely intentional.” Back in 2012, there was room for metaphoric language. In 2022, an emerging generation of writers names violence with even more earnest precision.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Hong Kong, Slovakia, and India!

This week, our writers deliver the latest literary news from Hong Kong, Slovakia, and India. Read about the newest translations to come out of Hong Kong, including works by Duo Duo and Leung Lee-chi. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to shake the literary world: we hear of how the arts continue to be neglected in Slovakia’s recent recovery plan, and India losing some of her brightest writers amidst this crisis. Despite this, some hopeful signs that things might change. Read on to find out more! 

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

Chinese poet Duo Duo’s Words as Grain, translated from the Chinese by award-winning translator Lucas Klein, is out this month. A recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Words as Grain is a new collection spanning approximately five decades of the poet’s oeuvre since the 1970s, with a full representation of Duo Duo’s work since his return to China from exile in 2004 and a selection of earlier poems. Duo Duo is hailed as an exponent of the Chinese Misty Poets and has been described by essayist and critic Eliot Weinberger as “a political poet who makes no statements; a realist poet in an alternate universe.” One may revisit Duo Duo’s poem, “Promise,” published in Asymptote’s July 2018 issue and translated by Klein, for a taste.

May also sees the publication of Jennifer Feeley’s translation of Hong Kong writer Leung Lee-chi’s short story, “Empty Rooms,” up on Two Lines Journal. A 2020 winner of the Award for Young Artist in Literary Arts by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Leung is among a younger generation of Hong Kong writers starting to get exposure in the English language. “Empty Rooms” is a response to late novelist Liu Yichang’s short story “Turmoil” depicting the chaos of the 1967 riots through the perspectives of inanimate objects. In a similar vein, “Empty Rooms” portrays the interior of an apartment to piece together moments of memory and departure.

It is also exciting to see the announcement of results for the 7th Bai Meigui Translation Competition organized by The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. “The Season When Flowers Bloom,” Francesca Jordan’s winning translation of an excerpt from Taiwanese writer Yang Shuangzi’s novella, is selected by the judging panel consisting of Susan Wan Dolling, Mike Fu, and Darryl Sterk. Jordan will be offered a place in the upcoming “Bristol Translates” Literary Translation Summer School in July. Honorable mentions from the competition include entries by Stella Jiayue Zhu, Will Jones, and Lucy Craig-McQuaide. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

In these dispatches, we see efforts in world literature to feature underrepresented voices.

World literature will be inclusive only through a continuous effort of organizing against the dominant, listening to the underrepresented, and making space for the unheard to bloom. This week our Editors-at-Large report such efforts from Australia, Hong Kong, and Slovakia. Read on to find out how the voices of women, indigenous and local peoples are being amplified around the world.

Tiffany Tsao, Editor-At-Large, reporting from Australia:

As part of an effort to resist the colonial systems that are the Australian publishing industry, the Australian media and arts industries, and modern Australia itself, the literary quarterly The Lifted Brow made the decision to hand over the entire production of their December issue to an all-First-Nations team of writers, editors, and ancillary staff. “We at TLB are too white, in all senses of that term,” read the magazine’s official statement on the matter. “[I]t’s way past the time that this should’ve changed. Our job and responsibility now is to push back against these oppressive and harmful regimes-within-regimes, not because we can undo the past, but because we can make better the present and the future.”

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