Posts featuring Louise Glück

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week’s latest news from Australia, Taiwan, and Sweden!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Australia, Taiwan, and Sweden. In Australia, the NT Writers Festival has celebrated Aboriginal writing and language; in Taiwan, registration has opened for the 2021 Taipei International Book Fair and the winners of the Golden Tripod Awards were announced; and in Sweden, the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement was made, awarding American poet Louise Glück. Read on to find out more! 

Rita Horanyi, Newsletter Editor, reporting from Australia

In Australia, like much of the rest of the world, literary events have been cancelled or moved online due to lockdowns and travel restrictions. Thus, it was especially exciting to see that the Northern Territory (NT) Writers Festival—held this year in the country’s tropical Top End in Darwin—was able to pull off a predominantly live event after having to postpone the festival from May to October.

The NT Writers Festival showcases local talent, alongside interstate and international guests, with a particular focus on South East Asian voices. Unfortunately, COVID-19 meant it was challenging to include writers from South East Asia this year, but, with the assistance of digital technology, acclaimed Indonesian poet Norman Erikson Pasaribu was able to join the festival to discuss “Translating Indonesia” with past Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Indonesia and translator Tiffany Tsao (the session is available to watch online here).

One of the ways the NT Writers Festival differs from many literary events in the country is in its strong emphasis on Aboriginal writing and language. This year’s festival included a panel with Meigim Kriol Strongbala (a group based in Ngukurr working to strengthen the place of Kriol), who discussed the process of translating the popular children’s book Too Many Cheeky Dogs (the session was held in both Kriol and English). Another special appearance was by the Gay’wu (Dilly Bag) group of women from Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land. This group of women read from and discussed the writing of their Stella Prize longlisted book, Songspirals, which illuminates the role of women in the crying of Yolŋu songlines. Senior Yolŋu Elder Eunice Djerrkngu Yunupingu even keened milkarri (women’s songspirals) in front of festival audiences. In other sessions, a group of Arrernte poets from Mparntwe/Alice Springs read and discussed their new poetry collection, Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk, which interweaves poems in both English and Arrernte. READ MORE…

Coals to Newcastle: A (biased?) Slovak overview of a century in American literature

The ambition of the “American” issue of RSL was to resist preconceptions and cross boundaries.

Small cultures import disproportionately more texts—both translated and original—than they export. However, literatures using a language with a limited number of speakers are not just markets for globalised goods. Translations quite naturally also help them develop and sometimes even exist, as cases of small languages that ceased to be the target languages for translations show. Revue svetovej literatúry (Review of world literature) is a Slovak magazine founded in the “golden” 1960s that brought an abundance of new impulses to Slovak literature from all over the world for the past fifty years. Late last year, writer and translator (and Asymptote past contributor) Peter Macsovszky and literature and translation scholar Ivana Hostová edited and co-translated (with the help of a team of translators) an issue of the magazine with a focus on contemporary and twentieth-century Anglophone literature from the US.

In her Buying into English (2008), Catherine Prendergast analyses the semantics and economics linked to the ability of speakers of a minor language—in this case Slovak—to use the language of global communication. She compares the perceived value of English in Slovakia immediately after the fall of state socialism and then in almost two decades in the post-communist Slovakia. The strict restriction of the flow of information between socialist Czechoslovakia and the Western world gave rise to an idealised notion of the Anglophone (and, more specifically, American and capitalist) world. It came to signify freedom and prosperity and was—in the minds of many Slovaks—expected to embrace and accept with curiosity and eagerness the cultures and peoples freed from the socialist regime. Prendergast suggests that the notion was only abandoned after it slowly became clear that “the lingua franca is language-as-battlefield; it is the terrain upon which players in the global information economy grapple for property, respectability, and political voice.” Now it has become obvious that it takes more than pureness of heart and an admiration for the American culture and way of life to extract any interest from what Michael Cronin in his Eco-Translation (2017) has called the crowded Anglophone attentionscape.

The proportion of imported versus exported goods including cultural products can be very well illustrated by the amount of translations produced in the Anglophone countries as opposed to cultural spaces[i] like Slovakia. Therefore, wanting to import even more texts from the dominant to small culture might seem like carrying coals to Newcastle. However, if we try to differentiate between a piece of writing as a commodity that primarily generates economic profit and institutional legitimation and look at the autonomous sections of the literary field—at those works that were not created to make the author famous or rich, but which came into being in order to exist for themselves and in their own right—it may come as a surprise that not much American writing can really be found in Slovak translation. In this context, an issue of a Slovak literary magazine bringing translations of Anglophone writing from the United States seems redundant only at first glance. Most of the literature written in the US that gets translated into Slovak nowadays can best be described as a commodity—currently, the best-selling book in the biggest Slovak bookshops is the translation of Dan Brown’s Origin (2017)—it is the kind of writing that, although undeniably culturally domineering and shaping the receiving context, does not inspire in the sense of creating resistance to the existing (cultural) preconceptions or fluent strategies of reading.

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