Posts featuring Masatsugu Ono

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

News this week from Vietnam, Japan, and Southeast Asia!

This week, our editors from around the world present reimaginings of Sophocles in Hanoi, memorials and debuts from Japan, and witness writing from Southeast Asia. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Since November 2021, The Goethe Institute in Hanoi has been in collaboration with the Youth Theatre of Vietnam (Nhà Hát Tuổi Trẻ) to produce six interpretations of Sophocles’s Antigone, exploring a variety of salient themes—fate versus freewill, the family versus the state, moral integrity and political order, feminism versus patriarchy, reason and emotion, loyalty and disobedience. While most of the productions were performed live in Hanoi after the gradual easing of COVID-19 restrictions, “Portrait” (“Bức Chân Dung”)—Antigone’s fifth iteration—is shown online from February 19 through February 26, 2022.

Directed by Lê An of Ho Chi Minh City’s Saigon Theatreland, “Portrait” shifts the first act of Antigone into 1970s wartime South Vietnam, where An (Huỳnh Ly)—whose name means peace and contentment—must forge her identity out of her family’s traumatic past. Creon, Antigone’s uncle in Sophocles’s play, is transposed into her emotionally repressed father, Đắc (Công Danh), a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese Army. Đắc forbids An to bring home Kỳ’s dead body—his son and An’s brother—an enemy soldier who fought and died for the Communist cause. Despite the obvious ideological landmines evoked by this premise, director Lê An, in a pre-performance podcast, sidestepped politics by discussing her heroine’s psychological quest “to find herself”— possibly to detract from the production’s more provocative implications.

While ideological heresy still cannot be addressed explicitly in modern adaptations of Antigone within Vietnam (despite the heroine’s Greek name which can mean “one who resists/is of the opposite bend”), this theme plays a central role in Vũ Thư Hiên’s oeuvre—including his newest story collection, Confessions at Midnight (Lời Xưng Tội Lúc Nửa Đêm) (California: Văn Học Press, 2022). A well-known dissident writer and translator, Vũ Thư Hiên has become Vietnam’s persona non grata since the 1997 publication of Night at Midday (“Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày)—a memoir, inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which recounts the nine years (1967-1976) he spent in various North Vietnamese prisons after being charged with “anti-Party, anti-State, spying and revisionist conduct.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2020

New publications from Brazil, Japan, and Poland!

This month, our selections of newly published literature from around the globe seem to cohere under the umbrella of trauma and memory, and the way they inevitably turn into narratives in the process of retrospection. From a Polish work of non-fiction that traces the sufferings of Poles during WWII, to the journals that document a Jewish immigrant in Brazil, to the strange and unspoken secrets of a small village in Japan—these works are of both documentation and imagination.

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A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, World Editions, 2020

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

It is a grim fact, one that acquires increasing urgency in recent years, that those who were alive to experience the horrors of the Second World War are getting older: before long, we will no longer be able to talk to people who have direct experience of those times. Thus, we are increasingly grappling with the problem of second-generation memory: with the matter of how the descendants of survivors preserve and pass on the stories of the past for future generations, and with questions as to whether, or how, those descendants inherit the trauma of their ancestors. Anna Janko’s A Little Annihilation is a powerful meditation on these issues.

In this reckoning with the past, Janko describes the destruction of the Polish village of Sochy by the German military on Tuesday, June 1, 1943: the inhabitants massacred and buildings burned to the ground over the course of a mere few hours. Nine-year-old Teresa Ferenc, Janko’s mother, was among the survivors. In recounts of conversations, her mother describes her memories of that day—most especially, witnessing the death of both of her parents. Janko also chronicles interviews with other survivors from the village, interweaving their stories and noting the discrepancies between them, while describing efforts to tabulate the exact number of lives lost. The impossibility of establishing precise details is a crucial reminder of the intertwined nature of history and memory, a refutation of the common notion of their opposition, as well as a reflection on the challenges of documenting a massacre.

For some English-language readers, Janko’s text may be the first work they have encountered that discusses the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles during the Second World War. For Americans especially, to learn about Nazi atrocities is generally to learn about their efforts to exterminate European Jews, without a detailed understanding of how their eugenicist ideology shaped their policies and strategies in a broader variety of ways. Confusion over the fact that Poland was occupied territory has led to mistaken statements about “Polish death camps” (most notably, perhaps, when President Barack Obama used the term during a ceremony awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski in 2012; he later apologized for the error)—as Janko angrily reminds readers. “In my opinion it would be best if Germany gathered up all the camps they left behind in Poland. So that no one would be mistaken any longer.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Our weekly roundup of literary news brings us to Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States.

We are back with the latest from around the world! This week we hear about Morocco, Hong Kong, and the United States. Enjoy!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Some seven hundred exhibitors from Morocco and around the world descended on Casablanca for the Salon international de l’edition et du livre, which took place from February 9-18. Half open-air souk (rumor had it that one of the ambulatory vendors went so far as to offer women’s panties for sale!), half oasis of high culture, the book fair counted over 125,000 titles from forty-five different countries. Egypt, this year’s guest of honor, accounted for nearly fifteen percent of the titles on offer alone, and managed to ruffle more than a few feathers when an Egyptian publisher was allegedly caught displaying a book (A Brief History of Africa) whose cover featured a map of the continent depicting a “mutilated” Morocco—the disputed territory of the Western Sahara appearing as an independent nation under the Polisario flag. The presence of the book was firmly denied by the Ministry of Culture.

READ MORE…