Posts featuring Miriam Toews

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary news from North Macedonia, Mexico, and Palestine!

This week, our editors around the world bring news as to how different literary initiatives and publications are help shaping the present. From writers who embody multiculturalism and unity, to works of solidarity and hope, read on to see how writers, readers, and artists are working to shed light on what matters.

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

“Rarely has any Macedonian poet attracted as much attention among theorists, literary historians, and philologists as [Kočo] Racin. Racin was . . . a pioneer in the artistic expression of the mother tongue, . . . an example of an ideal revolutionary and, in the end, a victim. He was the most honorable and most honored thing that the Macedonians had in the period between the two wars,” writes Goran Kalogjera, a prominent Croatian comparatist and scholar of Macedonian studies in his book, Pogled otstrana. Racin (1908 – 1943) (Side view. Racin (1908 – 1943)). Recently, this important biography was translated into Macedonian by Slavčo Koviloski, and published by Makedonika Litera Press.

Kosta Apostolov Solev is a canonical figure in Macedonian literature, hailed by some as the founder of modern Macedonian poetry. He is best known under his penname, Kočo Racin, which was derived from the name of his lover, Rahilka Firfova-Raca—a gesture indicative of his support for the socialist women’s movement. He himself was a political activist, participating in the translation of the Communist Manifesto into Macedonian, and acting as editor for several communist magazines. His political leanings had contributed to his mysterious and untimely death; mortally shot by a printing-house entrance guard in June 1943, some speculate that Racin had been purposefully targeted by the communist party, having fallen out of favor with them around 1940. However, his activism effectuated his ties to other cultures, enriching his literary oeuvre. Aside from his mother tongue, he wrote texts in Bulgarian and Serbian, and was published all over the Balkans. Kalogjera stresses this multilingual, multicultural aspect of Racin’s output in Pogled otstrana, noting his importance to Croatian culture. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary developments from Palestine, Sweden, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on the rebirth of theatre in Palestine, the best Swedish crime novels, and the Kenyan Readathon Challenge from September. From the Palestine National Theatre Festival to the Nairobi International Book Fair, read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

In Palestine, there is a generation of people who don’t really know what a theatre is! This might sound like an exaggeration, but sadly, that’s reality—or at least, that’s how it looks on the surface. 

When the first Intifada broke out in late 1987, all theatres and cinemas were closed and most did not reopen or regain momentum until the late nineties. With simple arithmetic, we can see that the chances are low today of finding high-caliber theatre actors or actresses, let alone directors, aged in their thirties and forties. 

With that in mind, I must admit I wasn’t too enthusiastic to attend the third Palestine National Theatre Festival running in the last week of October. Little did I know! All that was needed to get fully hooked was one play. 

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

On our itinerary are independent bookstores in Boston, a bistro on the Tripoli port, and the curious outskirts of Paris.

This week, we’ve come across a spoil of literary riches! Big international names come to show in eastern USA, cultural collectives take full advantage of the historic wonders of Lebanon, and, in France, the académie Goncourt is always up to something. Our editors at the front are here to share the treasures.

Nina Perrotta, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from the USA:

New York may be the undisputed publishing capital of the US, but the nearby city of Boston, just a few hours away by car, is also home to a thriving literary scene. Birthplace of the 19th century American Transcendentalism movement (notable members include Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott), Boston boasts one of the country’s richest literary traditions, and it remains a hub for writers and independent booksellers today.

Early last year, one of the city’s most prominent bookstores, the Brookline Booksmith, launched the Transnational Literature Series in partnership with Words Without Borders and the Forum Network. The series “focuses on books concerned with migration, displacement, and exile, with particular emphasis on works in translation,” and hosts conversations between writers and their translators. Previous Transnational Literature Series events have featured Ivana Bodrožić with translator Ellen Elias-Bursać, Olga Tokarczuk with translator Jennifer Croft, and Luljeta Lleshanaku with translator Ani Gjika.

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Translator Profile: Katia Grubisic on Contemporary Canadian Literature

They push at these familial forces, the draw of the origin story, and the magic and tragedy as they try on and define new selves...

In this email interview conducted by Editor-in-Chief Lee Yew Leong, award-winning poet and translator Katia Grubisic took time out of her busy schedule to discuss the state of Canadian literature (in English and in French) as well as the challenges she faced translating David Clerson’s lyrical novel, Brothers (recently featured in our Translation Tuesday showcase at The Guardian), including “the ‘bitch’ problem.”

Lee Yew Leong (LYL): David Clerson’s haunting novel Brothers, in your outstanding translation, would not be out of place in the fiction section of our Winter 2017 edition, not only because of the seaward-facing figures connecting many of the pieces but also because of the strong animal motifs. Among the other elements that make up this story’s poetic permutation: brothers and fathers, dreams, the very act of story-telling. As the translator—and therefore arguably the closest reader of the novel—what do you think David Clerson is trying to say with Brothers, and how do you think these elements come together to fit the overall arc?

Katia Grubisic (KG): Thank you for your kind words.

Yes, the novel’s sea-journey theme, the search for the father, the pretty far-out cynanthropy, the origin story, the twin motif—it almost feels mythological, and David’s baroque style in this book lends it a kind of timeless timbre.

As the translator, I may, in fact, be the worst placed to comment on what it’s about, second perhaps only to the author himself! What drew me to the narrative was first the landscape, the way the sea and the briny hills become almost their own character, anchoring and tormenting the brothers (who try to escape their identity as determined by the place they’re from), and drawing them to their inevitable return. Brothers explores how who we are and who we become is shaped by those who make us, including in this case, literally the knife-wielding though well-intentioned mother, who wants to give her firstborn son a companion as a buffer against the cruel world. The brothers are shaped also by their absent “dog of a father,” or rather—and this is telling—by the often conflicting stories told about him. Yet they push at these familial forces, the draw of the origin story, and the magic and tragedy as they try on and define new selves, and their own universe, has such compelling pathos. You don’t want to be them, but you can’t look away.

LYL: The novel at once reminds me of The Return, a film by Andrey Zvyagintsev about two brothers waiting for their father’s return, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which not only involves an odyssey on a boat, but also similarly injects a magical realism into the story-telling. What other literary ‘predecessors’ might I, as a non-Canadian, have missed? 

KG: I don’t know that Brothers’ ancestry is nationally bound. When I first read the book, it reminded me of Agota Kristof’s Le Grand cahier—the brothers, the old mother, the violence. Pas du tout, David told me; in an interview, he said he had been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy at the time! He wrote it too at the height of the Printemps érable student and popular uprising in 2012, which subtly tinged the narrative. Though I agree that both The Return and Life of Pi could be seen as kin, in terms of devices and preoccupations.

The wonderful thing about fiction is that it can belong to whichever reader happens to crack the spine. The region David evokes spoke to me so vividly of the Baie des Chaleurs shores in eastern Quebec and northern New Brunswick, but when I asked him about it, he conceded that many had pegged his setting as the Gaspésie region, but spoke instead of the imprint left by work he had read in his youth, including Golding and Stevenson, and even of a dream he once had, in which he saw himself fishing a dead dog out of a lagoon.

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