Non-US

From The Guardian:

When I meet him, artist Oleksiy Sai, along with his wife and son, have slept the night in their studio, a warren of rooms tucked behind an unassuming courtyard in central Kyiv. It’s on the ground floor, and with good walls, so they reckon it’s reasonably safe from Russian rockets. Safer, that is, than their apartment: the previous day they were woken by the juddering scream-boom of cruise missile strikes, one cratering a children’s playground a block from their flat. Somehow, their windows survived, though the glass was blown out of most of the nearby buildings. Now, the whole family is busy making work: his son Vasyl is at a screen editing videos; his wife, Svitlana Ratoshnyuk, is making folksy textiles embroidered with “Fuck Putin” in Ukrainian.

Before the war, Sai – slim, intense, wearing a black hoodie – used to make colourful works, based on Excel software, that wryly commented on “office life and global culture”. But when the Russians invaded on 24 February, he says, “I forgot about art completely, I forgot all my plans and started working for the war.” First, he began rolling out designs for protest posters. “I know how to do it fast,” Sai says; he honed the skill nearly a decade ago, during the 2013 Maidan Square protests against the pro-Russian then president, Viktor Yanukovych. Sai’s banner designs have been seen on the streets of London, New York and Berlin. They are not subtle. “Unilever! Quit Russia!” reads one, the familiar corporate logo rendered as a U-shaped spatter of blood. Another depicts a line of Russian medals “For torture”, “For looting” and “For the genocide of the Ukrainian people”.

Later, Sai made a video work. He shows it to me on his computer. Brutal images march across the screen in a grim procession: shattered and broken bodies, twisted and collapsed buildings, the full Goya-esque horror of war. The raw material for the piece was 7,000 photographs from the conflict’s barbaric heart – gathered from journalists, but also from photographers he knew who had signed up as combatants and taken pictures deep amid the raw carnage. “My goal is to terrify people,” he says. “To show that the war is total. To show that it’s fucking serious.” The work has been shown at the Nato headquarters, at the European parliament. Its sound consists of radio intercepts of Russian soldiers talking to their mothers or girlfriends, along with a sort of dull metronomic beat that gives the whole work a “zombified” feel, as Sai puts it. “It’s too scary for news,” he says. “But for art, it’s possible.” None of the images is captioned, there’s no contextual information; it’s designed to cut to the marrow. It’s certainly not intended to be journalism. As an artwork, “it gives you a deeper emotional connection, and a deeper knowledge”, he says. He calls it “propaganda” before checking himself: “It’s not propaganda. It’s not the stuff I want to do, it’s the stuff I need to do.” He adds: “It is practical and useful, and people changed their minds about the war. It worked.” In the resistance against the Russian invasion, Sai’s art is his weapon.

The work is distressing; after a few moments, to my relief, he pauses the video. I can’t help wondering what it was like to live among these images, studying them, editing them together in his small dark studio. “It was three weeks of hell. I dreamed about them. They got into my head,” he says. He developed a nervous tic, started scratching himself obsessively. For relief, he has been making what he calls his Smoke series of drawings – swirls of black that recall the clouds rising from the site of missile strikes. After Russian attacks, Ukrainian outlets show footage not of the affected buildings, but only the smoke – so as not to reveal whether the intended target was hit. There’s a stack of these Smoke works at the back of the studio; he’s given lots away so they can be sold to raise money for the war effort. “I’m lucky to get to edit in this comfortable place, smoking and eating,” he says. “I won’t lose my leg doing it. It’s easier than firing a gun.”

. . . .

Where to begin a story of war? Every war teems with stories: stories of survival and violence, of resistance and compliance, of struggle and terror. They go together: many of the oldest stories that survive (the Iliad, the Odyssey) are stories of war and its aftermath. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war full of stories but also a war about a story, about the accepted facts, about the prevailing narrative. Vladimir Putin’s “special operation”, as he calls it, seems to have been intended to provide a spectacle, a kind of war movie, for domestic consumption, drawing the Russians together against what he hopes to frame as a common enemy – described variously as Nazis, terrorists or even, bizarrely, as the forces of Satan. At the same time, the war’s false justification has its own disturbing narrative, its own warped internal logic. Underlying Putin’s military aggression, as his speeches and essays have for years made clear, is his assertion that Ukraine has no distinct existence – that it can be seen only as an adjunct to Russia. In such a war on a nation’s culture, identity and history, it is artists and cultural figures who find themselves the crack troops of the resistance. The war is on one level about borders, and it is being fought with shells, Himars rocket launchers and Shahed-136 drones. But it is, on a deeper level, about culture. And, desperately holding the line, fighting on the cultural front, weaponising their work, are Ukraine’s artists.

. . . .

What happens to art when a war appears as an unwelcome guest in your country? In the short term, war ruptures language and meaning; art seems pointless. No one I speak to in Ukraine can forget the shock of the first day of the invasion – a day that is sealed into people’s memories as surely as a fly trapped in amber, to borrow an image from Maksym Kurochkin, a Kyiv-based playwright turned soldier. Musicians tell me how they seemed to fall deaf, in those early days; novelists, how they started to muddle languages they’d never confused before. Art is no use against rockets or guns. “You could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems,” as Oleksandr Mykhed, a writer I meet at a book festival in Lviv, puts it. Everything collapsed in on itself, in those early days.

The best use of words, as the invasion began, was not to arrange them into elegant poetic forms, but to use them to send a message to your friends that you were alive, or to help someone stay safe. Mykhed speaks of a backpack his wife, Olena, has put together, containing equipment to use in the event of a nuclear attack, along with directions. “If the backpack survives, then we have a piece of nonfiction with instructions for restoring life,” he says. On 23 February, the day before the invasion, he finished writing a book. As the tanks rolled in, he volunteered for the military. On the fifth day of the war he was sleeping in barracks. On the seventh, his home was shelled to destruction. In such a way, war renders a life unrecognisable, over the course of a single week.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The Economist:

When I wrote previously for this publication, back in 2015, it would have been all but impossible to predict the course which global events have since taken. We have witnessed Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the United States and its toxic legacy, a global pandemic, the return of war to the European continent with Russia’s brutal, illegal invasion of Ukraine—and, in the United Kingdom, a cost-of-living and general economic crisis on a scale unseen in many decades.

Any one of these things would have the capacity to be unsettling. Taken together, though, these events have thrown the world around us into a state of flux of a kind rarely seen in modern times.

In Scotland, the government I lead is doing its utmost to protect people in the face of the severe economic challenges we face. However, those challenges have been exacerbated by the reckless actions of the British government, whose policies have sent sterling plummeting to record lows against the dollar, while prompting central-bank interventions to prop up the economy and leading to surging interest rates which are having a punitive impact on ordinary citizens at a time when inflation had already risen to its highest level in around 40 years.

Against such a challenging backdrop, some may ask why the Scottish government is committed to giving the people of our country the choice of becoming an independent nation. The answer, quite simply, is that Scotland cannot afford not to seize the opportunity of independence given the current circumstances.

When people last voted on the issue, back in 2014, they were told by the British government of the day that the only way to protect Scotland’s place in the European Union was to reject independence.

That pledge, like so many other promises of the No campaign in 2014, has proved to be empty. Scotland has been taken out of the eu against our will and removed from the world’s largest single market—a market around seven times bigger than Britain’s.

No one can now seriously claim, given the chaotic nature of British governance in recent times, and especially in light of the turmoil of recent months, that Scotland’s future is in safe hands for as long as we remain subject to rule from Westminster. The fact that the uk is now predicted to have the slowest growth of any G20 economy in 2023, with the exception of sanctions-hit Russia, is further proof.

At the time of writing, Scotland’s ability to hold a referendum without agreement from Westminster—in line with the overwhelming democratic mandate for one secured in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election—is in the hands of the UK Supreme Court. The court is having to rule at all only because the British government is seeking to block that electoral mandate.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG notes that the author of the OP is Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland.

While having Scottish and English ancestry, PG and his forbearers have lived in the United States for quite a long time, so PG is not in any position to comment on an internal matter of the UK.

PG realizes that UK internal politics are not the usual subjects for TPV, he will note that the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, extending through the weekend, puts a lot of US book talk on hold, so he ranges farther afield than usual.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Like its annual show and competition Canada Reads, the CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Poetry Prize program is another enviable example of the public services performed by CBC Books.

That program’s literary prizes include not only this poetry competition, but also one in nonfiction and one in short stories. In the case of the Poetry Prize, most of the five finalists announced today (November 17) have considerable experience and are professionally published writers, although the rules for entering the competition requires that an entry be “an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems up to 600 words in length (with no minimum words limit). The program, then, highlights previously unpublished content.

CBC Poetry Prize 2022 Finalists

Links for each finalist’s work are to CBC’s write-ups on the writers selected. On those writers’ pages, you’ll find all or part of each al

• From the Mouth by Rachel Lachmansingh (Toronto)

Lachmansingh is a Guyanese Canadian writer from Toronto. She’s been published in Minola Review, Grain, the Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her bachelor of arts degree in creative writing at the University of Victoria. Lachmansingh was also longlisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize for The Window of a Stranger’s House.

• To the Astronaut Who Hopes Life on Another Planet Will Be More Bearable by Brad Aaron Modlin (Guelph, Ontario)

Modlin is a creative writing professor and poet. His work has been used for orchestral scores, an art exhibition in New York, and has been featured on The Slowdown with U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón and Poetry Unbound from public radio’s On Being Studios. His book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won the Cowles Poetry Prize.

• Mouth Prayers by Luka Poljak (Vancouver)

Poljak is a Croatian Canadian poet currently in the bachelor of fine arts degree program at the University of British Columbia. He’s a board member of the nonprofit YouthCO and is currently working on his first chapbook of poetry.

• Grief White by Kerry Ryan (Winnipeg)

Ryan has published two books of poetry: The Sleeping Life and Vs., which was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Her third poetry collection, Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children, is to be released in the spring. Ryan was previously longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2020 for Driver’s Seat & Grief Knot. 

• Spell World Backwards by Bren Simmers (Charlottetown)

Simmers is the author of four books, including the wilderness memoir Pivot Point and Hastings-Sunrise, which was a finalist for the Vancouver Book Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is If, When. She was previously longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2013 for I Blame MASH For My Addiction To MLS and in 2012 for Science Lessons.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

While PG is something of a snob about poetry (he hasn’t seen much written after the mid-20th century that he’s liked very well), he wishes the best for each of the Canadian poets listed above.

From Public Books:

In March 1930, American author Marcia Davenport arrived at Prague’s Woodrow Wilson Station. She knew not a single Czech word or person, yet she “fell in love” with this newly formed European state. She cherished the ritualistic performance of village festivals, the cautious drives through city streets barely wide enough for cars, the echoing chatter of women in marketplaces, even the smell—“a rich compound of coal smoke, roasting coffee, beer, smoked pork, and frying onions.” For the next twenty years, Davenport returned to Czechoslovakia almost annually, each time amassing more knowledge and friends. During World War II, she worked tirelessly from the US to raise funds for the invaded state and disseminate accurate information about Czechoslovakia on the American airwaves. Her involvement became so intense that she even struck up a romantic (and ultimately tragic) affair with the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk. A faraway place truly became this New Yorker’s “second mother country.”

We often think of those dramatic decades leading up to World War II as a kind of battle between instinctive nationalism and stubborn isolation on the one hand, and a highfalutin universalism and abstract international idealism on the other. The reality, however—at least for Davenport—was less binary. She found her way into international engagement not by walking the halls of the League of Nations but by embracing the intimacy of daily life in a foreign nation. Reminders of a shared human experience and universal political ideologies have their place. But exposure to the particularities of domestic life within nations can cultivate an international perspective.

Feeling patriotism for a foreign country is, when you think about it, odd. Usually our love for country is for our own country, and we roll our eyes at any student who returns from study abroad still wearing a beret. Of course, we care when wars or disasters beset other countries. But we usually do so because of universalistic values, because we care for humanity wherever it may lie. The sort of fervor we feel for our own country typically stops at the border. It’s therefore hard to recall a recent time when many Americans have waved flags for a country that isn’t their own, or with which they didn’t have a diasporic connection. Then this February, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

Already in March, the president of the National Flag Company, Artie Schaller III, spoke to the New York Times on the skyrocketing demand for Ukrainian flags in the US. “This would be the biggest increase in volume for another nation’s flag that I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Schaller observed. “I can only compare it to—in my time—9/11, for just how quickly people are willing to show support and are using a flag to do that.” American enthusiasm for Ukraine extended beyond flags: for months, Instagram feeds have filled with recipes for traditional borscht; choirs for Kyiv have appeared on Saturday Night Live; and a small town in upstate New York has loyally followed the daily trials and tribulations of one Ukrainian man through his column for their local newspaper.

It seems most Americans have rejected Putin’s effort to present the war in Ukraine as an ideological proxy battle between East and West. Instead, they have elected to support Ukraine in a way that looks more like Davenport’s: an embrace of the intimate, the local, the very, very national.

. . . .

Although today’s uptick in foreign-flag purchases may be the biggest that Mr. Schaller has seen, it is not entirely without precedent. In the years of crises clustering around World War II, passionate attachment to a foreign nation became prevalent among internationally minded Americans. The fates of the world’s “small powers,” often referred to as “small nations”—including China (especially the Manchurian region), Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia), Poland, Yugoslavia, and yes, Czechoslovakia—all interested America’s burgeoning cosmopolitans. The attention showered upon these seemingly provincial places did not derive only from the state’s relative position in a broader geopolitical calculation. It came from a fascination—as Davenport experienced in Prague—with the components of a state that give it claim to nationhood: internal complexities, culture, and traditions.

. . . .

Davenport’s fascination with a small European state might have remained a private eccentricity, had it not been for the rapidly unfolding catastrophe of World War II. The infamous Munich Agreement in 1938 gave her personal affair with Czechoslovakia a political hue. Increasingly, she came to see Czechoslovakia not only as a place she loved in and of itself but also as a stand-in for her growing international vision and commitments. When reflecting on the war years, Davenport recalled that “the fate of the small country became common cause with every man and woman who stood up to be counted against Hitler.” She volunteered for Czechoslovak-specific relief organizations and also for groups with more global aims, including The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which lobbied the US government to join in the global fight against fascists. In this way, personal affection for the particularities of a people evolved into a commitment to international ideals.

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG doesn’t know if the American habit described in the OP has counterparts in other nations, but one factor that may trigger this in the United States is that a very large portion of the current population is descended from ancestors who were born and lived in other nations.

Plus, PG thinks its fairly common in many places for people to instinctively have or develop an emotional attachment to the underdog — the David who is confronting Goliath, Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader, etc. Even the Three Little Pigs and Little Read Riding Hood vs. the Big Bad Wolf are examples.

From Electric Lit:

Jai Chakrabarti’s “Prodigal Son” begins as Jonah arrives in Kolkata on his way to visit his guru. Jonah is an American, a white man, and like most American tourists, he is obsessed with proving he isn’t one. When he suspects the taxi driver will take advantage of him, he uses Bengali slang to “convince the driver of his adopted roots.” The possible oxymoron of the statement is lost on him—can roots be adopted? 

For fifteen years, Jonah has been visiting Guruji and his family—his wife Suparna and his son Karna. Jonah considers himself Guruji’s most devoted student and believes Guruji thinks of him as a second son. Which, maybe he does.

Guruji is a skilled flutist, and Karna—now an adolescent boy, or in some lights, a young man—is developing a skill to match his father’s. Jonah is technically proficient but not a natural; the transference Jonah hopes to achieve is not complete. The plan for this trip, which Jonah promised his wife would be his last, is to record Guruji’s first album. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From The Paris Review:

I was almost done with a draft of my novel when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Amid the destruction and devastation that followed, continuing with my novel felt impossible; I turned toward journalism, which had always been a part-time job for me. For seven months, I have been working as a war correspondent in Ukraine. I have found that I can only read war reports: I am constantly turning to On the Front Line by Marie Colvin. I have wondered about the role of literature, especially in wartime: Are we simply supposed to let documentaries and daily news take over? Or do we find—and provide—an escape from the unbearable?

I began to ask other writers these questions and was surprised by the variability of their answers. Five Ukrainian writers from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions—the areas devastated by the war—spoke to me about the genres they have been reading and writing during the war. In Kharkiv, a literature professor told me about his rare books being burned in the stove by the Russian military. He also told me about a Ukrainian officer seeking reading recommendations the day before being killed at the front. “I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over,” writes Serhiy Zhadan. On the other hand, says Lyuba Yakimchuk, “The task of poets is to put the unspeakable feelings in words.” Olga Kryaziach, whose apartment and books were also burned by the Russians, reads and writes on her iPad, taking notes for a different future.

Iya Kiva

I have started to become spatially disoriented because of the war. Once, as I was getting back to a rented apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I was or how I got there for hours. I lived in a Soviet project-style block of flats called khrushchyovka surrounded by identical buildings, and I couldn’t understand which one of those khrushchyovkaswas my home these days; I was shaking and I couldn’t breathe. In another one of my rented apartments, I was always hitting my head while entering. At home, I needed to turn left after entering, but in this new space I had to turn right.

Can I write? Yes and no. On the one hand, I prefer that my story and the stories of my loved ones are not told by others, like the Russian authors who started writing poems during the first weeks of the invasion. But I have been forcing myself to write rather than feeling an inner need; even short diary notes are incredibly tiring. I have also noticed that all my poems are about the inability to speak. This is true both on the thematic and architectonic levels, including pauses and a rather restricted range of ideas. The way I write now feels like a score of silence.

During the first months of the full-scale invasion, reading was similar to learning a new language. Not Ukrainian, Polish, or English, but language as is—as the ability to understand the meaning of particular words, to combine them, make phrases and sentences, to correlate what you’ve just read with your experience. Sometime in March I realized, with surprise, that if merely one word from a page of text aroused associations in my mind, then that was good. It meant I hadn’t unlearned how to think yet.

The only book that I have managed to read from the beginning to the end since February 24 is I Blame Auschwitz by Mikołaj Grynberg. Importantly, I read it in the original Polish. I have noticed that reading comes more easily in foreign languages now. It’s like I am tuning the radio of war to other frequencies.

Serhiy Zhadan

I think that an epic work of literature will not come until after the war is over. For now, there is only enough space and time for direct reflections. Everything else—novels and poems—everything that requires continuity in time—will emerge later. But humor is a completely different matter. It seems to me that even under the circumstances, Ukrainians have no problems with their sense of humor or irony. I think it is evidence of the power of faith, and I am saying this as an agnostic.

I am rereading Bruno Schulz, strange as it may seem. I am reading him despite the fact that he didn’t write about war—but maybe that’s exactly why. I want to continue translating Paul Celan, and I think I will get to it after our victory. But I am not reading him now. For me, Celan’s poems always had an “afterwar” feeling to them. It is unlikely that they could be written in the thirties. During war, there are no poets or non-poets; there are those who are ready to fight and those who are not.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From Smithsonian Magazine:

If one were to pinpoint the precise moment the Porter sisters experienced the pinnacle of literary fame, it would likely be the year 1814. By then, Jane and Anna Maria Porter were in their late 30s and living together outside London. They’d published 17 books, including several international bestsellers, and gained reputations as two very different paragons of feminine talent. Jane’s looks and personality proved a tall, dark and serious contrast to Maria’s, as light, bright and sparkling. With no more than a charity-school education, the sisters had grown up nurturing each other’s ambitions, editing each other’s writing and turning themselves into household names.

The Misses Porter (as they were sometimes called) arguably created the modern historical novel, weaving fascinating, romantic tales out of facts and events culled from history books. The sisters were certainly the first to achieve critical acclaim and bestseller status with such novels, starting with Jane’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), Maria’s The Hungarian Brothers (1807) and Jane’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810). Their protagonists—a mix of historical figures and invented characters—participated in bloody conflicts on past battlefields, then faced domestic hardships at home and abroad. Both sisters used compelling flourishes, and an undercurrent of clear moralism, to bring history’s heroes and despots to life.

It’s no accident that Jane and Maria made these contributions to literature during the Napoleonic Wars, when the threat loomed of a despot’s global domination. Their novels about liberty and independence, set in threatened nations of decades and centuries past, couldn’t help but shed light on the situation near at hand. Indeed, Napoleon himself understood the dangers the sisters’ books posed to him: He banned Jane’s novels from publication in France, presumably because they might encourage popular uprisings. The narrator of Thaddeus of Warsaw describes the hero’s thinking in a way no tyrant would have approved of: “He well knew the difference between a defender of his own country and the invader of another’s.”

When Jane died in 1850, she was called “one of the most distinguished novelists which England has produced” and “the first who introduced that beautiful kind of fiction, the historical romance.” The Porter sisters’ careers ended just as the Brontë sisters were getting started in the early Victorian period. And over the next century, as the Brontës became literary history’s most visible sisters, the Porters were gradually—and then almost entirely—forgotten.

Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine

From Publishing Perspectives:

Publishers in Europe may be facing a proverbial “perfect storm” of resurgent demand, bottlenecks in supply, rising paper costs, and the energy crisis.

At the Federation of European Publishers’ (FEP) overview of the European market before and during the still-ongoing coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, Enrico Turrin, deputy director of the federation, warned “We don’t know what the full impact of this ‘perfect storm’ will be, but it is coming.”

His overview of the market contained good, bad, and good-again news. “The pandemic was good for book sales overall,” he said, “perhaps because people rediscovered reading.”

. . . .

Not surprisingly, sales in bookstores fell from 50 percent in 2019 to 43.6 percent in 2021 as so many stores were forced to close. He also noted that print sales overall in Europe hadn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Words Without Borders:

I have been thinking lately about the infamous “three percent problem” of the publishing landscape, the notion that only three percent of books published in the United States are books in translation. This figure has done a lot of work as a rallying cry among translators and publishers—statistics are good for that—but I can’t help feeling that the statistic actually masks more than it reveals. So here are some further statistics worth pondering: a cursory glimpse at the data from the translation database established by Chad Post of Open Letter and now maintained by Publishers Weekly reveals that, between 2018 and 2022, 58% of books published in translation came from French, Spanish, German, or Italian. To my shock, this figure has only increased over time: between 2008 and 2017, for instance, 48% of translated books were translated from these Big Four languages. I remain astonished that the diversity of books published in translation seems to be diminishing, rather than growing. And yet, it is not surprising: as large publishers attempt to consolidate monopolies, “risk aversion becomes systemic,” preventing smaller publishers from taking chances on new kinds of works.

And so when we celebrate the increasing visibility of translation, we should also ask about what languages and literatures—and, consequently, what human experiences—are afforded visibility. If translated literature still makes up only three percent of the market in the United States, what does it say about the state of publishing that literature from thousands of languages beyond the Big Four has been relegated to a single, dwindling percentage point? How can translators from “lesser” translated languages garner visibility when the Big Four languages have only increased their share of the translation market over time? What good is a World Literature that privileges western languages, that reproduces existing global hierarchies, that retrenches European hegemony over cultural production? Why are publishers increasingly consolidating around these Big Four languages and increasingly excluding all others? The crucial work ahead lies in the hands of publishers and editors, to diversify their catalogs with braver acquisitions and more critical awareness of the inequities they perpetrate. Diversifying catalogs would mean greater opportunities for emerging translators, translators of color, and translators beyond North America and Europe. Championing linguistic diversity would stave off the reduction of any and all publishing decisions to mere actuarial science, and it would challenge the corporatization of literature itself. We deserve more than three percent, of course, but we also deserve a World Literature that represents more than the Big Four languages.

—Translator Nicholas Glastonbury

A really great question, in terms of what should be the next priority for the translation community. There are so many things that I still think need to be addressed, but if I had to choose one or two, I would say royalties from the first book sold should be standard practice for every publisher. The times this has happened with me, it’s been tremendously rewarding in every sense of the word. I also find that for translators to access publishers and editors, to get their work in front of them, still remains very much a game of “who knows who” or “who knows you.” If you don’t know the right individuals, you can’t get your work seen by the right pair of eyes. This needs to change.

—Translator Sawad Hussain

Link to the rest at Words Without Borders

From The Economist:

Annie Ernaux is surely the only winner of the Nobel prize in literature to have written nostalgically—even ecstatically—about the London suburb of North Finchley. Her book of 2016, “A Girl’s Story”, is typical of the French writer’s approach. As the author recounts formative late-teenage experiences in Normandy and as an au pair in London, she blends deeply personal memoir with social and historical insight. Decades later, she returns to the city for a literary event; while her fellow delegates consume culture, she takes the Tube and plunges “back into my past life”. As she writes, “the only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure.”

Ms Ernaux’s forensic but lyrical French prose has been seizing life and time, and mining literary pleasure from even the most harrowing memories, for almost half a century. On October 6th the Swedish Academy chose her as its Nobel laureate for 2022 “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. She is a prose poet of everyday hopes and fears; she probes how change and conflict affect the most “ordinary” of folk, especially women of supposedly low status. Many of her books channel the life she has led not around Left Bank cafés and salons, but in Cergy-Pontoise, a new and unglamorous suburban town north-west of Paris.

Born in Normandy in 1940, Ms Ernaux’s parents ran a café-grocery. She studied in Rouen and Bordeaux, taught in secondary schools and then, for 23 years, worked for a French distance-learning university, cned. Her shelf of two-dozen books began with fiction (“Cleaned Out” in 1974) but soon moved into a form of creative autobiography in which rigorous, unsparing accounts of private life enter the flow of shared social experience.

“A Woman’s Story” (1987), a searing account of her mother’s life and death from Alzheimer’s, helped secure her reputation in France. The injustices of class, gender and background loom large in her work, but never as political abstractions. This is history felt on the body, not just processed by the intellect. “I believe that desire, frustration and social and cultural inequality are reflected in the way we examine the contents of our shopping trolley or in the words we use to order a cut of beef,” she has said.

Desire, shame, sickness, loneliness and depression may brand her own and other lives. But, within and behind the most intimate feelings, she traces the marks of a whole culture and an epoch. This unique angle of vision broadened into “The Years” (2008), the book that ranks as her masterpiece. Its autobiographical trajectory widens into a collective psycho-social history of France between the 1940s and the turn of the millennium. Decades, governments and attitudes pass, but adverts, catchphrases and fads lodge in the collective memory as much as big ideas or great events. Translated by Alison Strayer, it won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2019 (of which your correspondent was a judge): to date, one of Ms Ernaux’s few honours in the Anglosphere. In France, her many awards include the Prix de la langue française and the Prix Marguerite-Yourcenar, both for the entire body of her work

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Public Books:

In 1857, the largest rebellion against the British East India Company took place. It spread across the subcontinent and among people of different religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. The city of Delhi, as the seat of the Mughal emperor, held special significance among the rebellion’s many centers. The previous year, the Company had annexed the neighboring state of Awadh and exiled its ruler in a particularly venal move. It shattered the last illusions that the Company’s political ambitions would be limited by even an appearance of what was lawful. Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was to become the last Mughal emperor, feared for his remaining authority, which did not really extend beyond the city of Shahjahanabad, the walled enclave of political power in Delhi. And it is the powder keg of Shahjahanabad that is threatened with ignition by a murder in Raza Mir’s historical mystery, Murder at the Mushaira. That is, unless Mirza Ghalib—a real-world poet in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor—can solve the mystery in time.

As required by their profession, detectives in Indian historical mysteries in English routinely and expertly transgress boundaries created by the socialization of the encounters between native and colonial hierarchies. In Mir’s novel, the process of this socialization comes to a head, with battle lines being drawn not only between the British and the rebels, but between rebels with different understandings of history, and between domestic and public spheres, as well as between different systems of political and cultural patronage.

At the center of these many oppositions is Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. In his novel, Mir casts one of 19th-century Delhi’s most illustrious residents as his detective.

Ghalib was born in 1797, six years before the East India Company captured Delhi from the Maratha Confederacy. His first collection of poems was written when he was 19, followed by decades of poetic compositions in Persian and a Persianized Urdu. Most of his now-famous Urdu ghazals, written later in life, were under the patronage of Bahadur Shah, himself a poet. Mir portrays Ghalib, as he was in real life, beleaguered by debt and familial conflict, painfully aware of each slight to his prodigious talent—in this case a reluctant detective who would rather write poems than solve crimes. Unlike many historical-mystery writers whose characters are taken from real history, Mir makes little to no changes to Ghalib’s character and temperament for the sake of fiction, for which there is sufficient documentation. His family being at the receiving end of both Mughal and Company patronage, his employment by the British in the role of a “cultural expert,” a native informant, to solve the mystery also rings true. It is of course a role that is then overwhelmed by the happenings of 1857, when, as Ghalib wrote in a letter a year later, “so many friends died that now when I die, there won’t even be anyone left to mourn for me.”¹

In Murder at the Mushaira, Mirza Ghalib, blessed with uncommon insight and nearing the end of his life, is chief witness to the dying of his world. The novel itself is a satisfying read, paradoxically perhaps, because it so often divests its energies from genre conventions that are beloved by fans, and it gives itself over to the uncertainty and devastation of this moment in the history of India.

Mystery and crime fiction, even when not ostensibly historical, depend on the past, however recent, being available as a tantalizingly difficult object of investigation. Historical mysteries not only reinforce this rewarding pastness of the past by placing it at a greater distance, but they also analogize the detective’s queries within the narrative to the reader’s curiosity about the past itself. So what does it mean when Indian historical mysteries concentrate on the period of colonial rule? How does the solution of the crime figure against the collective inheritances of colonial pasts?

These novels have understandably capitalized on the romance of the Raj—the British colonial regime that lasted until 1947—which, in turn, is often connected to the decline of colonial rule. In fact, quite a few of these series are set in the 1920s, corresponding to the so-called golden age of detective fiction, when the likes of Agatha Christie started publishing.

The 1920s as a cultural idiom have powerfully affected writers of historical mysteries. But in choosing to set their mysteries in India of the 1920s, a decade that saw an upswell both in anticolonial movements and in their brutal repression, these writers produce interesting results.

Christie’s novels frequent the drawing rooms and parties of the English upper and middle classes. At times, these elites are shielded from the economic downturn in Britain in the early 20th century, often benefiting from colonial wealth. Christie’s crime fiction is mostly classified as cozy mysteries, indicating their underlying sense of comfort and the conviction that nothing really bad happens, which is a product of the novels’ spatial and economic logics.

However, the spaces that contain and arrange Christie’s characters—manor houses, seaside resorts, golfing hotels, and even sleepy hamlets—all replicate the logics of empire, their coziness inextricably tied to the latter’s political, ideological, and economic cohesion. Even when Christie mocks superior senses of Britishness that would brook no criticism, whether in person or in organization, the lasting impression of these spaces’ comfort is still linked to that Britishness that has resulted from centuries of imperial self-affirmation.

The factors behind the coziness in Sujata Massey’s Perveen Mistry novels are a little different. Here the coziness is afforded by the detective’s upper-class Anglicized Parsi community of Bombay, whose monetary and social capital was a product of the colonial economy. Modeled after the first female lawyer of modern India, Cornelia Sorabji, Mistry’s exclusion from the larger professional field of law owing to her gender is calibrated against the affluent spaces that open up for her due to her class. In the first novel of Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series, the blame for the murder of a British official is at first falsely laid on Indian nationalists, but finally is brought home to the inner rot of the colonial administration. One also has to read his novels vis-à-vis the origins of modern policing in India, which had less to do with solving individual crimes than with the management of colonized spaces and peoples, and often the protection of the interests of religious caste majorities. Besides Mukherjee and Massey, Barbara Cleverly, Brian Stoddart, and Harini Nagendra also set their mysteries in the 1920s.

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG notes that the book described is apparently only available as a hardback on Amazon. Evidently, the publisher didn’t permit Look Inside to be activated for the book. The Share button also appears to be unusable as well.

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

IN 2016, MEXICAN ESSAYIST Mariana Oliver released her debut collection, Aves migratorias. In March 2017, she read a fragment of the book on a podcast, catching the attention of the literary translator Julia Sanches. At the time, Sanches, a former literary agent, had just quit her job and moved to Rhode Island, where she was debating her next professional steps. She ordered a copy of Aves migratorias, waited the seeming eternity it can often take for a book to cross national borders, and, after reading the collection, began to translate an excerpt. She submitted the resulting English-language essay to several journals, but had no luck until Charlotte Whittle, a fellow translator and Oliver fan, included it in her pitch for an issue of the international literary magazine Words Without Borders focusing on women essayists from Mexico — an issue that eventually came out in May 2020. Adam Levy, one of the founding editors of the Oakland-based publisher Transit Books, read the essay and reached out to Sanches, and, as she told me, “the rest is history.” Migratory Birds came out from Transit a year later and went on to win the 2022 PEN Translation Prize.

This years-long story is not, in the world of translation, uncommonly slow. If anything, six years between the publication of the original text and its English translation is rather speedy, especially for a literary work whose author is not a known quantity in the United States. Books like Oliver’s often take a long time to appear in English, finding publishers only through intense effort and great patience on their translators’ part. Indeed, translators frequently double — or, really, quadruple — as literary agents, scouts, and tastemakers. So do the editors who make a point of working with them. It is telling that Sanches first published her translation of Oliver’s work in a journal that rarely prints creative works written originally in English; telling, too, that Levy runs a press that specializes in translation. Increasingly, translated literature in the United States exists in its own ecosystem, one that Eric Becker, digital director and senior editor at Words Without Borders, says “grew out of necessity.” The journal was founded in 2003, he told me, to “address the fact that there wasn’t much work being published in translation.” Twenty years later, the translation landscape is growing, and the magazine has expanded its mission, striving not only to publish translated works but also to “reach people who may not even know they’re interested in international literature” and to advocate for the translators and critics who help that work enter the American literary conversation.

Of course, the question of what constitutes advocacy in the literary world is a complex one. For Words Without Borders, Becker told me, it means crediting translators, paying writers and translators equally, and actively seeking to launch new writers’ and translators’ careers. The magazine has published some 3,000 poems, stories, and essays by authors from over 140 countries, giving many — including every writer mentioned in this essay — their first English-language exposure or helping their work grab the attention of agents who can further their careers. Crucially, that exposure is readily available to anyone with an internet connection: unlike many print-only or print-focused literary journals, which tend to rely on a subscription model, Words Without Borders is free.

But free isn’t always a good thing. Many translators, myself included, are exhaustingly familiar with the expectation that we should work for little or no pay. One way to resist that idea is simply to expose it; another, for many translators, is cooperative action. Translators’ collectives are abundant; online and in industry groups like the American Literary Translators Association, translators offer each other information and support that can be vital in the often opaque publishing industry. Asked about the effect of her agenting past on her translation present, including her role as the chair of the Authors Guild’s Translation Group, Sanches said that this insider knowledge “makes me a better advocate for myself and my peers.” She then highlighted the Authors Guild’s model translation contract, which is heavily annotated and includes the explicit statement that “a large number of U.S. translators are being paid rates that make it difficult, if not impossible, to earn a living, so we continue urging translators to ask for fair compensation and publishers to provide it.” Arguably, fair compensation is the bedrock on which any other politics of translation must rest; as Jhumpa Lahiri writes in the introduction to her 2022 essay collection Translating Myself and Others, it’s hard to perform the “essential aesthetic and political mission of opening linguistic and cultural borders” without being able to make the rent.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

From Slate:

Imagine you are in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and your small child unexpectedly starts to have a fever seizure. You take them to the hospital, and the doctors use an online translator to let you know that your kid is going to be OK. But “your child is having a seizure” accidentally comes up in your mother tongue is “your child is dead.”

This specific example is a very real possibility, according to a 2014 study published in the British Medical Journal about the limited usefulness of AI-powered machine translation in communications between patients and doctors. (Because it’s a British publication, the actual hypothetical quote was “your child is fitting.” Sometimes we need American-British translation, too.)

Machine translation tools like Google Translate can be super handy, and Big Tech often promotes them as accurate and accessible tools that’ll break down many intra-linguistic barriers in the modern world. But the truth is that things can go awfully wrong. Misplaced trust in these MT tools’ ability is already leading to their misuse by authorities in high-stake situations, according to experts—ordering a coffee in a foreign country or translating lyrics can only do so much harm, but think about emergency situations involving firefighters, police, border patrol, or immigration. And without proper regulation and clear guidelines, it could get worse.

Machine translation systems such as Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and those embedded in platforms like Skype and Twitter are some of the most challenging tasks in data processing. Training a big model can produce as much CO2 as a trans-Atlantic flight. For the training, an algorithm or a combination of algorithms is fed a specific dataset of translations. The algorithms save words and their relative positions as probabilities that they may occur together, creating a statistical estimate as to what other translations of similar sentences might be. The algorithmic system, therefore, doesn’t interpret the meaning, context, and intention of words, like a human translator would. It takes an educated guess—one that isn’t necessarily accurate.

In South Korea, a young man used a Chinese-to-Korean translation app to tell his female co-worker’s Korean husband they should all hang out together again soon. A mistranslation resulted in him erroneously referring to the woman as a nightlife establishment worker, resulting in a violent fistfight between the two in which the husband was killed, the Korea Herald reported in May. In Israel, a young man captioned a photo of himself leaning on a bulldozer with the Arabic caption “يصبحهم,” or “good morning,” but the social media’s AI translation rendered it as “hurt them” in English or “attack them” in Hebrew. This led the man, a construction worker, to being arrested and questioned by police, according to the Guardian in October 2017. Something similar happened in Denmark, where, the Copenhagen Post Online reported in September 2012, police erroneously confronted a Kurdish man for financing terrorism because of a mistranslated text message. In 2017, a cop in Kansas used Google Translate to ask a Spanish-speaker if they could search their car for drugs. But the translation was inaccurate and the driver did not fully understand what he had agreed to given the lack of accuracy in the translation. The case was thrown out of court, according to state legal documents.

These examples are no surprise. Accuracy of translation can vary widely within a single language—according to language complexity factors such as syntax, sentence length, or the technical domain—as well as between languages and language pairs, depending on how well the models have been developed and trained. A 2019 study showed that, in medical settings, hospital discharge instructions translated with Google Translate into Spanish and Chinese are getting better over the years, with between 81 percent and 92 percent overall accuracy. But the study also found that up to 8 percent of mistranslations actually have potential for significant harm. A pragmatic assessment of Google Translate for emergency department instructions from 2021 showed that the overall meaning was retained for 82.5 percent of 400 translations using Spanish, Armenian, Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, and Farsi. But while translations in Spanish and Tagalog are accurate more than 90 percent of the time, there’s a 45 percent chance that they’ll be wrong when it comes to languages like Armenian. Not all errors in machine translation are of the same severity, but quality evaluations always find some critical accuracy errors, according to this June paper.

The good news is that Big Tech companies are fully aware of this, and their algorithms are constantly improving. Year after year, their BLEU scores—which measure how similar machine-translated text is to a bunch of high quality human translations—get consistently better. Just recently, Microsoft replaced some of its translation systems with a more efficient class of AI model. Software programs are also updated to include more languages, even those often described as “low-resource languages” because they are less common or harder to work with; that includes most non-European languages, even widely used ones like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, to small community languages, like Sardinian and Pitkern. For example, Google has been building a practical machine translation system for more than 1,000 languages. Meta has just released the No Language Left Behind project, which attempts to deploy high-quality translations directly between 200 languages, including languages like Asturian, Luganda, and Urdu, accompanied by data about how improved the translations were overall.

However, the errors that lead to consequential mistakes—like the construction worker experienced—tend to be random, subjective, and different for each platform and each language. So cataloging them is only superfluously helpful in figuring out how to improve MT, says Félix Do Carmo, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. What we need to talk about instead, he says, is “How are these tools integrated into society?” Most critically, we have to be realistic about what MT can and cannot do for people right now. This involves understanding the role machine translation can have in everyday life, when and where it can be used, and how it is perceived by the people using it. “We have seen discussions about errors in every generation of machine translation. There is always this expectation that it will get better,” says Do Carmo. “We have to find human-scale solutions for human problems.”

And that means understanding the role human translators still need to play. Even as medications have gotten massively better over the decades, there still is a need for a doctor to prescribe them. Similarly, in many translation use cases, there is no need to totally cut out the human mediator, says Sabine Braun, director of the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. One way to take advantage of increasingly sophisticated technology while guarding against errors is something called machine translation followed by post-editing, or MT+PE, in which a human reviews and refines the translation.

Link to the rest at Slate

From Smithsonian Magazine:

In 1927, with the publication of her short story “The Tuesday Night Club,” Agatha Christie debuted a new and instantly iconic character: Miss Jane Marple, an elderly woman from a small British village, whose twee penchants for knitting and local gossip belie a cunning ability to crack killer crimes.

Christie did not expect Miss Marple to rival the popularity of Hercule Poirot, her meticulous Belgian detective who put his little grey cells to good work in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the novel that had catapulted Christie to literary fame the previous year. But readers loved the “fussy and spinsterish” Marple, whom Christie would go on to feature in 12 novels and 20 short stories. The detective made her final appearance in 1976’s Sleeping Murder, published the same year as Christie’s death.

But now, Miss Marple is making a comeback. As Sarah Shaffi of the Guardian reports, a new collection of short stories, sanctioned by the Christie estate, features 12 new Marple tales penned by a diverse lineup of contemporary women writers.

Simply titled Marple, the collection includes contributions by seasoned crime authors, like Val McDermid and Dreda Say Mitchell. But it also features stories by those who typically work in other genres, like the historical writers Kate Mosse and Natalie Haynes, and the fantasy author Leigh Bardugo.

The writers were asked to follow a set of guidelines. They had to set their stories within the time period in which Miss Marple exists in Christie’s work, and refrain from inventing new backstories for the detective. They were able to incorporate characters and events from the canon of Marple stories, but they were asked not to draw on plot points from other Christie books.

The project came with pressure to live up to the legacies of the “Queen of Crime” and one of her most beloved characters. “The greatest challenge was knowing that if I didn’t do this well, I would enrage many, many fans,” Jean Kwok tells Emily Burack of Town & Country.

But the new stories transcend mere emulations of Christie’s writing, with each author leaving her unique fingerprints on the narratives. Mitchell, for example, tells the Guardian that she is personally interested in the contributions of Caribbean women during the world wars, and thus has Miss Marple collaborate with Miss Bella, “a former member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force whom Miss Marple met in an air raid shelter.” Kwok used to read Christie’s novels as “a poverty-stricken first-generation immigrant” who had moved to New York City from Hong Kong; she has her Miss Marple travel to Hong Kong on a cruise ship—with an “untimely death aboard,” of course.

Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine

From The Economist:

Hundreds of thousands of Britons have responded to the death of Queen Elizabeth II in a very British way: by queuing. A line to see the queen lying in state started to form on September 12th, two days before viewings in Westminster Hall began. By the afternoon of September 15th the estimated waiting time in London was over eight hours. It will continue, day and night, until 6.30am on September 19th, the morning of her funeral. As the line snaked for miles along the Thames, observers reacted appreciatively. One tweet called The Queue “the greatest bit of British performance art that has ever happened”. But is queuing the best way to do things?

Organisers needed a way to allocate scarce resources, or in this case, limited slots to file through Westminster Hall past the coffin. An ideal system would give spots to those who value them the most, with everyone having an equal shot at securing one. A queue effectively rations out the spots to those who turn up first—and who are willing to wait. An alternative might have been a lottery, with spots randomly allocated to a subset of those who applied, as was deployed for a concert to mark the queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June. Or even perhaps some kind of market, with prices for each time slot set high enough to balance supply and demand. To visit Buckingham Palace, for example, one must buy a ticket.

As a rationing mechanism, a queue has some advantages. Participating in a line that could stretch overnight, or at least several hours, is a strong signal of one’s eagerness. It also reduces the risk that those who cannot afford to pay for the privilege are shut out. But it has drawbacks. Although participants are not paying money for their spot, they are paying in time and comfort. Economists fret that a queue such as this favours those without much else to do and excludes those who cannot, for example, afford to skip work. Others, such as the frail and the sick, might not be able to access the queue at all.

The alternatives reduce the inefficiency of long waits. But they have their own disadvantages. A lottery system risks those who feel very strongly about seeing the queen losing out to someone lucky who does not care very much. A market-based system will allocate spots based on who values the experience—and who is also most able to pay. That would seem distasteful and unfair. A study published in 1977, by Martin Weitzman, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that, in cases where needs were more equally distributed or where income was more unequally distributed, rationing (of which queuing is one form) outperformed pricing in its ability to allocate things to whoever needed them most.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Economist:

Perhat Tursun was a precocious teenager.

He published his first poem when he was 11 years old and started university in Beijing at the age of 14. Back then, in 1983, few books by foreign authors were available in Uyghur, his native tongue. So Mr Tursun mastered Mandarin and gained access to troves of translated foreign works. He devoured the writings of Camus, Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Kafka. When other Uyghurs arrived in the capital to study, he advised them to do the same.

Through reading, young Uyghurs could explore a world that was off-limits. As members of the predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic minority, acquiring a passport was difficult and they faced bitter prejudice in Beijing, a city dominated by ethnic-Han Chinese. Despite these obstacles, the group of Uyghurs nurtured a passion for literature and philosophy and would go on to become some of the leading intellectuals of their generation. Mr Tursun made a name for himself as one of the most influential modernist writers in the Uyghur language. He chafed against convention and despised obsequiousness, recalls Tahir Hamut Izgil, a renowned Uyghur writer and film-maker living in exile in America, who was among the students Mr Tursun mentored.

Years later, in 2006, Mr Tursun finished writing “The Backstreets”, a book which echoes his life. The narrator is a nameless Uyghur from rural Xinjiang, a region in the far west of China, who is hired by a company in Urumqi, the regional capital, to fill their diversity quota. The protagonist grapples with racist superiors and callous strangers while searching for a place to live. Published in America and Britain on September 13th, “The Backstreets” is the first Uyghur-language novel to be translated into English.

Written as a stream of consciousness, the book exemplifies Mr Tursun’s unconventional use of form and style. At one point the Uyghur narrator imagines the murderous rage of a Han bystander and the page is filled with 215 consecutive repetitions of the word “chop”. Visceral and often disorientating, “The Backstreets” illustrates the painful effects of racism and exclusion. It is a strange and devastating novel, a portrait of what it means to become a second-class citizen in your homeland.

Darren Byler, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, discovered the novel while conducting fieldwork on Uyghur migration in 2014 and felt it “deserved a broader audience”. To decode the book’s dense language and cultural references, he relied on his co-translator, a Uyghur migrant living in Urumqi, credited only as Anonymous. They met daily in a teahouse, often in the company of friends—and, they suspected, informants.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Publishing Perspectives:

Another effort in getting books to refugee children being displaced in Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, the United Kingdom’s Publishers Licensing Services (PLS) collective licensing agency Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) and the printing firm Halstan have announced a partnership to pay for and produce 16,000 Ukrainian-language books for young readers in the UK.

And among the many “without borders” operations in the international sphere, one called “Books Without Borders” has been organized by the Ukrainian embassy in London to engage in these efforts, with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, as its patron.

An event was held Thursday (August 11) at the British Library to recognize the effort, in which Ukrainian publishers provided layouts and permission for 16 picture books and novels for ages 3 to 17.

England’s Halstan did the printing in the UK because much of Ukraine’s printing capability has been halted. Zelenska made a digital appearance during that program by remote video, doing a bit of a reading for some of her country’s displaced children in the course of the meeting.

Such efforts as these, as our readers know, have been replicated across many parts of Europe, most recently in our reportage in Germany, Poland, and Italy.

In this case, production of the books was funded through substantial donations by Publishers Licensing Services (formerly Publishers Licensing Society) and Halstan, with additional material support provided by Canon Commercial Print Division and Premier Paper.

. . . .

In her comments on the program’s work, Zelenska said, “Books not only entertain and educate us. They also unite us and bring us back to a feeling of home. This project is our victory on the cultural front, and it brings our primary victory closer.

‘We can bring the homeland to Ukrainian children in the form of books. We called this project ‘Books Without Borders’ as Ukrainian books can travel with Ukrainians to any country where they’re needed. The embassy of Ukraine to the UK, together with Halstan, Publishers’ Licensing Service, and other benefactors, have printed 16,000 books.

“I’m grateful to everyone who has contributed to this project. Displaced Ukrainian children will now be able to enjoy a mini-library at home.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Publishers Weekly:

In the United Kingdom, the National Centre for Writing in Norwich has today announced (July 22) the available languages and mentors in its Emerging Translator Mentorships program for the 2022-2023 cycle.

In its 13th year, the program is intended to encourage “successive new cohorts of literary translators into English, particularly for languages the literature of which is under-represented in English translation.”

Languages and Mentors Named

• Arabic – mentored by Sawad Hussain
• Danish – mentored by Paul Russell Garrett
• Hindi (The Saroj Lal Mentorship) – mentored by Daisy Rockwell
• Indonesian (Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize) – mentored by Khairani Barokka
• Italian – mentored by Howard Curtis
• Japanese – mentored by Juliet Winters Carpenter
• Korean – mentored by Anton Hur
• Norwegian – mentored by Rosie Hedger
• Polish – mentored by Sean Gasper Bye
• Québec French or First Nations languages – mentored by Sarah Ardizzone
• Swedish – mentored by Nichola Smalley
• Ukrainian – mentored by Nina Murray
• Visible communities – mentored by Meena Kandasamy

As to the reference to “visible communities,” it’s “a mentorship open to UK-based literary translators who are either Black, Asian and ethnically diverse, or working from heritage, diaspora, and community languages of the United Kingdom.”

The slot for mentoring in Québec French or First Nations languages is open to literary translators working from either one or more of the following languages: Québecois French, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Cree, Innu, Inuktitut, Micmac, Mohawk, or Naskapi.

In a prepared statement, the center’s program manager, Rebecca DeWald, is quoted, saying, “‘We’re looking forward to offering 13 promising literary translators the opportunity to work with an experienced translator to hone their skills and expertise and build their confidence as key players in international literature.

“The selection of languages we’re supporting this year spans many Asian, European, and Afro-Asian languages, as well as, for the first time, First Nations languages spoken in Québec. In addition, we’re pleased to be able to offer a dedicated Ukrainian mentorship this year, and to feature Hindi for the second time, thanks to the Saroj Lal mentorship. We’re also excited to continue our biannual partnership with publisher Harvill Secker for this year’s Young Translators’ Prize in Indonesian.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Atlantic:

Culture, too, is a casualty of war. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainian writers called for a boycott of Russian music, films, and books. Others have all but accused Russian literature of complicity in the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. The entire culture, they say, is imperialist, and this military aggression reveals the moral bankruptcy of Russia’s so-called civilization. The road to Bucha, they argue, runs through Russian literature.

Terrible crimes, I agree, are being committed in the name of my people, in the name of my country, in my name. I can see how this war has turned the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy into the language of war criminals and murderers. What does the world see of “Russian culture” today but bombs falling on maternity hospitals and mutilated corpses on the streets of Kyiv’s suburbs?

It hurts to be Russian right now. What can I say when I hear that a Pushkin monument is being dismantled in Ukraine? I just keep quiet and feel penitent. And hope that perhaps a Ukrainian poet will speak up for Pushkin.

The Putin regime has dealt Russian culture a crushing blow, just as the Russian state has done to its artists, musicians, and writers so many times before. People in the arts are forced to sing patriotic songs or emigrate. The regime has in effect “canceled” culture in my country. Recently a young protester faced arrest for holding a placard that bore a quote from Tolstoy.

Russian culture has always had reason to fear the Russian state. In the saying commonly attributed to the great 19th-century thinker and writer Alexander Herzen, who was sent into internal exile for his anti-czarist sentiments—and reading “forbidden books,” as he put it—“The state in Russia has set itself up like an occupying army.” The Russian system of political power has remained unchanged and unchanging down the centuries—a pyramid of slaves worshipping the supreme khan. That’s how it was during the Golden Horde, that’s how it was in Stalin’s time, that’s how it is today under Vladimir Putin.

The world is surprised at the quiescence of the Russian people, the lack of opposition to the war. But this has been their survival strategy for generations—as the last line of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov puts it, “The people are silent.” Silence is safer. Whoever is in power is always right, and you have to obey whatever order comes. And whoever disagrees ends up in jail or worse. And as Russians know only too well from bitter historical experience, never say, This is the worst. As the popular adage has it: “One should not wish death on a bad czar.” For who knows what the next one will be like?

Only words can undo this silence. This is why poetry was always more than poetry in Russia. Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camps when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them.

The Russian state has no use for Russian culture unless it can be made to serve the state. Soviet power wanted to give itself an air of humanity and righteousness, so it built monuments to Russian writers. “Pushkin, our be-all and end-all!” rang out from stages in 1937, during the Great Purge, when even the executioners trembled with fear. The regime needs culture as a human mask—or as combat camouflage. That’s why Stalin needed Dmitri Shostakovich and Putin needs Valery Gergiev.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

From The Economist:

In retrospect, would Boris Berezovsky agree that the Russian privatisation scheme of the mid-1990s was unfair? The questioner had in mind the way a few insiders took over vast industrial assets for a song, a giant scam that helped discredit markets and democracy among their struggling compatriots. Absolutely it was unfair, replied Berezovsky, who in 2000 had sought refuge in Britain, where the exchange took place: Mikhail Khodorkovsky got more than he did.

Mr Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, spent a decade in prison before his release into exile in 2013; Berezovsky died in contested circumstances in the same year. Both numbered among the original Russian oligarchs: a small cadre of men who grew up in the Soviet era and in the bare-knuckle 1990s became more rich, more quickly than almost anyone ever had. They brought their feuds to London, along with their wealth, in some cases eventually losing much of it. They lived many lives in one, all of them dramatic. Now Peter Morgan has written a version of that drama.

The star turn, though, is Will Keen as Putin. The stage is shaped like a nightclub bar, and for a while Putin sits on a low stool, unnoticed, before—literally and symbolically—Berezovsky yanks him up and into the action. Mr Keen mimics the snarl and seething menace of a hangdog who wants to be top dog. During his traceless rise from deputy mayor of St Petersburg to fsb boss, prime minister and then the presidency, Putin’s nervy strut becomes a swagger, the posture hardens inside his better-cut suits. The heart dies.

It didn’t have to be this way. That is one message of “Patriots” (in which, for almost everyone, patriotism and self-interest are fused). Cornered on press night, Mr Morgan said the tragedy of his play lay not in Berezovsky’s fate but in the miscalculation he made in elevating Putin, a mistake with still-spiralling consequences. Live and organic, theatre is the perfect art form to capture this feeling of contingency, the vertiginous sense that history turns on moments and decisions that might have gone differently.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

AS SOMEONE WHO grew up in India in the early 2000s, after the once-colonized country had opened itself to the global economy, one thing was clear to me. Aspiration and English were synonymous. Both were essential. This lesson was drilled into me at my missionary-run English-medium high school in New Delhi. Whether we dreamed of becoming doctors or engineers or corporate hotshots, we were repeatedly told that we needed to have English. Students were penalized for speaking in any language other than English, and our pronunciations were disciplined in preparation for roles no one doubted we would take on. Away from the institutional ear, my peers and I still cherished our other languages, to varying degrees. But, for the most part, we learned to joke, dream, rebel, and obey in English.

Everyone agreed that English was A Good Thing to Have. I heard similar ideas about the importance of English at home as well. My father, raising daughters in a country that did not value women, encouraged my sister and me to speak in English, and beamed with pride when we did. This expectation felt awkward — absurd, even — because English was not a language the other women in our family shared. My grandmother and mother both spoke in Hindi. I remember once, while tidying the house, my grandmother asked my sister if she needed the scrap of paper she had just thrown on the floor. No, my sister replied. But isn’t it important? It says something in English, it has your name. My grandmother was confused as my sister rolled her eyes. I remember feeling curious about how my grandmother, who I was sure didn’t know English, must have memorized the visual shape of the Roman script that traced her firstborn grandchild’s name. I remember wondering if she could read my name in English.

More recently, working on a book on the English language in postcolonial India, I was moved by my grandmother’s instinct to save a piece of paper scribbled over in English. A Good Thing to Have. It made me curious about how the material life of English in India overlapped with its literary life. What else had my grandmother read in English visually like this? I was also struck by how scenes of speaking and reading in English at school and at home — our most intimate and ordinary experiences — were rehearsals of caste and class positions. Each scene unfolded a different register of the meaning of English, drawing from and moving beyond it as the language of transnational capitalism and as a dubious legacy of British colonialism. With each case, to paraphrase Rebecca Walkowitz, English became both more than and less than a language. English was the promise of social mobility and feminist progress. It was a correct(ed) pronunciation and a scrap of paper.

The story of English in India toggles between the conceptions of the language as an idea and as an object. Scholars of postcolonial literatures have often looked to its colonial formation as the source of its meaning. But English has always been a language that has looked ahead to the future. Forged multiply in the crucible of caste, class, gender, and ethnic politics, English has found roots in India as a language that erases itself in the hope of what it could be. As a nation, we are obsessed with correcting each other’s grammar. Just look to Twitter. We shame celebrities for speaking “wrong” English, whatever we think that is. The memes and jokes about Indian English write themselves, filling up a billion-people-sized cloud storage on the internet and spilling out of WhatsApp groups. But this preoccupation with linguistic propriety is not about English at all. It stems, in fact, from a desire to claim English — either as a marker of class and caste authority or as its rejection. It stems from the lush possibilities associated with English — what it could be made to mean, what it could be made to do, what one could do in it.

. . . .

Amid bloody protests in non-Hindi-speaking parts of India, the Indian Constitution enlisted English for its potential to be something other than a language of slavery. English, the reasoning went, was equally foreign to all in India and thus politically neutral. Through translational projects, English could help create a governmental vocabulary in Hindi and mediate language conflicts. First temporarily in 1949 and then permanently in 1963, English was legislated as the associate official language, with Sanskritized Hindi as the official language of India. This practical concession to the monolingual aspirations of a newly formed nation would ensure that Hindi developed in relation to English. Hindi and English together would enhance the postcolonial Indian state’s democratic, secular, and modern character, while also leaving the undemocratic and communally charged Sanskritization of Hindi unchallenged. On several occasions, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, referred to English as a key to world knowledges, as a unifying cement to hold together the country’s linguistic diversity, and as a technology of progress to lead it into the future. The possibilities of English in the world’s largest democracy lend the language an outsize symbolic presence. But instrumentalized as a supplement and a prop to Hindi — as national cement — English also seems to shrink into something less than a language.

But perhaps “shrink” is not the right word. For this same English — instrumentalized as the supplementary language of democracy — also expands political worlds. Dalit thinkers and writers have leveraged the scientific rationalism and the linguistic medium of British colonial rule to challenge upper-caste authority. Key Dalit leaders like B. R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, and the education reformers Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule often wrote in and praised English, invoking its potential as a weapon in the struggle against the caste system. Writing in English helped reach a wider Anglophone audience and find global allies. English also offered an alternative medium of expression to the caste-marked Indian languages. Most playfully and provocatively, in 2010, Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer-activist of libertarian leanings, paid tribute to the promise of English by calling the language a Dalit goddess and building a temple for it. He mounted the idol of this goddess on a computer-shaped pedestal, putting the bilingual (Hindi and English) Indian Constitution in one of its hands and a pen in the other. This iconography equated the English language with liberty itself, promising that literacy and technology would guarantee freedom and democratic inclusion. Its devotees — many of whom can neither read nor write English — worship the Dalit goddess English for delivering them from centuries of caste oppression. English as goddess derives its power from technology and invokes the democratic potential inscribed in the Indian Constitution to contest the casteist state.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

From PBS:

The cerebral TV detective Endeavour Morse first materialized in the bestselling crime novels by Colin Dexter. Morse was a fascinating new sort of cop, a sensitive soul in love with opera and poetry, not stereotypically weary and hard drinking. Inspector Morse proceeded to hook U.S. television audiences from 1988–2001, generated the sequel Inspector Lewis (2006–2016), and the prequel Endeavour (2012–) with Shaun Evans as the young Morse.

Here are all 13 titles as published, with commentary from two crime fiction aficionados who knew Dexter.

. . . .

Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) Dexter first began writing in 1972, creating a police detective who’s passionate about the arts and whose intellect may be wasted in his position. Morse and partner DS Lewis explore the death of a girl beaten outside an Oxford pub. The author “struggled to refine [this debut book] into a form he found pleasing,” says Forshaw. That said, “it demonstrated at a stroke that Dexter was an effortless master of the crime novel.”

Last Seen Wearing (1976) Like most Morse stories, this one centers on a puzzle. “Someone is dead, but not exactly dead,” says Gulli. In fact, the deceased is sending letters. Dexter’s second novel “firmly set his name as a writer who’d one day be the crime fiction heir to Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and John Dickson Carr,” Gulli adds. “Though his works can be described as literary puzzles, Dexter was more concerned with the ultimate riddle—the motivations of the human mind.”

The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977) Like his character Nicholas Quinn, Dexter became a school administrator after losing his hearing. Here, Quinn joins an ad-hoc university committee where his profound deafness actually leads him to unearth a conspiracy. A prologue provides readers with clues Morse and Lewis don’t have as they investigate Quinn’s murder. “With all the books I’ve written, I’ve always known what’s going to happen…I suppose I must be categorized as a whodunit writer rather than the kind who concentrates on the motivation of crime,” Dexter told Gulli for The Strand.

Service of All the Dead (1979) The novel is presented in four parts, each taken from a book of the Bible. Dexter addresses moral questions from personal responsibility to protecting one’s reputation. “The formula with Dexter in his [writing] was that there was no formula,” says Gulli. “This is one of my favorites—steeped with Gothic atmosphere, treachery, and murder. And not only a good book, but instructional for aspiring writers.” The UK’s Crime Writers Association awarded Dexter’s fourth novel its Silver Dagger prize.

Link to the rest at PBS

From Publishing Perspectives:

In our look at the April bestseller charts in China, we focused on an interesting inflection point in which consumers seem to be waiting for new “online literature” to take to their hearts in book form.

In May, our associates at Beijing OpenBook saw the role of what they interpret to be emotional attraction and canny promotions.

As examples, Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle (Beijing October Art & Literature Publishing House) entered the fiction chart at No. 22 and Crystal Spiral (Nan Hai Publishing) by Keigo Higashino arrived at N0. 29, having just been published in April (Nan Hai Publishing).

As our associates point out, Yu Hua’s To Live (at No. 10 in May in a new edition from Beijing October Art & Literature Publishing House) had benefited in 2018 by an endorsement from film star Yi YangQian Xi.

This year, e-commerce pr0motions began well before the June 1 to 18 shopping promotional period, so that by May book sales pros were approaching the annual “618” promotions as a chance to push Yu Hua’s book.

And the ability of Crystal Spiral to appear so quickly in China’s relatively slow-moving market rankings reinforces the fascination that the prolific Japanese author Higashino has for so many Chinese readers.

The key to Higashino’s work, OpenBook’s Wendy Pan points out to us, is his work’s high levels of emotional content. “Crystal Spiral is a detective work full of emotion,” Pan says.

“The work makes people feel that the detective element is less important than the emotional ties in it.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Wall Street Journal:

‘A Yiddish writer in America is an unseen entity,” Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote, “almost a ghost.” He offered this comment to explain why he felt inclined in his fables and fictions “to search for what is hidden from the eye.”

It could be said that an important dimension of the acclaimed Yiddish novelist and short-story writer has until now been hidden from the eye of many readers. “Old Truths and New Clichés,” a collection of 19 prose articles, most appearing in English for the first time, reveals that Singer was as consummate an essayist as he was a teller of tales. “To this day,” David Stromberg writes in his intelligent introduction, “few critics deal seriously with Singer’s essayistic writings.”

Mr. Stromberg, who serves as editor to the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust, has rescued these articles from the author’s archives at the University of Texas in Austin. The collection distills the convictions that informed Singer’s art and rounds out a literary self-portrait. Singer proves to be equally at home in a range of themes and registers, from casual observation to philosophical musing. In one essay he ponders what it is to seek a God who is “eternally in love . . . with his creations.” In another, in a satirical spirit, he considers how the Ten Commandments would be received—and misread—were they issued today.

Singer liked to say that when he was born in a Polish shtetl, his mother asked the midwife, “Is it a boy or a girl?” The midwife answered, “A writer.” The quip, repeated in a short piece here, wouldn’t have amused Singer’s pious parents. For them, a writer was someone inevitably subject to secular temptations.

In “Why I Write as I Do,” Singer describes the religious atmosphere that pervaded—in his memory, stifled—his childhood home in Warsaw. Yet it was there, he writes, that he learned “to transform inhibition into a method of creativity, to recognize in inhibition a friendly power instead of a hostile one.” The son and grandson of rabbis, he waged a “private war against the Almighty,” as he puts it, and replaced orthodox faith with “a sort of kasha of mysticism, deism, and skepticism.” Even so, long after he removed his black gabardine and yarmulka, Singer believed—as he says in another essay—that “it is impossible to write truthfully about human beings without having faith in something higher than human beings.”

Singer had the good sense to leave Poland for New York City in 1935, before Europe’s descent into barbarity and Poland’s dismemberment by Nazi and Soviet occupiers. Other writer-immigrants, like Joseph Conrad (Poland) and Vladimir Nabokov (Russia), switched to English upon arriving in English-speaking lands. Singer refused to do so. Having left behind—one might say, having betrayed—his religious past, his first wife and his 5-year-old son, he remained faithful to his native language, a language without a homeland. As he eked out a living writing under several pseudonyms for the Yiddish daily Forward, he felt comforted by what he calls “the language of exile.” In another essay, he contends that “journalism exerts a beneficial influence upon literary creativity.”

. . . .

The breakthrough came when “Gimpel the Fool,” the tale of a pure-souled simpleton, appeared in Saul Bellow’s propulsive translation in 1953. Singer’s short novels “Satan in Goray” in 1955 and “The Magician of Lublin” in 1960 brought him to a wider American audience. His mischievous narratives, teeming with demons and dybbuks and false messiahs, soon migrated from the pages of small magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary to glossier outlets like Playboy, Esquire and the New Yorker.

An earlier generation of Yiddish writers—led by I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim—had perfected a plain-spoken and pathos-laden mode of storytelling. Singer inherited that legacy but also subverted it, by introducing notes of irony and carnality. Not everyone was pleased. In her novella “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Cynthia Ozick depicted Singer’s detractors, who didn’t merely resent the American fame of a writer they saw as a careerist but, as Ms. Ozick writes, “raged against his subject matter, which was insanely sexual, pornographic, paranoid, freakish.” Singer reports that the editor who published his first stories at a journal in Warsaw had asked: “Why write about thieves and whores when there were so many decent Jewish men and devoted Jewish wives?”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal