Jennifer Wong’s Light Year is a meditation on separation and exile, tracking the concerns of other authors of the Hong Kong diaspora. The title is especially appropriate for the theme: a unit of measurement that calculates distance through the optics of speed and time. Indeed, the poetry focuses on the geographical distance between the United…
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War,…
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently…
Written 40-50 years ago during the South Korean dictatorship from the 1970s-80s, now newly-translated into English and framed by reflective essays, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection The Hell of That Star is a violent and grotesque testament to a censored time. Having worked as an editor during the regime, Kim is familiar with the censorship apparatus…
A child was abandoned on the train tracks of Cheongnyangni Station, Seoul. Nothing was known of her before that moment—no certificates, no paperwork. She would grow up to be called Munju by her foster father, then Esther by the nuns at the orphanages, and finally given the name Nana by her French adoptive parents. Those…