In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been translated into thirty languages, eleven from India alone. The book tells of Kuroyanagi’s rambunctious childhood that got her expelled from her first school, partly because she refused to sit at her desk and instead wanted to look out the window at the sparrows outside.
Translation
The Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) is a literary festival and cultural event for the general public, but it is preceded each year by the Sharjah Publishers Conference, a rights marketplace and networking opportunity for publishers from around the globe.
Yoko Tawada’s Archipelago of the Sun, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is the third and final instalment of a trilogy. The first two volumes—Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars—introduce a diverse cast of characters centered around Hiruko, a Japanese woman in search of her homeland, which seems to have vanished from the earth and almost from memory. Along the way she befriends a Danish linguist, a transgender Indian, a German museum worker, an Eskimo sushi chef, and a seemingly ageless Japanese cook. This motley group accompanies Hiruko in her search, which takes place across a near-future European landscape in which contemporary ecological and political issues have intensified. Europe is a tranquil welfare state while America has become the world’s largest manufacturing base. The climate has been horrendously damaged, causing the collapse of many ecosystems and the cultures they support. Immigration has become a necessity for many, even while some borders have calcified, and geopolitical tensions abound. And, of course, there is the looming question of what happened to Japan. (Did it sink beneath the sea? Enter political isolation? Or was it simply forgotten?)
Author and activist Sarah Joseph was born and raised in present-day Kerala, known for both Jewish and Christian populations dating back well into the first millennium CE. A Christian herself, she writes both poetry and prose in Malayalam, often centering around religion and feminism. A decade ago she won accolades for a novel based on the Ramayana. Now she has a new novel, Stain, translated by Sangeetha Sreenivasan, that re-imagines the biblical story of Lot, largely set in the town of Sodom. Although readers of the English translation will undoubtedly be familiar with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, one would have to assume that Joseph’s original Malayalam audience either also know the story or find resonance in a biblical story set long ago and far away.
Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
That translator Dong Li calls Chinese poet Ye Hui “metaphysical” in his introduction to The Ruins—a characterisation repeated in the book’s marketing material—might seem challenging, but in the fact the poems, while not exactly straightforward or immediately obvious, are—for most part—eminently accessible and interesting.
Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of Urdu equals Islam by only Muslim authors in their collections. With the anthology Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?, Rakhshanda Jalil attempts to bring diversity to the scene by including only non-Muslim writers.
If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus.
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895.
“There are only two limitless things in this world: the human soul and its sins.” This grim declaration captures the essence of Sultan Raev’s Castigation, a dense and allegorical novel that draws as much from biblical prophecy as it does from the tragedies of Shakespeare and the myths of antiquity.
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