ALTA45 Bilingual Reading Series: Asian Literature (July)

Readers typically read for a few minutes in the an original language of the text they have translated, and then read in their English translation.

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Moderator

Elisabeth Jaquette has served as Executive Director at ALTA since 2017. She is also a translator from Arabic; her translation of Minor Detail by Adania Shibli was a finalist for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the Booker International Prize. Other translations include Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous. Elisabeth has served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translated Literature, the NEA Literary Translation Fellowships, and other prizes. She has also taught translation at Bread Loaf Translators Conference and Hunter College, CUNY.

Readers

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda read from Yuju Wen’s Children in the Middle (Fiction), translated from Japanese. Born in 1980, Yuju Wen is a Japanese writer of Taiwanese descent. Her novel Children in the Middle was published in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize. Children in the Middle tells the story of Kotoko, a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese girl who decides to study abroad in Shanghai after graduating from high school in Japan. At her Chinese language school, Kotoko meets Galing, also half-Taiwanese and half-Japanese, and Shunya, born and raised in Japan to Chinese parents, with whom she ponders the meaning of mother tongues and national borders. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator from Japanese. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she holds degrees from Wesleyan University and UC Berkeley. She is currently co-translating a novella by the late modernist writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, forthcoming from New Directions in 2023. Ray Chandrasekara will read from Anis’s Unfulfilled Revenge (Fiction), translated from Bahas Malaysia. Anis uses her fiction to articulate village life as it was in the 1930s Malaya (now Malaysia). Hers are stories fraught with dilemmas and human predicaments. The story is one of many from a collection of stories by Malay Women Writers who lived and wrote in the 1930s-1960s Malaysia, Mustika Diri (Jewelled Lives). Ray Chandrasekara is an Associate Professor, Southeast Asian Studies, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Interests in translation of Indonesian/Malaysian literatures of South East Asia. Additional interests in history and politics of South East Asia. Shanna Tan read from Wong Koi Tet’s Dakota (Nonfiction), translated from Chinese. Wong Koi Tet (Singapore, 1973) has worn many hats in his writing career: a journalist with a local Chinese newspaper, an editor of a literary magazine, a drama scriptwriter and now, a part-time creative writing lecturer at Nanyang Technological University. Deeply personal, and at the same time, a collective memory of Singapore’s urban history, Dakota is an autofiction about growing up in the 1970s in Dakota Crescent, one of the oldest public housing estates in Singapore which has since disappeared into history. Humorous with a touch of melancholy, Wong’s evocative writing makes us reflect on place as an anchor of history, heritage and home. Shanna Tan is a Singaporean translator working from Korean, Chinese and Japanese into English. She was selected as the Korean prose mentee under the UK National Centre for Writing’s 2022 Emerging Translator Mentorship. She was also selected for the ALTA 2022 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program, translating Singapore Chinese literature. Sonakshi Srivastava read from Mannu Bhandari’s Two Artists (Fiction), translated from Hindi. Mannu Bhandari was a popular Hindi writer. She was one of the spearheads of the “Nayi Kahani” (New Story) movement which aimed to integrate the hopes and aspirations of the emerging middle class in India. The story Do Kalakar (Two Artists) is a story of such aspiration and inspiration, and the gap in between. It is a tale of two friends, an artist, and a social worker. The former has attained fame for her visceral portrayal of a beggar and her two children but it is the latter who emerges as the “greater artist” for it is she who understands the vicissitudes of the beggar’s life and adopts her children as her own. Sonakshi Srivastava is an MPhil candidate at Indraprastha University, Delhi. Her works have appeared in OddMagazine, Feminism in India, Potluck Zine, orangepeel mag, and ESLA journal. She is one of the recipients of South Asia Speaks mentorship programme. Priyamvada Ramkumar read The Palm-Leaf Cross from Jeyamohan’s Stories of the True (Fiction), translated from Tamil. Stories of the True by Jeyamohan, contains twelve imaginative stories based on the lives of real people. It explores the capacity of humans to hold on to their intrinsic goodness in the face of both the everyday and the extraordinary. The story, The Palm-Leaf Cross, unravels the life-altering influence of a British doctor, who works in a poverty stricken region of southern India, on the young son of a palm-tree climber who has fallen to his death. Jeyamohan is a preeminent writer in modern Tamil literature. With more than 200 books to his credit, his most significant work is Venmurasu, a reimagination of Mahabharata spanning 26 novels and 25,000 pages.
Based in Chennai, India, Priyamvada translates from her native tongue Tamil into English. Stories of the True, due for publication in July 2022, is her first book length translation. Selected into the ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship Programme (2022), she is currently working on translating White Elephant, a historical novel.