Words Without Borders

 Words Without Borders (WWB) is a non-profit organisation encouraging cultural understanding
through the translation, publication, and promotion of contemporary international literature. Its publications and programs enable readers of English to explore the multiplicity of viewpoints, richness of experience, and differing perspectives on world events offered by writers in other languages. It provides a location for global literary conversation, principally through its monthly on-line magazine. This includes ten to fifteen pieces of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction not previously translated into English; to date the magazine has published over 1,600 pieces by writers from 119 countries, translated from 92 languages.

Susan Harris is the editorial director of the on-line magazine. She spoke to me, via e-mail, from Chicago: WWB is virtual; it has no offices, Susan and her colleagues all work from home, either in the States, or in London.

The current magazine features pieces from North Korean writers living in exile.  I asked Susan how the editors decide on themes for issues?  “It's a mixture. We do annual graphic novel and queer issues, and we often do an issue of writing from the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This year is the tenth anniversary of our founding, and we’re celebrating by returning to the themes of our first three issues: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.”

I wondered how much lead-time is required for each issue, and what happens if world events render commissioned material out-of-date?  “We work well in advance on the issue themes, and we've already scheduled most of 2014, but we acquire work for the monthly features, usually three to four pieces, closer to publication. We try to remain flexible to accommodate breaking news and other developments. In 2011, I'd planned an issue of writing from the three languages of Algeria - Arabic, French, and Berber - for August. In January the uprisings started, and we realized that, regardless of what transpired over the next seven months, we would need to acknowledge the situation. Then all the dominoes started to fall, and it became clear that the entire region was undergoing revolution. So we took apart our schedule and scrambled to publish two issues of writing from the Arab Spring, in the rough order of the uprisings: July with North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Tunisia), and August with the Middle East (Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen).

I asked whether WWB commissions from translators, or directly from authors?  In which case, how do they manage the translation process? “We do prefer to receive translations. but we often solicit submissions in the original languages - from authors, publishers, agents, etc. In those cases, if we don't have the original language reading capacity on staff, we place the pieces with a reader and commission a sample.  If we’re happy with the sample we commission a full translation.” 

On a personal note, I asked Susan what she most enjoys about her job, and what she finds most frustrating? “I love working with authors and translators and helping to bring work that I couldn't otherwise read into English.  It frustrates me there's so much we don't know about, or to which we don't have access.”

Words Without Borders is at http://wordswithoutborders.org/. They are interested in expanding their offerings from Asia, particularly in the languages they haven't yet published – Thai, Khmer and Laotian. So if you are in Thailand, Cambodia, or Laos, get writing!

My next post will be on Words Without Borders’ North Korean issue. Have you read it yet?  If so do please share in advance  your opinions.

The Rainbow Troops / Andrea Hirata

If you’re fed up with books about lucky westerners going through a patch of angst, then read The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata, which was originally published in Indonesian.  It is now available in English translated by Angie Kilbane; I read the Australian edition from Random House.

The Rainbow Troops are a group of dirt-poor students from the ramshackle Muhammadiyah Elementary School on the Indonesian Island of Belitong. Have you heard of Muhammadiyah?  I hadn’t, until I read The Rainbow Troops, but I now know it’s a charity that helps Muslims via education – the novel employs all sorts of Malay and Muslim words and concepts previously unknown to me.

The Rainbow Troops get their name from sitting in a tree in their schoolyard looking for rainbows.  In Indonesian they are called Laskar Pelangi. Either the author, or the translator, explains that pelangi means rainbow, and laskar means warriors, but I suppose the novel couldn’t be called, in English, The Rainbow Warriors, because of associations with Greenpeace?

Mind you, The Rainbow Troops fight hard for their environment, and this novel might prod you to do a light spot of internet research on tin mining in Indonesia. Tin mining is the backbone of the Belitong economy, and one of myriad threats to the existence of The Muhammadiyah School comes from a rapacious mining company which wants to knock it down to dredge the land it stands on. The Rainbow Troops see off this threat, as they see off many others.

This is not, however, a feel good novel with happy endings all round. The narrator, Ikal, is a clever boy, but not the cleverest in his class; he perpetually comes second to Lintang, a genius who is so desperate for an education that he daily crosses crocodile infested swamps to get to school.  Lintang’s fate will make your blood boil, as will this whole novel, it is a book furious at the injustice of the world, but it wears its anger lightly, and it charms, rather than lectures – it deceives you into thinking.

There is only one girl in Ikal’s year, a gender imbalance he appears not to notice, although I’m sure all western readers will ponder it.  The novel does, however, have a courageous, inspiring female character, Bu Mus, one of the two extraordinary teachers who provide The Rainbow Troops with hope for the future. Bu Mus is only fifteen when she starts teaching, she is not qualified in any way that would be recognised in the West, she receives no pay for her work – and she is a heroine adamant the children in her care will be freed by education from the illiteracy and drudgery which blight their parents’ lives.

I urge you to read The Rainbow Troops.  Unless you share Ikal’s background, it will force you to think about lives very different from your own, and unless you are impoverished by Asian standards, it will force you to consider how privileged you are.  But this is not a self-consciously worthy or earnest book, it is instead gentle: warm, tender, and heartbreaking. 

500 Words From Stephen Leather

500 Words From is a series of guest posts from writers and translators.

Many Asian writers feels excluded by geography, or by language, or by choice of subject matter, from publishing in the big centres of the industry in London, New York and Sydney.  But developments in the self-publishing of eBooks mean that if he or she has access to the internet, and is writing in English, and has enough spare cash to pay for editorial services, then a writer living on, say, a remote Indonesian island has a much fairer shot both at reaching a wide international readership, and also at earning by the keyboard, than would have been the case until very recently.  (A writer writing in an Asian language is unlikely to reach an English-speaking readership. Whatever language a writer uses, his or her earnings are likely to be small to nil.)

Bangkok-based Stephen Leather is a highly successful thriller writer. His self-published eBook The Basement was Number 1 in the Amazon Kindle charts in the US and the UK. He here draws on his experience to offer encouragement to others around the region who think they could do better than published authors, and who want to have a go at self-publishing. A debut author wouldn’t be able to send his or her manuscript to fans, and might not be able to afford an editor in New York, but the process Stephen outlines – editing, design, formatting, eMarketing – would be the same for a newcomer to self-publishing, as it is for him. 

A self-published author pays the costs of publishing. It is probably best not to try to save money on editing - you need the best editor you can afford - but you can bring the design costs down, whilst still getting a great cover,  by posting your job on internet auction sites.

So: 500 words from Stephen Leather for Asian Books Blog.

It’s never been easier to be a writer based in Asia, and it’s all thanks to the internet.

I can sit in my apartment in Bangkok and send my newly-completed book to half a dozen readers and fans in the US and the UK to check that it works. Once I’ve incorporated their suggestions, I can send it to an editor in New York who polishes it and then sends it back to me. I have cover designers around the world – in the UK, the US and India – and depending on the type of book I commission the artist who I think will do the best job. I usually get the completed cover back within a couple of days.  Then I send the edited book to a lovely lady in France who formats it for me so that it can be uploaded to Amazon – to publish on the Kindle – and to Smashwords, who sell it everywhere else. Once the formatted file comes back to me – usually within hours – I can download it to the Kindle servers in Seattle and the Smashwords servers in California.  The book will go on sale within twenty-four hours and two months after that any money earned is paid into my bank account. And over the next few weeks, readers who have spotted typos and mistakes in the finished product will let me know and I’ll fix them, within hours.

And the amazing thing about the entire process is that I have never met any of the people involved. In fact I’ve never even spoken to them – all communication has been by email.

It’s a far cry from the state of publishing when I wrote my first novel some twenty-five years ago.  Back then I wrote on a manual typewriter, and my first editor at Collins worked on the manuscript with a pencil. It was then given to a typesetter who retyped the entire manuscript, which was then checked by a proofreader before the book was printed. For that book, and many of my subsequent thirty-odd novels, I would sit down next to the editor and go through the manuscript page by page. If a typo did manage to get through, changing it was a time-consuming – and expensive – process.

The advent of ePublishing has also changed the way that writers relate to the readers, and vice versa. In the old days – actually only five years ago – it made sense for a writer to go on lengthy book tours, visiting book shops and libraries and signing books for readers.  But these days it’s Facebook and Twitter where readers can be found. Instead of standing in a bookshop and talking to a dozen readers, I can post on Facebook and talk to thousands. And instead of readers posting a letter to me care of my publisher and getting a reply several months later, now they can tweet to me and get an answer within hours, no matter where in the world I am.

Find out more about Stephen at www.stephenleather.com

If you have any experience of self-publishing, please do post to share your insights. To repeat,  self-publishing is unlikely to be a path to riches – it is not a way to get filthy rich in rising Asia, or in risen Asia, or in sinking Asia. Wherever they live, most writers earn very little. (See the post of  March 29 for a notice for How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia / Mohsin Hamid.)

Boyd Anderson

Boyd Anderson is visiting Singapore from Sydney, to promote his new novel, Amber Road – see the previous post for a notice. I met him at BooksActually, an independent bookshop-cum-publisher specializing in books at the literary end of the market.  Boyd was there to sign his novel; his wife, Oola, accompanied him.

Boyd is Australian, but Oola is Malaysian. Their creative and constructive partnership seems to have informed much of Boyd’s work. Amber Road can be summed up in one sentence as: Gone With The Wind set against the backdrop of the Pacific War. Oola, Boyd’s first reader and first editor, checked all the Peranakan, Chinese, and Malay cultural references, but, more than this, a branch of her own family lived on the real Amber Road during the Japanese occupation of Singapore; her relatives’ histories and memories inspired many of the novel’s settings, incidents, and details.

Boyd’s next novel, The Heart Radical, which is to be published by Random House, Australia, in February 2014, also owes a big debt to Oola.  This new work can be summed up as: To Kill A Mockingbird set against the backdrop of the Malay Emergency. Oola’s beloved father was a lawyer in Ipoh.  In The Heart Radical characters inspired by Oola and her father fill the spaces occupied by Scout and Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird – in The Heart Radical the lawyer defends a Chinese guerrilla who is accused of murder, and not a black accused of raping a white.

Each written Chinese character has a set of strokes that make up the radical.  Many characters can share a radical, and if you know the radical you can work out the general area of the character’s meaning.  Oola, who is a Chinese calligrapher, explained to me that The Heart Radical refers to the Chinese radical meaning heart, also found in the characters for love, loving, etc.   Boyd then added that he also intended radical to refer to the root that gives a life meaning, and that in his novel the lawyer is the daughter’s heart radical. I forgot to ask where this left romantic love, but I did learn that The Heart Radical is to incorporate a contemporary love story.

As if Oola hasn’t contributed enough to Boyd’s output, one of her ancestors was Chung Keng Kwee, better known as Kapitan China, a millionaire businessman-philanthropist, and a leader of the Chinese community in Penang in the mid-to-late 19^th century – he owned one of the grandest private homes on the island, now converted to a museum.  The Kapitan was involved in all sorts of secret societies, schemes, and shenanigans, but many stories about him would have been lost, were it not for Oola, who persuaded Boyd to talk to her grandmother, keeper of the family memory, before the old woman died.   As a result of those conversations, and of subsequent research, workaholic Boyd has now written The Kapitan’s Daughters, a novel currently with his agent. Let’s hope she manages to sell it, so we can all read it. 

Amber Road / Boyd Anderson

Amber Road is an historical romance set during WW11, against the backdrop of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore.

The heroine is a gorgeous young Peranakan, Victoria Khoo.  But who is her hero? She would like it to be Sebastian Boustead, a handsome and wealthy Brit, but unfortunately for her at the novel’s opening he has just become engaged. Meanwhile, the reader can see at once she should be hankering after Joe Spencer, an Aussie, who is slightly rough around the edges, but who understands her in a way that Sebastian does not. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say Joe and Victoria eventually get it together, but do they keep it together?  Will they get their happy ending?  To find out the answer, you’ll have to read the novel, all I’ll say is I was rooting for them, and the ending wasn’t quite what I’d expected.

Given that the novel’s central triangle concerns people of three nationalities, you’ll probably immediately gather that Amber Road is ambitious in its sweep and scale.  The characters include Chinese, Japanese, Peranakans (Straits born Chinese), Indians, an English woman disguised as an Indian, communists, capitalists, servants, masters, children and the very old.  The novel, like one of its main settings, Singapore, is a melting pot, and Anderson skilfully explores contrasting cultures and concerns, sometimes even within one family, as when Victoria expresses discomfort at her own father’s polygamy – he has two wives, and two families.

Anderson’s characters’ personal stories unfold against dramatic world events, and as South East Asia is in turmoil; he seems to have undertaken meticulous historical research. This never becomes intrusive, but the wealth of detail enables him to evoke place and period with what feels like great authenticity.  He is very good at conveying the chaos, the deprivations, and the fear of the Japanese occupation of Singapore, an atmosphere of suspicion and tension perhaps best summed up for me in an incident where Victoria’s much younger half-brother betrays his own family by informing the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, that they have hidden in their house an illegal radio.

Thanks to Anderson’s research, I learned from his novel all sorts of interesting historical facts, for instance about the opium trade in Singapore prior to WW11 – a trade about which I previously knew nothing.  Reading the novel has also made me determined to take a walk along Amber Road, which is a real road in Singapore, and which was once lined with beachfront mansions belonging to wealthy families.  One of the mansions was clearly the inspiration for Anderson's Angsana Lodge; a house that has such importance for Victoria’s fantasy life it could almost be a character in its own right.

Amber Road is a big, generous romance that blends derring-do adventure, suspense, and tragedy. It has characters you’ll care about, and it conveys both a compelling sense of place, and of period. I highly recommend it.

Amber Road is published in Australia by Random House, and in Asia  by Monsoon Books, a company based in Singapore. It is available in print and e-book formats. If you have read it, please post with your opinions.

The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature

Asia House, in London, builds links between the UK and Asia; the organisation runs a variety of programmes focused on helping readers in the UK become aware of the many Asian writers whose work is available there. The UK has a large population of first, second and third generation immigrants, whose families originally came from countries stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean, to the Pacific. Hence Asia House also runs programmes to promote the work of young British-Asian writers.

Next month Asia House will hold its annual Festival of Asian Literature, which brings to the British public the newest fiction, non-fiction and poetry written about Asia. The Festival’s director, Adrienne Loftus Parkins, explained how writers are chosen to participate: “We want to present the best books and the most stimulating discussions. Beyond that, the books we feature are mostly published in English in the UK, so that the British audience has access to them. We prefer books published in the year leading up to each festival. Work can be written by Asians or non-Asians, but it must be about Asia or Asians, and give insight into the understanding of Asian cultures and concerns. Preference is given to books about contemporary topics, and books must work within our theme for the year.”

This year the theme is freedom: freedom of expression; education; travel; justice; the freedom to read the truth and to live in our chosen ways. Festival events will examine censorship, corruption, gender, economies, social issues and political freedoms.

 In the UK, few are denied many freedoms, so who is the intended audience for Asia House’s events? “Our audience is anyone who is interested in Asian countries and cultures.” Said Loftus Parkins, “As we cover such a wide range of countries and cultures, the second and third generations who attend are from a broad range of countries. An event focused on Iran will be about 60% Iranian, or Iranian diaspora, while an event focused on women and Islam will see an audience with a vast array of people attending from a number of home countries.”

Although all the books featured are written in or translated into English, I wondered what happened when an author doesn’t speak English?  “We provide a translator, as we will do this year for Chinese authors Ma Jian and Yan Lianke. Often authors work with their own translators who they bring to the events.”

I asked Loftus Parkins what she thought writers and readers hoped to get out of the Festival? “We provide a venue where people can come together in a relatively intimate, relaxed environment. Being the leading pan-Asian organisation in the UK, we have a deep understanding of the things that matter to both the writers and the audience, and also  of Asian perspectives. Writers enjoy it because we produce events with an understanding of the issues they are writing about, matching them with moderators and other authors who can provide a stimulating discussion of the topics.  They also have an opportunity to interact with people in the West who understand the issues about which they are writing.  Readers like our events because they know at Asia House we know Asia. They will have the opportunity to hear stimulating discussions, followed by intelligent questions. They also find that with relatively small audiences, and a friendly atmosphere, they have a greater opportunity to meet and talk with the authors at receptions afterwards. We recently hosted an evening with Mohsin Hamid who spoke about his latest book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.  The audience loved having the chance to ask him questions about his perceptions of Pakistan. We are excited about giving people the chance to do the same with other authors throughout the Festival.” (See the post of March 29 for discussion of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.)

The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature runs 7-22 May. You can participate via the following platforms:

Blog:              www.asiahouse.org

Facebook:      Like them at Asia House or at Asia House Festival of Asian Literature

Twitter:          @festofasianlit   (There will be live tweets from many events at the Festival.)

YouTube:       Asia House has its own channel.

Audioboo:      http://audioboo.fm/channel/asia-house

A Tale For The Time Being / Ruth Ozeki

Branching from, or parallel to, the world in which I live, does there exist an infinite number of other worlds in which unbeknownst to me, I (other versions of me?) also live? A Tale For The Time Being asks you to consider this question, and others like it.  If that sounds a turn-off, then I’d nevertheless urge you to give it a try, so you can get to know the two main characters, Nao, and Ruth.

Nao, whose name is pronounced now, is much concerned with time, as befits a time being - which, she explains, “is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”  This surely raises the immediate question: what about ghosts?  Ok, ghosts aren’t living, but, if they exist, do they exist in time?  Since one of the characters in Nao’s story is, in her present, a ghost, this is a question you get to ponder as you continue further into the novel. Nao is a Japanese teenager, living in Tokyo, but wishing she were still in California, where she spent her childhood.  Her parents have effectively zoned out on her, she is bullied both at school, and on the internet, her life is spiralling downwards until her great-granny steps in to save her. This wise old great-granny is a Buddhist nun, of 104, whose only son died on a kamikaze mission during World War Two – he is the ghost Nao later encounters, or imagines she encounters.

Meanwhile Ruth is a Japanese-American novelist living with her eco-arty husband on an isolated Canadian island. You, the reader, seem to be invited to consider whether Ruth bears a close resemblance to Ruth Ozeki, the author of A Tale For The Time Being, but I decided to ignore this question, as distracting. Ruth (the character) finds Nao’s diary in a package washed up on the beach near her home.  The package may have been ripped into the Pacific by the 2011 tsunami. Ruth reads Nao’s diary.  As she reads, she considers everything from the relationship between the writer and the reader, to the nature of time, to our relationships with our own histories, our families’ histories, and world history, to Zen Buddhism, to quantum physics, to the role of the internet in contemporary life, to the nature of bravery, and so on and so forth.

Ozeki’s language ranges from teenage-slangy, in Nao’s diary entries, to dryly academic, in the footnotes and appendices she unconventionally includes, to evocatively poetic in her descriptions of nature, and of Buddhism. Her characters grab you; all are moving in their various predicaments; they all matter.  The novel has a great sense of contrasting places, and cultures. Tokyo is captured in all its gaudy craziness; a Buddhist nunnery feels mossily serene; the claustrophobia of a Canadian island seemed very real to me.

 
All in all this is a fantastic novel, and one I highly recommend. 


If you have read it please post with your opinions.