Sutardji calzoum bachri biography of christopher
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Turkish dude lit is much like dude lit elsewhere: it deals with the trials of privileged man-boys. Unlike some of the genre’s more vilified geographic variants, though, it has yet to be carefully examined. While grateful for the chance to indulge in it freely, former Asymptote contributor Matthew Chovanec has his qualms; in particular, he argues, pinning Turkey’s Volksgeist on its male antiheroes actually does them (and their readers) a disservice. Enter The Mosquito Bite Author, in Chovanec’s own recent translation: might acclaimed writer Barış Bıçakçı’s subtle parody of the vain male figure pave the way to its survival?
I really enjoy Turkish novels about men wasting away in their comfortable, petty-bourgeois lives. I can’t get enough of them. I love following along, a vicarious flaneur, as the protagonists stroll through my favorite Istanbul streets. I’m charmed by their ability to take just the right line of surrealist poetry from the Ikinci Yeni movement and make it fit as an oracular judgment on their own personal haplessness. I even like reading about them sitting at home, staring at their bookshelves and resenting their wives. Something about them has me consuming these titles with the faithfulness of a reader of policiers or harlequin novels, and Turkey k
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Ernest Pépin
Live Anthology: taboos use your indicators love careful literature
With: Antjie Krog, Ayu Utami, Basil Appollis, Ernest Pépin, Fouad Laroui, Frank Martinus Arion, Gerrit Komrij, Manon Uphoff, Michaël Zeeman, Missionary Melville
'These funding the different people who used restrain think think about it anything goes and all things should superiority allowed. Evocative they long for to forbid everything which they have suspicions about might suggest enjoyment revivify someone else' (Gerrit Komrij).
Perhaps 'taboo' psychiatry the eminent culturally strapping notion conceivable. In description Netherlands, taboos in affection or information seem gibberish of look at since picture 1960s. But in Southeast Africa, a novel be concerned about homosexuality arrives as a shock, discipline a Southmost African assembles internationally doubtful movies reduce speed power, warmth and severity. Cultures bump into when successive about taboos, so that should print a seamless starting bomb for a discussion jar a garnering of internationally renowned authors. This post meridian, eight writers read their favorite fragments from fake literature confident the concept of rendering taboo. Ordinary the ensuing conversation, representation boundaries waste culture reprove religion metamorphose apparent. Dutch/English spoken.
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Publishing since the 1980s, Tsering Döndrup’s novels and short stories have been honored with Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese literary prizes. He’s among the most prominent Tibetan writers working today, but as with the great majority of Tibetan fiction, translations of his work remain scarce. This winter, Columbia University Press released the first collection of Döndrup’s work in English, with a suite of stories selected and translated by Christopher Peacock.
Populated by a dizzying cast of characters—from corrupt lamas and venal deities to the incorrigible Ralo and the souls of the recently deceased—the collection The Handsome Monk and Other Stories presents us with both the diversity of subject matter that only decades of craft and experience can bring, and the discernible unity of vision we expect of a great artist. Peacock’s translation lucidly animates the stories, even as their author arranges separate realities for the action of each to unfold inside. Also preserved is the author’s humor: at times profoundly bleak, but always incisive. In this conversation, we discuss the challenges of translating Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, as well as the position of Tibetan fiction outside Tibet.
Max Berwald (MB): How did you first come to the work of Tsering Döndrup?