Thoughts

David Francis’s translation of Severo Sarduy’s Footwork is out in the world! If you haven’t picked up a copy – or your local bookstore doesn’t have one – feel free to buy one from us! We’ll have some more background on the book up here soon. It took a while to get out into the world, but it’s worth the wait!

Also in the “we are slow” department: a very long time ago – November of 2019 – we heard friend of Circumference Eliot Weinberger give the keynote address at the George Town Literary Festival. You can read it online at Asymptote; it’s nice to see Pauline Fan’s translation of Kulleh Grasi's Tell Me Kenyalang get a mention there! Eliot Weinberger’s Angels & Saints is fantastic and you should pick up a copy of that if you haven’t already.

We’ve been sitting on this for a while, but we can finally reveal that Kulleh Grasi’s Tell Me, Kenyalang, translated by Pauline Fan, has been longlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award in Poetry! There’s going to be a livecast of the award ceremony on October 15th which you can register for here. Congratulations to judges Ilya Kaminsky, Lisa Katz, and Farid Matuk for having such good taste! Congratulations to the author for having written such a book! And congratulations to Pauline for her translation! We hope that it wins.

Update: TMK is now on the shortlist! Looks like it’s going to be a 5 a.m. Zoom for some of us.

We’re very pleased to note that Lupe Gómez's Camouflage, translated by Erín Moure, is now a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award in poetry for 2020! Congratulations! It is unfortunate that both of our books didn’t make the short list, but we understand that other presses do exist and they have to be fair to them.

Oh! And there's a very nice interview by Elaine Chiew of Pauline Fan and Kulleh Grasi about Tell Me, Kenyalang at the Asian Books Blog

Also, I think we forgot to note here that you can buy our books directly from our site now! Yes. There's a dedicated store page, or you can just click the buttons on any of the book pages. Buy these award-winning books early and often!

We always have poetry. And reading can be a kind of company. So in this tenuous time, Circumference Books has decided to give free access to our first two books, Camouflage and Tell Me, Kenyalang. You can read both, for a while at least, online through our website. You can read both books at our subscribers page, here. Please feel free to share that link with others who might be interested!

We would also like to announce the third book we will publish, Footwork: Selected Poems of Severo Sarduy, translated from Spanish by David Francis. The book will come out in fall 2020, slightly later than originally planned, but it will be glorious.

Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American literary figures of the twentieth century. Gabriel García Márquez once called him the best writer in the Spanish language! Sarduy was born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1937 and died due to complications with AIDS in 1993. David Francis serves as Dean of Grace Hopper College at Yale University, where he teaches in the Program on Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.

You can be the first to receive Footwork (which might not be the final name!) by becoming a subscriber to Circumference Books, which will get you that and whatever exciting thing we decide to publish as our fourth book. If you're behind, you can also pick up our first two books.

There’s a piece in the Borneo Post by Jeremy Veno about Kulleh Grasi and Tell Me, Kenyalang. Oddly, they’re using an older version of the cover for the piece! This is what documenting all of our work gets us, I guess.

And if you’re near Kuala Lumpur, Kulleh Grasi and Pauline Fan will read from Tell Me, Kenyalang as part of the celebration of World Poetry Day at Lit Books on March 21st from 4 to 6 p.m. Details can be found here.

And Circumference Book #3 is coming into view? Though maybe taking slightly longer than we expected. It doesn’t quite have a title yet, which complicates things in terms of announcements. But we’re working on that. It’s going to be great – the book, hopefully the title as well.

We all went to Penang for the Malaysian launch of Tell Me, Kenyalang! And it was great, though I don't know if we managed to document it very well. Thanks so much to Eliot Weinberger, who said some very nice things about Tell Me, Kenyalang in his lecture "New Trade Routes of the World" – maybe a version of that will be published at some point?

Here's Kulleh Grasi on a panel with Canadian writer Darrel McLeod, Australian writer Julie Janson, and moderator Chris Parry as part of a panel entitled "First Nation, Last in Line":

We had a book launch! But I was on stage so I didn't take any pictures of that. It is too bad: Kulleh looks as good as a suit as he does in a loincloth. Maybe some pictures will turn up? In the interim, here's a video of Nading Rhapsody playing a song at China House:

Here's the band being interviewed by Astro Awani, a Malaysian cable news channel, after the show:

And you can see that clip here (or here, I suspect these links aren't long for the world), though most of what's being said is in Malay.

Here's Jennifer Kronovet on a panel with poet/editor/blurber Jeffrey Yang and the Tamil publisher Kannan Sundaram in a discussion moderated by Christine Edwards entitled "From Ink to Blink":

And we sold a lot of books! Thanks booksellers!