Thoughts

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.

The 21st Poesiefestival Berlin is taking place online this year from 5–11 June 2020. But starting now, you can see our books as part of the virtual Lyrikmarkt, a poetry book fair – there are a lot of interesting things there!

Camouflage is up for a Best Translated Book Award! Because things are strange right now, there's no real ceremony. But there is a reading from the books – including tranlator Erín Moure! – to be done over Zoom on Wednesday, May 27, at 6 p.m. (EST), and then the actual ceremony on Friday, May 29, also at 6 p.m. (EST). You can sign up to attend the readings or the ceremony itself – I hope we're allowed to give those links out?

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 are very happy to note that both of our books from last year, Camouflage and Tell Me, Kenyalang, are on the long list for the Best Translated Book Awards for 2020! Congratulations to translators Erín Moure and Pauline Fan, and good luck to the judges who have to decide between them because they are both really good.

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!

Sorry for the late notice, but there will be a lot of Circumference at the George Town Literary Festival in Penang, Malaysia this weekend! Visit their site for the details. But here's what's happening:

• 21 November, 12:30 p.m.–1:50 p.m.: Kulleh Grasi joins Nam Ron and Muhammad Haji Salleh for a discussion titled "Kata Tanpa Aksara" (which might be in Malay?), moderated by Regina Ibrahim.
• 21 November, 2 p.m.–3:20 p.m.: Editor Jennifer Kronovet joins Tiffany Tsao, Adriana Manan, and Fahmi Mustaffa in a discussion of "The Beauty and Chaos of Translation" moderated by Jeffrey Yang (who's on the Circumference Advisory Board).
• 22 November, 2 p.m.–3:20 p.m.: Poet Kulleh Grasi joins Darrel McLeod and Julie Janson for a discussion entitled "First Nation, Last in Line," moderated by Chris Parry.
• 22 November, 5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.: There's a book launch party for Kulleh Grasi's Tell Me, Kenyalang! It will be great.
• 22 November, 8:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m.: Kulleh Grasi's band Nading Rhapsody plays.
• 24 November, 9:30 a.m.–10:50 a.m.: Jennifer Kronovet joins Jeffrey Yang and Kannan Sundaram for a discussion entitled "From Ink to Blink," moderated by Christine Edwards.
• 24 November, 2 p.m.–3:20 p.m.: Tell Me, Kenyalang translator Pauline Fan moderates a panel entitled "The Sea and the Mirror" with Nikola Madzirov, Kim Yedeum, Charlotte Van den Broeck, Carlomar Daoana.

That's a lot! And the rest of the program is great too! Perumal Merugan! Satyajit Ray's son Sandip! Tell Me, Kenyalang blurber Goenawan Mohamad! Eliot Weinberger! The highest concentration of Circumference in who knows how long! If you're in the area, come say hello!

(This is the third in a series of posts on the design of Kulleh Grasi's Tell Me, Kenyalang. Read the first one and the second one if you don't want to be confused.)

Most book covers are terrible for very predictable reasons: they are effectively designed by committee. An editor gives an idea to an outside designer who probably has not read the book; the marketing department has concerns; the publisher, who's paying for the whole thing, might not like a color; the author may demand that things be taken in a different direction. At Circumference, we do not have the luxury of being terrible for that reason because we are too small and do not have, for example, a marketing department to yell at us.

We still want the cover to be nice. But the purpose of a cover design is very different from the purpose of the interior design. A cover’s job is to make a potential reader pick the book up and buy it, while the interior's job is to support the text. The concerns of the cover are primarily financial rather than aesthetic or literary. As someone who cares more about ideas than things, this is less interesting. But a cover can still convey something interesting.

The cover of this book actually started before we’d published any books: we had to have an image to represent the covers of our first two books – two so that people could subscribe. Again, the cover’s reason for being is financial. But we had to have two book covers and they had to contrast. We had our logo – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black – and using yellow and magenta as the primary colors of the two books was easy. Camouflage was magenta – the title is still magenta – and, without very much thought, Tell Me, Kenyalang became yellow. And somehow it stayed yellow.

There were a number of different fake covers that we used which aren't particularly interesting. An inflection point happened when I realized that kenyalang was the word for the rhinoceros hornbill, a photogenic bird if ever there was one. It's a very strong and immediate image that's easy to visualize – just like the word camouflage. Problem solved! There are plenty of old Victorian paintings of hornbills. We could use one of them. But this is not right. A British colonial painter looking at a hornbill in the nineteenth century was seeing something very different that an Iban poet does in 2019. Colonial portrayals of hornbills don't actually have anything to do with this book.

Another image came my way. I discovered the work of Carol Rubinstein, which is really worth talking about at great length by itself. She went to Borneo in the late 1960s and spent several years living with Dayak groups, recording their songs and poetry. The Sarawak Museum in Kuching published two enormous volumes of her work as issues of the Sarawak Museum Journal in the 1970s (and a handful of selections of the poetry were published by other presses and ended up in Jerome Rothenberg's anthologies of ethnopoetics). The title page of one of the volumes features drawing of a kenyalang. Perfect, I thought, here's a kenyalang, one that has previous experience with poetry in translation. That's our bird.

Because of a desire to have this book match our first book, I took that photo of the kenyalang and turned it into a shape – the same thing I did to turn the image of a tree into camouflage. The first thing I did was to make it black and put it on a yellow background with the title treated just as in Camouflage:

This pretty clearly moved to the abstract: the drawing isn’t really recognizable when it’s just the front cover (though it becomes more recognizable when the flaps are opened). I like this: it’s striking. But it also seemed like I was inadvertently plagiarizing Andy Warhol’s design (and color palette!) for The Velvet Underground & Nico:

That’s a great design – particularly when the banana could be peeled off. But it doesn’t quite fit; and variations on that design are everywhere in Southeast Asia for the past few years, pretty quickly going from signifying a hipster to just being another part of vernacular fashion. And a similar issue came to light when I spent a little time in Borneo: just like the VU banana, the kenyalang image is on everything. Here, for example, you see it on the Sarawak Hornbill Tourism Award:

Again there’s a reason that this image is popular. It’s a good design. But it also signifies preconceived ideas about Borneo: as the place where you go on a fancy vacation to see the orangutans. This is not what we were trying to convey. Kulleh’s poetry moves back and forth between the ancient and the modern: one of Tokyo’s airports is in there along with Iban mythology.

What I wanted was to keep the kenyalang but also mix in something else. I thought of the weaving designs that Bruce Mau used for some of Zone’s books in the 1990s:

Conceptually that’s maybe a little too direct in its equation of sex and death (though it’s a fine choice if you’re making a cover for The Decadent Reader) through intercutting images. Trying to do something a bit subtler but with the same kind of effect, I decided to use the kenyalang shape as a mask. It could be some kind of glitchy Blade Runner future city seen through the kenyalang. Here’s a version with a weird hotel in Lisbon filling that function:

I like the interplay between the organic shape of the kenyalang and the rectilinear lines of the architecture. But this is maybe going too far: that contrast I was trying to look for was already there. You can see the modern in the monochromatic background, the digitally processed shape of the kenyalang drawing, the typography. Things are starting to get lost; trying to figure out what the shape is as well as what's in the photography behind it is visually challenging. So I stepped back, and instead put in a photo I had taken from a river in Borneo, the forest and the sky above the water. It's not a particularly good photo:

But in context it works, and the cover seemed to snap into place. The trees mirror the trees that are on the front cover of Camouflage. And, with a couple of tweaks, that's how we ended up with this cover: