Acting My Age: Thomas Farber’s new book from MĀNOA

Thomas Farber, 2020. Photograph by Andrea Young
Thomas Farber, 2020. Photograph by Andrea Young

Elegant, exuberant, and idiosyncratic, Acting My Age is a memoir and meditation by one of America’s most playful and inventive writers.

Acting My Age is the newest volume from MĀNOA. In the words of Mary Mackey (The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams), “in Acting My Age, Thomas Farber gives us an unflinching, luminous, cleverly conceived meditation on his own mortality as well as on the extinction of the coral reefs, snow leopards, dolphins, and, ultimately the human species. Couching his observations in a series of short, interconnected, almost-epigrammatic essays that read like prose poems, Farber creates a narrative style reminiscent of Joyce and Melville: oceanic in depth and all-encompassing in range.”

Below, Thomas Farber shares how this book came together, water friendships, and how he’s faring a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. 


University of Hawai‘i Press: You describe Acting My Age as an “interim report.” When and where did Acting My Age begin?

Thomas Farber: I’d finished Here and Gone in early 2015. The concluding chapter of its third person nonfiction has “the writer” confronting open heart surgery in seven days. Acting My Age picks up, in the first person, where that left off.

UHP: You sign your author’s note that opens Acting My Age from both Berkeley and Honolulu. Tell us about your relationship to these places.

TF: Born and raised in Boston, I first came to Berkeley in 1964 at age twenty. I’ve been based there most of the time since, albeit with long absences, and have taught at the University of California, Berkeley since the mid-1990s.

I first came to Hawai‘i in 1971, have had long stays every year since, often for half the year. Surfing and Pacific Island post-colonial writing have been two of my persistent interests. I’ve been visiting writer at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa; visiting fellow at the East-West Center; and have traveled extensively in the South Pacific.

Gill net pyramid,   Keauhou Bay, Hawai‘i, 2009. Photograph by Wayne Levin
Gill net pyramid, Keauhou Bay, Hawai‘i, 2009. Photograph by Wayne Levin

UHP: How do you feel Wayne Levin and Geoffrey Fricker’s photography complements your work?

TF: Water friendships! I first saw Wayne’s marvelous ocean photographs when I was dreaming toward the book that became On Water (1994). My collaborations with Wayne include Through A Liquid MirrorOther Oceans (UH Press), and Akule. As for freshwater, I’d been part of a Geoff Fricker project about the upper Sacramento River. Then in the late 1990s Geoff asked me write text for his haunting photographs of the ruined Hamakuapoko sugar mill.

Sugar water-cooling system, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1997. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker
Sugar water-cooling system, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1997. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

UHP: As the author of more than 25 books, how does Acting My Age differ from your other work?

TF: A return to first person nonfiction, something I’d not done for many years, it picks up after the impending heart surgery looming at the end of Here and GoneActing My Age is, not surprisingly, much concerned with aging and mortality—author seventy-one to seventy-five in the telling—but also speaks from my ongoing love of and fear for the ocean. My dismay with the mess humans can make of things. As for how the stories are told, well, I’ve had a long love affair with words, tried to draw on all I’ve learned in my writing life.

UHP: The revisions for Acting My Age were completed in the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic. How does this find you—and your writing—nearly a year later?

TF: Like everyone, I’m much sobered by the pandemic. Too many apprehensions realized.

Meanwhile, no one writes or lives forever. About to turn seventy-seven, clearing books and papers from my garage library, I feel like a surfer in a long lull. Waiting for the next set. Staying very close to home, perforce, has encouraged me to be the kind of reader I was as a child—(re)reading for the deep pleasure of it. No product quite yet in mind. Savoring company I’ve kept. Jim Harrison’s late poems, Dead Man’s Float. J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine.  Calvino’s Invisible Cities. These “colleagues” I’ve learned from, have tried to measure up to.


THOMAS FARBER has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. www.thomasfarber.org

Manoa MA 32-2 Acting My Age Cover Thomas Farber
MĀNOA Vol. 32 Issue 2 (2020)

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Author’s Note

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Print copy of Acting My Age, $24.99

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Like Acting My Age? MĀNOA publishes two compelling issues annually of international literature. Subscribe here. 

Tyranny Lessons: 60 International Writers on Contemporary Tyranny (MĀNOA Vol. 32 Issue 1)

In Tyranny Lessons, the newest volume from MĀNOA, international writers from two dozen countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas address the challenges of contemporary tyranny as only literary writing can: through the perspective of lived experiences, imagined futures, and personal struggles.

Tyranny Lessons also features the photography of Danny Lyon, the first photographer of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, whose work documented the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Alok Bhalla and Ming Di guest edited this issue alongside MĀNOA editor Frank Stewart, who shares how this issue came together and some of the pieces in the issue.


University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

MĀNOA: As an international literary publication, MĀNOA tries to engage with the most urgent issues of our time. We have compiled volumes on freedom, unending wars, reconciliation, and, most recently the displacement of people due to climate change, ethnic conflicts, and other causes. Tyranny Lessons grew out of these global concerns.

UHP: Why is this issue important now?

MĀNOA: Literary writing is often about individuals, not statistics or abstract groups. Many millions of people have been displaced around the world, and tens of millions are living under authoritarian governments or in intolerant communities. These numbers blur the fact that they comprise individuals, each of whom struggles, suffers, or is hurt. Good literature helps us live through the experiences of everyday people in difficult circumstances, enlarging our understanding and compassion.

UHP: How do you see this issue being used in the world?

MĀNOA: Writers from nearly two dozen countries contributed to this volume—many from places that Americans seldom hear from: India, Indonesia, Tibet, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Syria, and others. Their experiences, languages, and viewpoints are diverse. When American readers see them side-by-side in MĀNOA—and when the writers themselves see their work in this international context, across political and national boundaries—lives of others become more immediate, and our feelings of kinship grow larger and more inclusive.

UHP: Walk us through your table of contents: What’s not to miss?

MĀNOA: Well, there are more than sixty writers in the volume so it’s hard to answer this briefly. There are many excellent writers from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Tibet. Tang Danhong’s “Chairman Mao Is Dead!” is a wonderful, acerbic, and at times funny essay about a time in her childhood when a death in China turned the country, and her life, on its head. Other writers from China recall events in the recent past, the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. There are two wonderful allegorical tales by an Indonesian writer, Rio Johan, living in Paris. There are some unexpected pieces, such as an essay by Walter White, who headed the NAACP, on lynching, and some union songs by Joe Hill.

UHP: What was the most challenging thing about creating this issue?

MĀNOA: It was important to us that Tyranny Lessons not have an agenda or or be predictable. We wanted to understand tyranny as a condition that is common in our lives, in ways we don’t think about in that way—and not just government oppression. There’s a moving story in the issue by Ann Pancake, who lives in West Virginia, about a brother whose opioid addiction tyrannizes the well-being of a family. An essay by Thomas Farber comments on the scientific practice of capturing and experimenting on dolphins—surely an example of humans tyrannizing non-humans. And there’s a fine play by Catherine Filloux, “whatdoesfreemean,” concerning incarcerated women of color.

UHP: How does the artwork complement the written content?

MĀNOA: Acclaimed photographer Danny Lyon, the first official photographer of the Civil Rights Movement, gave us a suite of photographs from his book The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. The images underscore the reality that tyranny is not something that happens only in totalitarian foreign countries. Communal violence and intolerance are present in the U.S. as well. And Americans too have lessons to teach the world about tyranny.

 

Manoa 32-1 Tyranny Lessons

Tyranny Lessons

Read Free on Project MUSE:

Editor’s Note

Poem: “Cry Out in Sorrow,” by Lin Zi
This poem was written for Li Wenliang (1986–2020), the Wuhan doctor who alerted his colleagues about the coronavirus in December 2019, and died of the disease in February 2020. When punished by the police for “spreading rumors,” he said, “A healthy society should allow more than one voice.” The poem calls for public mourning as a protest against censorship.

Buy the Volume

Print copy of Tyranny Lessons, $25

eBook of Tyranny Lessons, $9.99 (through Oct. 2020)
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Subscribe to MĀNOA

Like Tyranny Lessons? MĀNOA publishes two compelling issues annually of international literature. Subscribe here.

MĀNOA Journal Receives Two National Grants

Published twice a year since 1989 by the University of Hawai‘i Press, Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing has received two national grants to support its issues. The journal’s editorial offices are in the Department of English of the UH-Mānoa campus, and it is supported by the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature.

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded Mānoa an Art Works grant of $10,000 for fiscal year 2020. This grant was one of 1,187 that totaled $27.3 million and supported projects in every state. Art Works grants are given to artistically excellent projects that celebrate American creativity and cultural heritage.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), in alliance with the Amazon Literary Partnership (ALP), awarded Mānoa a 2020 Literary Magazine Fund grant of $5,000. ALP launched the Literary Magazine Fund with CLMP in 2019 to help CLMP support the crucial work of literary publishers. Grant applications were reviewed by a panel of judges convened by ALP and CLMP. Final selections were made by ALP and CLMP.

Since 2009, ALP has provided $13 million in grant funding to over 175 literary organizations, assisting thousands of writers. Originally founded in 1967, CLMP provides funding and technical assistance to over 400 magazines, presses, Internet publishers, and chapbook and zine publishers.

Mānoa was one of three UH Press journals that celebrated thirty years of publishing in 2019. It has published over sixty issues and featured the work of over a thousand contributors from all over the world. The CLMP and ALP award will support the publication of the journal’s summer 2020 issue, Tyranny Lessons: International Prose, Poetry, and Performance, a collection of writing about ordinary people struggling against the restrictions on lives, movements, and thoughts imposed by intolerant societies, repressive political systems, and failed states.

Manoa 32-1 Tyranny Lessons
Forthcoming from Mānoa: Tyranny Lessons (Vol. 32, Issue 1)

Displaced Lives: MĀNOA Vol. 31, No. 2 (2019)

  Four Generations of a Tibetan Family. Majnu Ka Tilla Diaries (007), 2007 Serena Chopra  © courtesy sepiaEYE
Four Generations of a Tibetan Family. Majnu Ka Tilla Diaries (007), 2007 Serena Chopra © courtesy sepiaEYE

The dislocation of people in the twenty-first century has been unprecedented. At the end of 2019, over 260 million people were living outside their countries of birth. Some are voluntary migrants, but others have been forced to relocate by violence, wars, persecution, hunger, or extreme weather events. Millions more are mentally and spiritually uprooted and isolated because of PTSD, depression, addiction, and aging.

The displaced are a statistical category, but their lives, emotions, and hopes are made vividly real in these powerful and intimate works of literature by more than thirty writers from four continents. Many of the authors are themselves exiles, members of immigrant families, or witnesses to the effects of displacement on loved ones. Authors are from Bangladesh, Canada, Cuba, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Iran, Israel, Macedonia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, and the U.S.

Alok Bhalla and Ming Di guest edited this new issue of Mānoa featuring fiction, poetry, memoirs and plays, and also Serena Chopra’s photographs from Majnu Ka Tilla Diaries.


Explore Displaced Lives

Editor’s Note

Images

Borderlands
Anna Badkhen

Statue of Liberty
Mario Bojórquez, Don Cellini

The Traveler
José Manuel Cardona, Hélène Cardona

Good Night
Chang Yao, Ming Di, Kerry Shawn Keys

Bhasha India
Siddharth Chowdhury

The Missing
Mangalesh Dabral, Asad Zaidi

Pig
Jose Dalisay

Werewolf
Patrick Deeley

Neve Shalom, September 2014
Batsheva Dori-Carlier, Lisa Katz

Wulkan
Ulrike Draesner, Iain Galbraith

Vanilla Crumble
Asif Farrukhi, Durdana Soomro

turning your body into a compass
Catherine Filloux

Return of the Exiles
Huang Fan, Ming Di, Frank Stewart

In a Silent City
Ilya Kaminsky

The Serpent
Wayne Karlin

The Speculative Fiction Writer
Jee Leong Koh

At Wagah
Sukrita Paul Kumar

Two Poems
Nikola Madzirov, Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat

Something Growing
Julia Martin

Fox-Sparrow
James McCorkle

Claude McKay Describes His Own Life
Claude Mckay

Six Poems from Harlem Shadows
Claude McKay

Bread
Mihaela Moscaliuc

Yesterday and Today
Masud Mufti, Durdana Soomro

The Subhuman and His Habitat
Ramsey Nasr, David Colmer

Lament for Mrs. Mones
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Katherine M. Hedeen

The Rehearsal
Manjula Padmanabhan

Big White Bird
Ann Pancake

Dera Baba Nanak
Joginder Paul, Naghma Zafir

Grandmas
Joginder Paul, Asif Farrukhi

Tonghui River in Beijing
Qing Ping, Ming Di, Frank Stewart

Gilt
Chloe Garcia Roberts

Two Poems
Françoise Roy, Amanda Fuller

Self
K. Satchidanandan

Two Poems
Aleš Šteger, Brian Henry

Five Prose Poems
Udayan Vajpeyi, Alok Bhalla

The Souls of Shah Alam Camp
Asghar Wajahat, Alok Bhalla

The White Night Photo Studio
Wang Suxin, Chen Zeping, Karen Gernant

Two Poems
Sholeh Wolpé

The Flower of All Water
Robert Wrigley

Refused a Visa at the U.S. Embassy
Yi Sha, Frank Stewart, Ming Di

About the Photographer

About the Contributors

 

Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States (MĀNOA 31:1)

Qutang Gorge Entrance II, Daixi, 2003. Photograph by Linda Butler. In June 2003, when the reservoir formed, the confluence of the Daixi tributary and the Yangtze River disappeared beneath the waters, which washed over the feet of the distant mountains. The ruins of Daixi town also vanished.
Qutang Gorge Entrance II, Daixi, 2003. In June 2003, when the reservoir formed, the confluence of the Daixi tributary and the Yangtze River disappeared beneath the waters, which washed over the feet of the distant mountains. The ruins of Daixi town also vanished. Photograph by Linda Butler, this issue.

Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges presents nearly 100 poets and translators from China and the U.S.―the two countries most responsible for global carbon dioxide emissions and the primary contributors to extreme climate change. These poetic voices express the altered relationship that now exists between the human and non-human worlds, a situation in which we witness everyday the ways environmental destruction is harming our emotions and imaginations.

“What can poetry say about our place in the natural world today?” ecologically minded poets ask. “How do we express this new reality in art or sing about it in poetry?” And, as poet Forrest Gander wonders, “how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics?”

Eco-poetry freely searches for possible answers. Sichuan poet Sun Wenbo writes:

… I feel so liberated I start writing about
the republic of apples and democracy of oranges. When I see
apples have not become tanks, oranges not bombs,
I know I’ve not become a slave of words after all.

The Chinese poets are from throughout the PRC and Taiwan, both minority and majority writers, from big cities and rural provinces, such as Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and Xinjiang Uyghur, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions. The American poets are both emerging and established, from towns and cities across the U.S.

Included are images by celebrated photographer Linda Butler documenting the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, on the Mississippi River Basin.

Celebrating Asian / Pacific American Heritage Month with Free Journal Content

We are proud to publish an extensive list of Pacific, Asian, and Southeast Asian studies journals. This Asian / Pacific American Heritage Month, explore and enjoy the following free journal content online:

Open Access Journals:

Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society

Language Documentation & Conservation

Palapala: a journal of Hawaiian language and literature

Free journal content online:

Asian Perspectives: The Journal of Archaeology for Asia and the Pacific (46#1, 2007)

Asian Theatre Journal: Official Journal of the Association for Asian Performance (23#1, 2006)

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture (1, 2007)

Buddhist-Christian Studies: Official Journal of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies (27, 2007)

China Review International: Reviews of Scholarly Literature in Chinese Studies (15#1, 2008)

The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs (15#1, 2003)

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (3#1, 2014)

The Hawaiian Journal of History (49, 2015)

Journal of Daoist Studies (8, 2015)

Journal of Korean Religions (6#1, 2015)

Korean Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal on Korea and Koreans Abroad (29, 2005)

MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing: New Writing from America, the Pacific, and Asia (19#1, 2007)

Oceanic Linguistics: Current Research on Languages of the Oceanic Area (50#2, 2011)

Pacific Science: Biological and Physical Sciences of the Pacific Region (71#4, 2017)

Philosophy East & West: A Quarterly of Comparative Philosophy (53#3, 2007)

Rapa Nui Journal: The journal of the Easter Island Foundation (30#2, 2016)

Review of Japanese Culture and Society (24, 2012)

U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal (45, 2013)

Asian Perspectives 58-1
Asian Theatre Journal 36-1 cover

Visit our website to learn more about our publications or to subscribe.

 

Three International Journals Celebrate 30th Anniversary

(HONOLULU, Hawai‘i)  The University of Hawai‘i Press celebrates the 30th Anniversary for three influential university-based journals—The Contemporary Pacific, Journal of World History, and Mānoa—in collaboration with the Center for Pacific Island Studies, Department of History, and the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

In the past three decades, these journals have attracted a growing, global audience for more than 6,300 articles read in over 170 countries. The Journal of World History served as a pioneer in the field of world history and continues to publish quality peer-reviewed articles and special issues quarterly. Research published in The Contemporary Pacific has shaped an entire field of Pacific Studies and has often demonstrated foresight and long-lasting relevance. Indeed, the journal kicked off its first issue in 1989 with an article on the potential impacts of climate change in the Pacific. Also among the journal’s most cited pieces are features published in its political reviews section which document the local and regional politics of Pacific Islands states. Mānoa brings to light new translations of international literature, highlighting the work of both emerging and established translators and authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel laureates. In 2018 alone, works from the three journals garnered more than one-quarter million downloads.  

The journals were founded in 1989 in response to the university president’s call to expand the journals published by UH Press. “Since being awarded the modest, three-year start-up funding, these journals now annually reach tens of thousands of researchers, scholars, students, and the general public,” said Joel Cosseboom, Interim Press Director & Publisher.

A special celebration was held at College Hill on March 13, commemorating the 30th anniversary of their founding. Learn more about The Contemporary Pacific, Journal of World History, and Mānoa below and at www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals.

The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs, edited by Alexander Mawyer

ISSN: 1043-898X  / E-ISSN: 1527-9464  Published twice a year.

Founding Editorial Team: Robert Kiste, Terence Wesley-Smith, David Hanlon, Brij Lal and Linley Chapman. Awarded Best New Journal (1990) from the Association of American Publishers. The journal editorial office is supported by the Center for Pacific Island Studies.

The journal covers a wide range of disciplines with the aim of providing comprehensive coverage of contemporary developments in the entire Pacific Islands region, including Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. It features refereed, readable articles that examine social, economic, political, ecological, and cultural topics, along with political reviews, book and media reviews, resource reviews, and a dialogue section with interviews and short essays. Each issue highlights the work of a Pacific Islander artist.

The Journal of World History: Official Journal of the World History Association, with editor-in-chief Fabio López Lázaro

ISSN: 1045-6007 / E-ISSN: 1527-8050  Published quarterly.

Founding Editor, Jerry Bentley with Imre Bard as Book Review Editor. Awarded Best New Journal (1990) from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The journal editorial office is supported by the Department of History.

JWH publishes research into historical questions requiring the investigation of evidence on a global, comparative, cross-cultural, or transnational scale. It is devoted to the study of phenomena that transcend the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures, such as large-scale population movements, long-distance trade, cross-cultural technology transfers, and the transnational spread of ideas. Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association.

Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, edited by Frank Stewart

ISSN: 1045-7909 / E-ISSN: 1527-943X Published twice a year.

Founding Editors, Frank Stewart and Robert Shapard.  Works in MĀNOA have been cited for excellence by the editors of such anthologies as Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Pushcart Prize. The journal editorial office is supported by the Department of English.

Mānoa is a unique, award-winning literary journal that includes American and international fiction, poetry, artwork, and essays of current cultural or literary interest. An outstanding feature of each issue is original translations of contemporary work from Asian and Pacific nations, selected for each issue by a special guest editor. Beautifully produced, Mānoa presents traditional alongside contemporary writings from the entire Pacific Rim, one of the world’s most dynamic literary regions.

University of Hawai‘i Press

The University of Hawai‘i Press supports the mission of the university through the publication of books and journals of exceptional merit. It strives to advance knowledge through the dissemination of scholarship—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—with a primary focus on Asian, Pacific, Hawaiian, Asian American, and global studies. It also serves the public interest by providing high-quality books and resource materials of educational value on topics related to Hawai‘i’s people, culture, and natural environment. Through its publications, the Press seeks to stimulate public debate and educate both within and outside the classroom.

UH Press is a member of the Association of University Presses and the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. The Press has also partnered with museums and associations to bring new or out-of-print titles into circulation, and offers publishing services for authors and partnering organizations.

News Release Date: March 19, 2019
Media contact: Pamela Wilson, Journals Manager
Pwilson6@hawaii.edu 808-956-6790

Becoming Brazil: New Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir (MĀNOA 30:2)

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Sebastião Salgado Selected photographs Brazil, 1981–2016
Sebastião Salgado, selected photographs. Brazil, 1981–2016. Salgado is the featured artist in Becoming Brazil.

Becoming Brazil, the newest issue from MĀNOA, brings together prose and poetry by more than two dozen authors, juxtaposing stories of the country’s diverse people in places urban, rural and remote. Depicted in this collection are the machinations of the military in Brasilia during the recent dictatorship; the cultural practices of the caiçara fishermen of Paraty; and the violence that too frequently befalls residents of Brazil’s impoverished favelas. 

While Becoming Brazil was in production, a fire destroyed the Brazilian National Museum, destroying countless artifacts in the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history. For the team at MĀNOA and guest editors Eric M. B. Becker and Noah Perales-Estoesta, “this volume took on added significance … and became a project in which to represent—through the voices of writers—the resilience of the country’s diverse people, its long history, and what Brazil is still becoming.”

Explore this exciting new issue, including the work of acclaimed Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Continue reading “Becoming Brazil: New Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir (MĀNOA 30:2)”

AWP 2019: Join Manoa and The Contemporary Pacific for Translation Panel

The Contemporary Pacific and Manoa at AWP 2019Two journals celebrate their 30th anniversary this yearMĀNOA and The Contemporary Pacific—and join together for two great events at the 2019 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Portland, OR.

The conference brings together more than 12,000 attendees over four days. Mark March 29, 2019 on your calendars to catch these panel discussions.  Continue reading “AWP 2019: Join Manoa and The Contemporary Pacific for Translation Panel”

Support MĀNOA’s Upcoming Title, Becoming Brazil

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The team at MĀNOA has just launched two ways to support the longstanding journal of international writing. Supporters can back the upcoming issue, Becoming Brazil, through Kickstarter and also pledge support for the journal overall through Patreon.

Support Becoming Brazil on Kickstarter

Becoming Brazil Manoa 30-2 Front CoverBecoming Brazil: New Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir is the forthcoming title from MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. The issue includes more than two dozen works by canonical twentieth-century Brazilian writers, innovative contemporary authors, and new voices, many of them in translation for the first time.

Authors include Conceição Evaristo, Marcílio França Castro, Milton Hatoum, José Luiz Passos, and João Guimarães Rosa. Becoming Brazil also features images by celebrated photographers Sebastião Salgado and Marcio Rodrigues. Guest-edited by Eric M. B. Becker (founder of Words without Borders) and MĀNOA contributing editor Noah Perales-Estoesta, Becoming Brazil will appear in a handsome print edition from the University of Hawai‘i Press, a digital edition through Project MUSE; and an ebook through Amazon.com.

Learn how to support Becoming Brazil on Kickstarter.

Support MĀNOA through Patreon Continue reading “Support MĀNOA’s Upcoming Title, Becoming Brazil”

Words from the Fire: Poems by Jidi Majia (MĀNOA 30:1)

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Bbahxa Ayuosse by Qubi Shuomo. Bbahxa Ayuosse by Qubi Shuomo.
This Nuosu ritual painting is of the magical python Bbahxa Ayuosse or Bbahxa Arrysse, one of the supernatural helpers of the Nuosu hero Zhyge Alu. Bbahxa Ayuosse by Qubi Shuomo. Object #1998–83/102—Scroll, Painting. Gift of the Blakemore Foundation, courtesy of Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington.

The new issue of MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, volume 30 number 1, is a collection of poems by Jidi Majia, translated by Jami Proctor Xu.

Jidi Majia is a member of the Yi ethnic minority group, one of the fifty-five officially recognized minorities in China and the sixth largest, comprising about nine million people. The subgroup to which Jidi Majia belongs, Nuosu, is the largest. For centuries Nuosu people have held on to their language, culture, and social structure, staving off assimilation by the majority Han.

This collection of more than 125 of Jidi Majia’s poems opens with an editor’s note and concludes with a translation of Jidi Majia’s speech for the 2017 Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival at Cambridge University. More than a dozen images featuring Nuosu scrolls and paintings accompany the poems. Continue reading “Words from the Fire: Poems by Jidi Majia (MĀNOA 30:1)”

Mountain/Home: New Translations from Japan (MĀNOA 29:2)

"Mount Fuji in the Spring." Norikane Hiroto. Etching, 1997.
“Mount Fuji in the Spring.” Norikane Hiroto. Etching, 1997. Gift of Philip H. Roach Jr., 2010 (31780). Courtesy of Honolulu Museum of Art.

The new issue of MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, volume 29 number 2, is a collection of Japanese literature in translation edited by Leza Lowitz and Frank Stewart.

From the editors:

Mountain/Home presents new translations of selected Japanese works from the medieval period to the present. The volume opens with traditional folktales, court poetry, Edo Period poetry, and contemporary fiction—all from “One Hundred Literary Views of Mount Fuji,” a collection of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction related to Japan’s national symbol. The works reveal how Japanese attitudes toward Mount Fuji have changed over time, particularly after the country was opened to the West in the nineteenth century.

Table of Contents

One Hundred Literary Views of Mount Fuji: Mount Fuji has been celebrated by poets, novelists, and playwrights for almost 1,500 years, from Japan’s earliest literary works to the present. Peter MacMillan provides these translations and introductions.

  • The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter: Taketori Monogataria tenth-century tale, recounts the origin of Mount Fuji’s name and is one of the earliest examples of Japanese literary fiction.
  • Love Song and Reply: These poems are from the Gosen Wakashū, a major tenth-century anthology of Japanese poetry. Many of the waka in the collection are “dialogue poems,” written in pairs by men and women of the court, speaking the cloaked language of secret love affairs, seductions, and laments.
  • from The Confessions of Lady Nijo: Lost for over six hundred years, Lady Nijo’s manuscript was discovered by a Japanese scholar in the Imperial Library in 1940.
  • A Tale of a Mount Fuji Cave: This story from the Kamakura Period tells of a journey to the mouth of hell and back.
  • Two Haiku by Matsuo Bashō: His poetry broke from the decadent style of the time, finding instead a resonance with nature, simplicity, spontaneity, and originality.
  • Sanshirō: In this excerpt from Natsume Soseki’s 1908 coming-of-age novel, the protagonist, Ogawa Sanshiro, is twenty-three years old.

Continue reading “Mountain/Home: New Translations from Japan (MĀNOA 29:2)”