July 29th was Thai Language Day. While Thai, the official language of Thailand, is spoken by over 56 million people — making it the 25th most popular-spoken language globally — surprisingly little Thai literature has been translated into English. This is an injustice to Thai’s rich contemporary literary scene.
A much-needed intervention came from the international literary journal Words Without Borders, which devoted its November issue to contemporary Thai literature. For a reader seeking to explore contemporary Thai literature in English translation, this is a great place to begin.
The Words Without Borders issue offers a diverse snapshot of contemporary Thai literature. There’s fiction from Chart Korbjitti (a two-time recipient of the prestigious SEA Write Award), Sri Daoruang, Duanwad Pimwana, Prabda Yoon, Uthis Haemamool, and Win Lyovarin. The highlight for me was Lyovarin’s inventive story “Life’s Lexicon: Everyman’s Bangkok Edition,” which turns a vocabulary lesson into an uproarious, postmodern portrait of Bangkok city life. Sample the hijinks in Peter Montalban’s translation:
Radio: A box that can make sounds. In dictatorships it’s used as a tool for propaganda alternating with entertainment; in freedom-loving capitalist countries it’s used for entertainment alternating with propaganda:
“Good Morrrrrning all you fans out there! You’re tuned in to ‘A Morning In Bang kaawwwk’ Wednesday Octoberrrrrr 12th!”
(I’ve heard that this young Thai DJ named Dang hasn’t been out of the country his whole life long . . .)
On the poetry front, Phu Kradat’s bustling “Untitled: #13” draws on juxtaposition and subversive vagueness to paint a playful picture of flea markets in rural Isan, using regional dialect. As Peter Montalban’s tantalizing translation conveys, lists quickly give way to contradictions and absurdism:
Mon thru Fri, Sat and Sun, no holds barred
flea markets run from morning to morning
open up their thing
hustling bustles on Crown Property
peddling motley commodities cheap
consumer stuff
foodstuff
dried stuff
fresh stuff
live stuff
dead stuff
tangibles
intangibles
Wow, countless all whatevers to buy, sell, exchange!
come in at your convenience,
just shuffle on in
they shuffle on in
hesitating
I hug my possibles bag
grope for change stuck in the bottom
grope for my own stuff
for enough to change out for
cheap goods scattered out wide as if
proud of their humanity
tho it’s too bad the possibles bag is empty
it’s all worthless. Priceless!
As editor Mui Poopoksakui notes in the issue’s introduction, “Thai literature has had a long tradition of delivering social critique and promoting activism, going all the way back to the beginning of Thai prose writing about 140 years ago.” A superb interview with Suchart Sawasdsri, who was a longstanding editor for Chorkaraket, the vanguard Thai quarterly for short stories, gives a sense of this rich history. The interview documents trends and changes within the modern history of Thai literature, tracing back to the first Thai novel in 1900, Nai Samran’s Kwam Mai Payabat (No Vendetta). Poopoksakui and Sawasdsri’s conversation touches widely on the popular “literature for life” / social realist movement, the literary aftermath of the October 14, 1973 Event and the October 6, 1976 Event, the recent rise in experimental literature, the relative scarcity of woman writers, and (self-)censorship on account of the lèse-majesté law which forbids defaming royalty.
On this last note: contemporary Thai poets have found creative ways to skirt censorship while still posing political critique. This is evident in Zakariya “Che” Ametaya’s poem “Lese Majeste: In the Back Room,” published in Modern Poetry in Translation, which stages a legal trial inside a mouth. As his translator Cutter Streeby notes, Ametaya — the first free-verse poet to win the SEA Write Award — makes a subtle art of omission to strategic effect. By foregrounding negative space and noisy images of silence like “muted thudding,” Ametaya is able to mount a veiled critique of censorship. One particularly noticeable formal feature, which carries over in Streeby’s translation, is a simulation of erasure on the page — each stanza shortens by one line until, come the end, the last stanza is just a single line, “where thought is a gavel and ordinary words sentenced: left thudding in the throat.” And then there were none: the remaining blank space implies a muffled zero-line stanza. What is off-page becomes as loaded as what is included.
The contemporary Thai literary scene is bursting with imagination, and I can tell I have barely begun scraping the surface of what’s available in English translation. I am now enjoying listening to the podcast Poet in Bangkok to learn about more contemporary Thai writers. As English readers, it is our own loss that we can’t keep up, until a systematic effort is made to translate more contemporary Thai literature. While under-acknowledged and undervalued in English, Thai writers are pushing modern global literature forward. It’s time we make more space in our own literary landscape for them.
In Celebration of Thai Language Day was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.