The "Best Primer guide to African literature" is out of print for many years

In 2021, the world's important book awards, such as the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, and the Goncourt Prize, were invariably awarded to African-American writers. But under this "African fever", the vast majority of Chinese readers are still unfamiliar with African literature. How far away is African literature from us? Is this distance geographical, or spiritual, or both? There is a book that may provide the answer. Recently, for the first time in the Chinese Simplified world, the "Anthology of African Short Stories", which has been introduced for the first time in the world of 2021 Nobel Prize winner Gurna, known as the "Best Beginner's Guide to African Literature", has been out of print for many years, and finally returned from reprint and was officially published by Yilin Publishing House.

Using literature as a method, it describes Africa in motion

The Anthology of African Short Stories is a genealogical map of contemporary African literature, which selects and compiles modern and contemporary literary works, and thus presents the cohesion and dispersion of African history. For thousands of years, in the vast land of Africa, the forces of nationality, region, ethnicity and culture have been colliding and blending. Before the 1960s, most readers in the world read about Africa, most of which were images of Africa by Western writers, such as the British writer Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness". Known as the "father of African literature", the Nigerian writer Achebe advocated that "Africans write their own stories" to spread African culture to the world. The Anthology of African Short Stories puts this principle into practice, allowing us to see how africans live and how they see their own existence and future.

The authors of the book include 38 writers from 16 countries, including Chinua Achebe ("father of modern African literature"), Abdel-Razak Gurna (winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature), Nadine Godimer (Africa's first female Nobel Laureate in Literature), Ben Oakley (Booker Prize winner), Ngugi Va Thiango ("Achebe's successor"), Mia Cotto (Winner of the Carmons Prize for Literature), Arma Atta Aidu and M.G. Wasangi (Commonwealth Writers Award winner), D'D'D'étaux Marechella (Guardian Fiction Prize winner), Althea Jebal (Newstadt International Literary Prize winner), etc.

These authors from different countries, with certain differences in age and background, together constitute the best group of short stories in Africa. They depict the past and present of the African land in their own minds in various languages, and together they show a colorful and unique Africa. Their collision of ideas makes us believe that literature is not just a mirror image or window of history; it is also a medium, shaping and interpreting Africa as we see it, triggering us to examine issues such as immigration, identity, and borders. The history of Africa as seen from literature is not only limited to political turmoil and generational change, it contains subtle portrayals of daily life, the writing of cultural memories, the heritage of oral traditions, the reflections on migration and return, the alternating influence of folk literature and modern Western literature, the repeated re-enactment of totems and taboos, and the never-ending dialogue between legends, myths, fables and reality.

For the first time, the work of 2021 Nobel Laureate Gulner was introduced

In the 1950s and 1960s, Asian, African and Latin American literature became one of the focuses of foreign literature translations on the mainland. After the reform and opening up, China-Africa economic and trade relations have developed rapidly, and people-to-people exchanges have become increasingly frequent. As an important publishing town of foreign literature, Yilin Publishing House has noticed that the translation of African literature on the mainland should be constantly updated, showing a new atmosphere, and timely translating some outstanding contemporary writers into the translation.

As early as 1999, Yilin Publishing House began to introduce African literary themes: John Cooche's "Shame", Ben Oakrie's "The Road to Hunger", Nadine Godimer's "No One Accompanies Me". In 2007, the Translation Society introduced the copyright to the Nigerian female writer Chima manda Ngozi Adiqi for "Half a Wheel of Yellow Days". In 2010, he purchased Oakry's first short story collection, The Holy Land Incident. In July 2011, the copyright of the "African Short Story Anthology" (namely "Selected African Short Stories" and "Selected Contemporary African Short Stories") was introduced, and Professor Zhan Jian, vice president of Shanghai Chinese University and dean of the Translation Research Institute, was invited to form a translation team, which was selected among the young generation of translators, and it was finally determined that Zhang Man, Gu Yue, Zheng Qingbin, Ye Juan and Wen Chen would jointly participate in the translation work. The first edition was published in January 2014.

In October 2021, Abdul-Razak Gürna was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On the night of the announcement of the Nobel Prize, some readers found that only this "Anthology of African Short Stories", which contained two of Gurna's short works "Bossy" and "The Cage", was The only Chinese translation of Gurna. Yilin posted articles on multiple platforms to celebrate. As the first publishing house in China to translate Gurner's works, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Gurner, which is also an affirmation of The Literary Vision of Yilin. In this regard, many netizens left a message: "Wisdom is like a torch!" "Yi Lin has a vision!" "I hope to read his book as soon as possible, and Yi Lin cheers!" In the second-hand book market, the book was even fried to a thousand yuan. In order to repay the love and affirmation of readers, Yilin Publishing House decided to immediately republish the book, completed the republishment of the book as quickly as possible, and published it in February 2022.

Authoritative compilation and translation, highly literary value

The African Short Stories Anthology consists of two books: Selected African Short Stories and Selected Contemporary African Short Stories. "Selected African Short Stories" selects short stories before 1983, which adopts a realistic creative method, that is, a linear time narrative, with events as the core, with flat and direct descriptions, narratives, and character dialogues to structure the novel, and some still have traces of oral literature, and the story and folk color are very prominent. Selected Short Stories of Contemporary Africa is included in the works of the 1980s and 1990s, from the harsh reality of South Africa by Nobel Laureate Nadine Godimer, to the fantasy world described by Booker Prize winner Ben Oakley, from the magical realism of Mozambique Mia Koto to the surrealism of Garner Kocho Lane, which not only reflects the changes in contemporary African life, but also shows the renewal of novel creation methods, as well as the influence of modern novels in Europe and the United States, and the techniques of modernism are more obvious. The fusion of realism, dreams, fantasies, and consciousness flows into one furnace, presenting a trajectory of leapfrog development from oral narrative to modern novels.

AnThology of African Short Stories was written by the famous Nigerian writer Chinnoa Achebe and the well-known African literary scholar C. Ahmed. L. Anthology co-editors. With a unique vision, Achebe and Innis have selected well-deserved representatives from all African writers, and show the diverse styles and extraordinary achievements of African literature with their wonderful words. In this book, they consciously no longer stay in the collection of articles, no longer compile according to the existing literary history, but pay attention to the reality of the African continent, take the unique social situation and cultural memory as thinking, and select works based on regions and sections, taking into account the country and genre. The book is presented in such a complex and varied way that it stirs up our modern imagination of Africa.

(Editing by Wu Yanran)