Asia Society and Hanuman Editions present a conversation between the poet and translator Vivek Narayanan and the writer and translator Anton Hur on translation and its practices in world literature. Narayanan and Hur will discuss notions of scale in translation, from the poetic epic to the novel, as well as relationships between temporalities of the ancient and the highly contemporary, as they shape passages of language and place in today’s literature.
Both authors have contributed to the press’ publication of new writings from the international vanguard: Hur in the form of a modern Korean ghost story (Bora Chung's Grocery List) and Narayanan with a lyrical interpretation of classical Tamil literature (Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror).
This continues a series of dialogues which form a roving transnational salon within the Hanuman Editions catalogue.
About Hanuman Editions
An independent press launched in 2023, Hanuman Editions publishes critical works of avant-garde literature, with an emphasis on translation. Responding to the importance of the compact in contemporary culture, with both physical economy and a capacious regard for language and ideas, their books serve as portals to a new and globally situated vanguard. Founded by writer and art historian Shruti Belliappa, the project orients from the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary series published between southern India and the Chelsea Hotel in New York City during the 1980s and early 1990s. Hanuman publications were printed and handbound at Kalakshetra Press in Chennai, channeling the Hanuman Chalisa, miniature prayer books circulated widely in India as talismans for spiritual protection. Alighting on these lineages, across a polyphonic register of fiction, poetry, art and visual culture, the books serve as secret documents or samizdat of ideas and expressions, for a world as it is now, and may yet become.
Speakers
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. Hur’s deft, sometimes deadpan translations of Korean literature often focus on mental and social disaffection in hi-tech urban environments, as in Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets (2022) , Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (2018), and for Hanuman Editions, Bora Chung's Grocery List (2024). Hur received a PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize; his translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize that year. Also a writer, Hur’s novel, Toward Eternity, a speculative treatment of a transhumanist future, debuted with HarperVia in summer 2024.
Born in India and raised in Zambia, the poet Vivek Narayanan works between inventory and invention in writing shaped by a sense of scholarly scope and the fragmentations of the contemporary. His texts are crafted with a precision optics of atmospheric romance and jagged allusion; they flirt with history—its forms, its tropes—only to leap wholly into presence. Narayanan’s collection, After (2022), published by the New York Review of Books, was lauded for its lucent animation of the Ramayana’s foundational epic, just as The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror, his volume for Hanuman Editions, approaches classical Sangam lyric. Narayanan was the co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based literary journal, from 2007 to 2019 and his essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared widely in publications including Granta, The Paris Review and Caravan. Narayanan received a 2026 NEA Translation Fellowship and was recently named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia.
Translating Ideas in Literature: Vivek Narayanan & Anton Hur
Host
Wed, Jun 10, 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM (EDT)
To be shared on approval (New York)
30 attendees
Asia Society and Hanuman Editions present a conversation between the poet and translator Vivek Narayanan and the writer and translator Anton Hur on translation and its practices in world literature. Narayanan and Hur will discuss notions of scale in translation, from the poetic epic to the novel, as well as relationships between temporalities of the ancient and the highly contemporary, as they shape passages of language and place in today’s literature.
Both authors have contributed to the press’ publication of new writings from the international vanguard: Hur in the form of a modern Korean ghost story (Bora Chung's Grocery List) and Narayanan with a lyrical interpretation of classical Tamil literature (Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror).
This continues a series of dialogues which form a roving transnational salon within the Hanuman Editions catalogue.
About Hanuman Editions
An independent press launched in 2023, Hanuman Editions publishes critical works of avant-garde literature, with an emphasis on translation. Responding to the importance of the compact in contemporary culture, with both physical economy and a capacious regard for language and ideas, their books serve as portals to a new and globally situated vanguard. Founded by writer and art historian Shruti Belliappa, the project orients from the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary series published between southern India and the Chelsea Hotel in New York City during the 1980s and early 1990s. Hanuman publications were printed and handbound at Kalakshetra Press in Chennai, channeling the Hanuman Chalisa, miniature prayer books circulated widely in India as talismans for spiritual protection. Alighting on these lineages, across a polyphonic register of fiction, poetry, art and visual culture, the books serve as secret documents or samizdat of ideas and expressions, for a world as it is now, and may yet become.
Speakers
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. Hur’s deft, sometimes deadpan translations of Korean literature often focus on mental and social disaffection in hi-tech urban environments, as in Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets (2022) , Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (2018), and for Hanuman Editions, Bora Chung's Grocery List (2024). Hur received a PEN/Heim grant for his translation of Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize; his translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize that year. Also a writer, Hur’s novel, Toward Eternity, a speculative treatment of a transhumanist future, debuted with HarperVia in summer 2024.
Born in India and raised in Zambia, the poet Vivek Narayanan works between inventory and invention in writing shaped by a sense of scholarly scope and the fragmentations of the contemporary. His texts are crafted with a precision optics of atmospheric romance and jagged allusion; they flirt with history—its forms, its tropes—only to leap wholly into presence. Narayanan’s collection, After (2022), published by the New York Review of Books, was lauded for its lucent animation of the Ramayana’s foundational epic, just as The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror, his volume for Hanuman Editions, approaches classical Sangam lyric. Narayanan was the co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based literary journal, from 2007 to 2019 and his essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared widely in publications including Granta, The Paris Review and Caravan. Narayanan received a 2026 NEA Translation Fellowship and was recently named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia.