Out of the Shadows of Angkor
Guest-edited by Sharon May, Christophe Macquet, Trent Walker, Phina So, and Rinith Tang.
Series Editor Frank Stewart.
With nearly 400 pages, Out of the Shadows of Angkor: Cambodian Poetry, Prose, and Performance through the Ages is an outstanding collection of classic and contemporary writing. The volume emerges from the thirty-year effort of a community to gather Cambodian literary and cultural works. In doing so, they not only translated rare works into English for the first time, but also helped to rescue writing lost during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979).
Readers will find the following and more:
- Cambodian writing ranging over fourteen hundred years, from the seventh century to the present;
- translations of classical texts;
- selections of modern Cambodian poetry, prose, and folk theater;
- contemporary writings by Cambodian refugees and children of the diaspora living in countries from Australia to the U.S., Canada, and Europe;
- visual art, including oil paintings and a graphic novel.
Excerpts from the overview essay by guest editor Sharon May:
“While writing is the most solitary of pursuits, the creation of literature and the communities from which it comes are often made from literary friendships, wherever in the world they reside. In the ‘golden age’ of Cambodian literature in the 1960s and 1970s, a community of writers thrived through such friendships and literary partnerships.
“I met Christophe Macquet, my literary cohort, in Phnom Penh twenty years ago through my friendship with Soth Polin; we communicated in our common language, Khmer, to the amusement of the café workers at the places we met; Christophe has spent a large part of his life translating and documenting Cambodian literature, as well as translating foreign literature into Khmer. I first encountered Trent Walker fifteen years ago on a sunny afternoon at Stanford University, when he was an undergraduate and had just spent a year learning smot singing in Cambodia; he has since become a brilliant translator of ancient Cambodian languages and an endlessly patient and generous literary colleague through the years of working on this book. I met Phina So in Cambodia years ago when the only literary festivals were not in Khmer; she has worked tirelessly to remedy that by becoming a writer, editor, publisher, and passionate community advocate for Cambodian literature and arts. The Khmer Literature Festival she founded in 2017 is now an annual event. I remember standing on the steps of the CKS library at that first inaugural festival, in October 2017, at Wat Damnak, in Siem Reap, in the same spot where, fifteen years earlier, a young poet had told me, ‘I am a Khmer writer. I don’t have much experience. But in my heart, I feel addicted to writing.’ Rinith Taing has been writing perceptively about Cambodian authors and artists for many years as a journalist based in Phnom Penh; he worked intensely on translations for this volume.
“The work included in Out of the Shadows of Angkor is just a part of the vast, diverse repertoire of Cambodian literature created by those born in Cambodia, in the camps, and in new lands. Soth Polin once told me, ‘What we have lost is indescribable…What we have lost is not reconstructable. An epoch is finished. So when we have literature again, it will be a new literature.’ We hope this book brings out of the shadows some of the lost, hidden, and emerging gems of Cambodian literature—past, present, and moving into the future.”
Out of the Shadows includes a foreword by Vaddey Ratner, oil paintings by Theanly Chov, and excerpts from a graphic novel by Tian Veasna.
More information:
Out of the Shadows of Angkor
shadowsofangkor@gmail.com
384 pp., double issue (33:2–34:1), $25
978-0-8248-9454-2
Project Muse
MĀNOA 