Please join us for the next CuSPP Seminar (taking place both in-person and via zoom)

Thursday 9 November, 1-2:30pm, AD Hope Conference Room (see CuSPP email or contact wesley.lim@anu.edu.au for zoom link)

Narrated by a schoolteacher in 1960s Phnom Penh, and a journalist turned taxi-driver in early 1980’s Paris, Soth Polin’s two-part novel L’anarchiste was first published in France in 1981. In his four years in Paris, Virak has made countless stops at the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, or the Sacre-Coeur, but not once has this Parisian landscape surfaced in his sleep. Nor does he dream of Angkor or Khmer monuments: it is the faces of family and friends who appear repeatedly before him: flickering across his windscreen, at the bottom of a beer-glass, or in cigarette smoke, reminding him that he has still not arrived: “Je ne vis dans le réel, ni dans l’imaginaire,” and that he can never escape. “When you lose your country, you lose everything,” Soth Polin explained in a 2004 interview from Long Beach, California, where he now lives: “If you are a writer, you no longer have the echo of your readers.” In this presentation, Penny Edwards discusses the work of translating Soth Polin’s novel, which will appear in full-length translation for the first time with Gazebo Books, Sydney, in 2024.

Penny Edwards is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945. Her translations of Soth Polin have appeared in Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writings, words without borders, and the Mekong Review.