Cambodia authors forge Khmer language literary revival

Financial Times | 5 August 2016

The Mekong Review launched in Phnom Penh, in 2015. But many Cambodian writers still struggle to write in Khmer

For a brief moment in November 2015, the sleepy town of Kampot in southwestern Cambodia became a national literary hub.

The inaugural edition of the Writers and Readers Festival hosted discussions about Cambodian literature and culture. There were tales of Buddhist death rituals, of life deep inside the rainforest, of a cross-country pilgrimage undertaken by a clown. But, for the most part, the discussions were about Cambodia, rather than by Cambodians: slightly fewer than half of the country-specific talks featured local speakers....

“[Literary culture in] Cambodia is a long way behind not just the rest of Asia but the rest of the Mekong region [which comprises China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam].”...

Memoirs of the Khmer Rouge years have found audiences in the west, but these have mostly been written abroad, often with foreign co-authors and in languages other than Khmer. For writers living and working in Cambodia, publishing opportunities are scarce....

The creation of a contemporary literary genre is particularly tricky in Cambodia because of the language’s written structure, argues Teri Yamada, who founded theNou Hach Literary Association in 2002. “Cambodian writing has a lot of Pali and Sanskrit aesthetic influence,” she says. Traditionally there are no paragraphs, no sentence breaks and no quoted dialogue. “[Traditional writing] has lots of adjectives, it’s extremely descriptive, it tends to not have so much of a plot oftentimes,” says Yamada. And, critically for writers dreaming of international acclaim, “It is extremely challenging to translate that writing into English.”

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