Book takes literary voyage around world

David Damrosch embarked on a virtual voyage around the world during the pandemic and now the fruit of his project, Around the World in 80 Books, has been published in the United States and China. It will be one of the highlights at the upcoming Shanghai Book Fair in August.

The professor of comparative literature at Harvard University is director of Harvard's Institute for World Literature. In 2020, when the world came to a halt because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to start a new blogging project. "With a whole series of travel plans canceled, I decided in the summer of 2020 to follow the lead of Jules Verne's globe-trotting hero Phileas Fogg. In my case, I went voyaging around the world not in person but through 80 books."

One of Damrosch's former students, Chinese American Professor Song Mingwei of Wellesley College, immediately followed up and put together a team of translators to translate the blog into Chinese. Damrosch posted essays every week from May to August in 2020, completing the project in 16 weeks. The Chinese translation was serialized almost simultaneously in the weekly literary journal the Shanghai Book Review from May 21 to Sept 12.

"This writing project demonstrates resilience in a period of crisis. During the pandemic, there was someone reading and writing, spreading a message of hope," Song said earlier this year, during the book tour for the Chinese edition.

Around the World in 80 Books was published by Penguin Books in the US and by Pelican Books in the United Kingdom in 2022.The Chinese edition was published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House in April.